Second Dinner!

Our second dinner: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse-themed after we went to a fabulous talk by Alice at Scripps College. As pictured, our menu was a good mixture of California-French cuisine.

First Dinner's Menu!

Menu from our first dinner

Beet and goat cheese salad on spinach leaves with a red wine vinaigrette

Hand-made egg pasta with fried sage and butternut squash

Julia Child inspired flour-less chocolate cake with a bourbon white chocolate cream sauce and pomegranate seeds

Catering the Wine Tasting

Res Ed put on a wine tasting night for students last week. Michael and Emily catered the event. Here are a couple of photos from the day. We made focaccia with basil and with a purple sweet potato and rosemary. Also, we carmelized beets and sprinkled them over creme fraiche. Our third dish was a torta espanola with onions and potatoes. Michael created a delicious roasted pepper dip on top of crostini. For a sweet dish, we made the Gourmet's recipe for almond cherry biscotti!

Well Fed Opening Dinner - Fall '10

After a long hiatus, we're unbelievably excited to announce that -- drumroll, please -- Well Fed is back! Join us for our opening dinner this Saturday evening, when we'll be serving a mildly-Halloween-inspired meal to get us all in the mood for the weekend!

Four new students are doing Well Fed this semester, but our goal remains the same: to provide a warm, convivial space for members of the Oxy community to relax, converse, and enjoy good food.

What: Well Fed Opening Night Dinner
When: 5:30 pm on Saturday, October 30, 2010
Where: UEPI building

We hope you can join us! We will take the first 20 email reservations. Please let us know if you would prefer a vegetarian meal and provide a phone number we can reach you with. A $5 donation is suggested.

Check out this blog throughout this week for updates -- like our menu!

Cheers,

The Well Fed team
Michael, Emily, Jeff, and Tyler

More FOOOOD

Strawberry/ Kumquat Tart

ICE CREAMs!!!

One of my most beautiful and bestest friends, Julia Bleckner, will be showing her documentary tuesday (tomorrow) in Johnson 204 at 3 pm. The documentary is the culmination of a year's study on what it means to cross gender binaries in Turkey. The topic is absolutely fascinating and she has done an amazing job putting it together. We are all VERY proud to know her :)

In any case, Well Fed is providing the food! In this case, four different flavors of ice cream: cardamom, coffee, salted caramel and honey-earl grey. You should all come and bring your friends too. Its going to be a par-tay.

Well Fed: Grande Finale

Last night we had the final Well Fed dinner of the year. It was a bittersweet experience although the food was the best its ever been.

Homemade fresh Chamomile- Meyer lemon soda

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Spring tabouleh with asparagus, fava beans*, green garlic and chives*

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Ravioli stuffed with homemade ricotta and thyme, duet of tomato pesto

(sun dried tomato and first of the season sun-gold tomatoes)

Sauteed garden greens (spinach*, chard*, kale*)

Green salad with green onions*

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Chocolate-Bourbon cake with fresh spring strawberries

Bourbon-brown sugar glaze

*From the FEAST garden

Lemon Upside Down Cake

A little bit out of season...

but what do you make when you have a LOT of leftover roasted butternut squash and some buttermilk? You make a butternut squash / buttermilk pie. Tastes like Thanksgiving.

Catering 3.22.2010

Another catering event today!

This was the second lecture in Mortar Board's Last Lecture Series. This evening Professor Whitney in the econ department gave an inspiring speech about "the good life." It was refreshing for a lot of us seniors to hear that jumping right into adulthood (having a 9-5 job and settling down) is not always what is best. It sounds like most of the best years of Professor Whitney's life were right after college when he had the time and energy to volunteer and travel around the world. I think we were all touched by his talk.

On to the food! Giulia and I catered the event. We kept it simple yet delicious. Two types of crostini-- one with spicy snashed chick peas (jalepeno and rosemary) and one with potatoes in a chili/ tomato/ hazelnut sauce. We also made a lovely lemon buttermilk cake, surrounded by fresh strawberries and a fruit platter with cara caras, pears and mandarins. These catering jobs just keep getting easier and easier and better and better. We have two more coming up soon, hopefully more to follow!

Catering 3.18.2010

we assembled the sandwiches on the table in my front yard.

Janette Sadik-Khan, transportation commissioner for New York, has been at Oxy for the last few days, inspiring all of us with the incredible work she does. If you missed her speech last night I recommend checking her out on your own-- she has completely transformed the streets of New York by turning them into art galleries and bicycle and pedestrian havens. We in Los Angeles have a lot to learn from her!

