International Food Day - America

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         Every couple of weeks there is a class called Internasjonal Mat (food), where the NLC student(s) from a country have to prepare a dinner for the whole school--about 100 people. We had our first one on Thursday, for America. Our group decided to make baked mac & cheese with bacon, and an apple crisp for dessert. There are four Americans, and we worked with the students that signed up for the class--mostly girls from Art and Global--to prepare the meal. 

        To make enough for everyone, we had to cook an insane amount of food. The school has a huge, industrial kitchen, which made it much easier, and we split into three groups: apple crisp, bacon mac, and vegan/dairy/gluten free mac & cheese for people with special diets. I was in the apple crisp group, and we started by peeling and cutting 50 or so apples. 

        As we quickly realized, none of us had ever actually made baked mac & cheese before, especially not from scratch, and we didn't have a recipe for either dish. It ended up being a mix of guessing and estimating, but everything turned out tasting great :) We were given oats, flour, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon for the dessert, and we decided to completely wing it, and hand mix everything in a giant bowl until it looked good enough to eat. It worked!

         I think that most people really enjoyed it. I spoke to five or so Norwegians that told me they've never had mac & cheese before, which is partly why we decided to make it. We ate the leftovers for lunch on Friday, and when the doors opened I heard the people in front say "Ooh, mac n cheese!" so it couldn't have been that bad! It was a fun experience, and I am excited for some of the students with real, cultural food to have their day. Ananda has promised to make Nasi Goreng from Indonesia, which is one of my favorite dishes ever! 

Here we are cutting and peeling the apples:


We made four giant trays of apple crisp, plus one smaller vegan one.


I had to mix all of the topping ingredients by hand.


We cooked so much bacon!


This was the final pasta before it was baked, it was mixed in a HUGE bowl!


These pictures aren't the best, but it was actually very tasty.



Heiden spent the night mixing the pasta, cheese, milk and bacon: 





Comments

  1. KevinOctober 5, 2020 at 8:38 AM

    Love hearing your stories and how you can adapt so easily. I hope you can bring Ananda to Rockport sometime to make me Nasi Goreng!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JoyceOctober 6, 2020 at 7:34 AM

    Everything looks delicious!

    ReplyDelete

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