Who’s in the mood for a little storytelling? I’m going to give you the origin story of how I learned to make the worlds easiest guacamole. But, mostly this is an in memoriam to the kitchens of college past.

When I went off to college I was armed with an arsenal of low cut tops, chunky platform flip-flops and a handful of recipes that I had learned from my mother. The first year of school was spent in a crowded dorm room with two other girls. The microwave was attached the the refrigerator, creating this for-rent contraption called a “Microfridge”. Like any good Hawaiian girl, I brought along a rice pot. My Filipino roommate moved in with the largest bag of rice I’d ever seen, and a Costco pack of Vienna Sausage stored on the upper tier of our closet, above the coats. These things made up our “kitchen”. Cooking that year didn’t resemble cooking. I ate a lot of frozen burritos, and whatever suspicious “maybe it’s chicken, or is this fish?” they served us in the cafeteria. Our Microfridge only caught on fire three times that year, burning whatever questionable food we were trying to nuke at the time. I suppose this was a regular occurrence in other dorm rooms as well. Sometimes when walking the halls, it would smell like a Chicken Chow Mein electrical fire–wafting the scents of takeout mixed with dangerous university issued appliances from under the doors. I missed being able to cook my own food. I missed having personal space. I missed not falling asleep to the sound of one of my roommates smacking lips with her new boyfriend.  […]