Imagination and Recycling: They Go Hand in Hand

Today will be a day of imaginative recycling: spicying up the very forgettable to-go boxes from Blanchard and the boring M&C's graham cracker night. Instead of tossing those plastic to-go containers from the Salad Sensations bar or the Culinary Classics section, use them as a lunch box (or breakfast or dinner box). This can be done the night before or the morning before classes. There's the reason the to-go containers are to go-containers: they're the perfect size and form for accomodating the random shapes that food naturally propagate.

Case in point: the breakfast box to fortify and keep awake the sleepy Organic Chemistry student:

Three checks for fruit, grain, and protein. Bonus checks for meeting more than half your daily values of fiber with both the apples and the Gold Medal Wheat Bread of either Honey and Oat (16 percent at four grams of fiber) or Multigrain (24 percent at six grams of fiber).

By preparing your own boxed meal, you naturally create a meal with a fixed proportion, while hopefully keeping in mind a healthy balance of your nutritional needs: grain, fiber, protein, and the myriad essential vitamins and minerals for preserving a sound body.

Indeed, there are websites to help you do this: www.mypyramid.gov maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and nutritiondata.self.com explained by its catchy sub-heading, "know what you eat." The USDA's website has the nifty "My Pyramid Tracker" in which you can enter in your physical data, then your diet and exercise to oversee both caloric and nutritional intake. Meanwhile, SELF Nutrition Data provides a quick and extensive informational page for any food you search for, which includes everything from the specific essential vitamins and minerals to a summary of food in terms of its caloric ratio (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) and the NutritionData's Opinion of an accounting in terms of weight loss, gain, and optimum health.

On a last and, rather, sweet note: enlivening the dreary M&C's day of graham crackers. How? By making s'mores. Chocolate chips and marshmallows can be collected during brunch days at the dining halls or bought during a Big Y or Trader Joe's grocery shopping trip (a small price for chocolate-y and marshmallow-y goodness).

The ingredients: the graham crackers, the marshmallows, the broken up Hershey Mr. GoodBars.

In this instance, I had some Hershey's Mr. GoodBars I wanted to get rid of. The random passerbys or sitters I fed said that they preferred the texture and taste of a chocolate-nut mix in the s'more. I prefer baking s'mores as opposed to roasting them over an open fire. The acrid taste of carbon, i.e. burnt marshmallow, depresses the food scavenger in me, which declares "waste not, want not." Burnt food means waste. Also, the ramifications of a fire in a dorm paired with a highly sensitive fire alarm, which has pitched students out of bed at an ungodly hour, because it was simply dirty from bodies of perished bugs... well, imagine, my reluctance in applying myself to the authentic s'more experience. Oh 1837, may you change for the better.

Before Baking at 385 degrees Fahrenheit

After Baking (Time elapsed: two minutes give or take, but monitor your s'mores with a judicious eye! I advise a check every half minute as the marshmallows begin to blow up and caramellize. Also not all ovens are created equally: know your oven, know your s'more, know your preferences.)

Recipe for Mr. GoodBar s'mores: 1 graham cracker, 18 marshmallows, 3/4 of a mini-Mr. GoodBar (obviously, the amounts of the ingredients are subject to gustatory discretion)

The completed s'more: I know, I know S'more, the picture doesn't do you justice.