We at Well Fed were ecstatic to be invited to cater one of the lunches she spoke at!

The menu was:

3 different kinds of sandwiches (all on ciabatta):

Fresh mozzarella, roasted butternut squash and cilantro* pesto

Prosciutto, braised balsamic/dijon leeks and mozzarella

Lamb, fennel, mint and ricotta salata

Beet salad with arugula*, nasturtium flowers* and feta

Moroccan carrot salad

Cara Cara oranges, Blood Oranges, Oro Blanco Grapefrfuits

Strawberries

Brownies

Lemon* Bars

*Grown in the FEAST garden or foraged on campus

Spring Break Cooking!

So now that we're on Spring break we've all had a lot more time to cook. Giulia had some people over the other night for some of the best pizza of my life. Of course she made the crust which is always very thin and very crispy. She harvested some treats from the garden to put on top. The final pizzas were:

Roasted red bell pepper and mozzarella with green garlic and basil

Italian ham with crushed pepper flakes and arugula*

Cilantro pesto*, mozzarella

She topped the whole meal off with salted caramel ice cream!

I had her and Dylan over the next night for chicken legs braised in fennel, leeks and white wine with some bloomsdale spinach in butter and lemon, couscous and salad. There was also an oddly textured chocolate mousse tart for dessert.

I'm going to make some chicken stock this afternoon and I look forward to figuring out the menu for our camping trip later this week. For now back to comps....

Dinner 03. 3. 2010

Had some friends over for dinner the other night! Something I definitely want to do more... more cooking and more time with friends is a great combination. Unfortunately we are all so busy with senior thesis work that its hard to nail down a time.

Menu:

Fresh chamomile iced tea with blood orange and lemon

roasted root vegetables

fresh pasta with english shelling peas, chanterelles

green salad

pavlova with fresh strawberries, raspberries and raspberry sauce

I wish I had gotten more pictures of the food but the moment its time to serve also happens to be the least appealing time to take a picture.

Dinner 2.27.2010

First Well Fed back of the semester last night. Unfortunately I forgot my camera for the second half but I have some great pictures from the whole day of cooking.
We had four new cooks with us this week and they were all amazing! Big thank you to the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life for funding us half the amount we will need to continue the dinners this semester! We were able to serve the dinners for $5 instead of $10 because of it!
The final menu was.

Moroccan mint tea

Butternut squash soup with fried sage and crostini
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Pasta with Italian sausage, kale* and green garlic
Medley of roasted root vegetable
kohlrabi, sunchoke, purple carrots, turnips and fennel
Arugula salad*
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Strawberry shortcakes
First of the season!

*From the garden!

Reservation site is working again!!!

Catering 2.24.2010

We catered a Last Lecture Series event, featuring Professor Chin on Wednesday evening. The event took place around 5 so we had some finger food hors d'oeuvre-y things incorporating as much produce from the garden as possible.
Vegetable platter (fennel, radish*, broccoli*, multicolored carrots, sugar snap peas*, snow peas*)
Butter and radish sandwiches (Giulia's amazing bread with radish from the garden, sea salt)
Hummus
Cheese plate with Giulia's fresh rustic Italian bread
Upside down blood and navel orange cake

Reservation site malfunction

The reservation site is experiencing some difficulties! Please email oxywellfed@gmail.com to make a reservation!
Thank you!

Opening night of the semester!!!

First Dinner of the Semester! This Saturday at 6 pm in the UEP building. To make a reservation go to the link in the upper right hand corner of the blog!

We have four new cooks on board this week:
Lizzy Dutton
Jack Moreau
Lindsey Wong
and Teresa Eilers

The tentative menu is:

Butternut squash soup with homemade rustic bread
Fresh pasta with kale* and Italian sausage
Arugula* salad
Strawberry shortcake

*From the Garden!
** Vegetarians are easily accomodated-- just let us know!

A great meal with music and art for only $10! Come out and support your friends who love to cook!

Meeting!

Well Fed is having its first official meeting of the semester (or ever, for that matter) on Monday, February 8th at 12:30 in Johnson 204. If you love to cook, especially with local, seasonal fruits and vegetables than this is the group for you. We serve a three or four course meal every other weekend to 20 members of the Oxy community. Check out older posts for menus. We have also partnered with student musicians and artists to really make the dinners special. It does not matter if you don't have experience cooking for large numbers of people-- if you enjoy cooking this is for you!
See you on Monday :)