With mom nowhere near to tell them not to play with their
dinner, it’s only natural that students would want to have
fun with the dining hall food they eat every day. Because the
dining halls at UCLA double as the kitchen for many Bruins,
creating new dishes adds some variety and excitement to the norm of
dorm food.
Ortence Middleton, who has worked in UCLA food service for
almost four years, confirmed that students create various
concoctions to mollify their grumbling stomachs.
“I have witnessed them mix everything,” Middleton
said. “(Sometimes) they’ll take some of each drink and
mix it together.”
One such cure for dining hall dullness is the “Fruity
Cocktail,” which combines orange juice, a little bit of apple
juice and a slight trace of cranberry.
“It’s a really cool color,” said inventor
Karim Bhalwani, a third-year business economics student.
Bhalwani went on to explain that the interesting thing about his
drink is how it forms layers as the densities sort themselves out,
making it appear like a sunset in a glass.
But the span of his inventive skills does not stop there.
Bhalwani and his friend Katherina Jawaharlal, a third-year
global studies student, co-created a way of improving the dining
hall gooey half-baked brownie with the “Wannabe Ghirardelli
Hot-Fudge Sundae.”
Their recipe goes something like this: Take a little goo
(brownie) and put some vanilla ice cream on top. Follow with more
goo. Add banana slices and thread them throughout. Mush it and mix
it all up, and voila! It’s ready.
Both Bhalwani and Jawaharlal enjoy their resourceful dessert so
much that they argue over whose idea it was first. Eventually, they
came to the consensus that the bananas were Bhalwani’s idea
and putting the dessert in a cup came from Jawaharlal.
Despite its debatable origins, however, the sundae can simply be
described as “a reward,” according to Jawaharlal.
Other possibilities are much more unconventional.
“One guy used to mix barbecue sauce and ranch dressing and
put it on his salad. He said we should try it,” said
Middleton, although she admits she never did.
Another barbeque-sauce lover is William Ninh, a third-year
philosophy student who feels that “ketchup becomes
run-of-the-mill,” so he puts barbeque sauce on everything
from rice to cheese pizza.
One time, he even put barbeque sauce on ice cream.
For Ninh, inventing new combinations is a way to not get sick of
repetitive food. Ninh makes his creations in an effort to create
dorm food diversity.
“You get sick of it. … You don’t get to make your
own food, so the combinations are as close as you can get,”
he said.
Ninh’s most recent creation was Thanksgiving on a bun,
with hot turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.
“I don’t have to rely on utensils (for it),”
he said. “It’s not laziness ““ it’s
efficiency.”
Efficiency or not, making new dishes adds variety. After only a
quarter at UCLA, Charlotte Burke, a first-year undeclared student,
is already bored with the food.
“The food (here) is bland,” Burke said. “I get
bored with the food, so I try to spice things up.”
Burke likes to make macaroni and cheese with plain pasta and
salad bar cheese. She also creates rice-crispy treats with cereal,
marshmallows and butter in the microwave, topped with soft-serve
frozen yogurt.
Burke also likes to use her creativity to come up with new salad
toppings. Instead of plain dressing on her salad, for example,
Burke will mix together oil, vinegar and mustard.
Another unusual salad recipe is that of Andrew Cannon, a
first-year undeclared student.
For “Andy’s Special Ranch and a Whole Lot of Love
(Salad),” Cannon meticulously chops a plain chicken breast,
tomatoes, eggs, provolone cheese (from the sandwich bar) and
onions, then adds lettuce and a lot of ranch dressing.
Cannon’s reason for assembling this creation is it makes
him feel “a little special” that he can create and eat
food that other students haven’t yet, he said.
So the next time dining hall food gets old, don’t hesitate
to mix various foods together to create a new dining hall
concoction; after all, the vast amount of food lends itself well to
creating new variations on the same old food.
“There is a plethora of food options here,” Bhalwani
said. “Take advantage.”