42 Recipes for Surviving Freshman Year

Like geese, my family migrates when it gets cold every year, to Miami for New Year’s and a Green Christmas and to Myrtle Beach for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. I think what we eat at Thanksgiving captures a wonderful picture of our cross-cultural family identity. Thanksgiving dinner this year was borscht with garlic and rye bread, turkey with homemade plum sauce, and farina cake.

Over the past semester I asked my family to teach me how to cook the foods I love, and I’ve been trying to make most of them during actual work weeks. I was surprised that they are almost all very easy to make, and that it’s possible to have a real dinner without taking real time away from studying. Most of what I ate freshman year was cereal and skim milk.

In celebration of my new steps toward real adulthood, here are the 42 (plus or minus a few) recipes that encompass most of the foods I love. This blog post is mostly for me but it is also for you, in case you want to learn some fast, diverse recipes to get you through the semester.

30. Bubble tea

If you don’t know what bubble tea is, you will when you get to campus. It is sweetened milk tea with tapioca bubbles. It is addicting. It is sold at the Student Center for $3 a serving.

Effort: 2

Ingredients:

• Tapioca bubbles
• Honey or fruit preserves
• Tea
• Milk
• Bubble tea straws

Steps:

1. Buy tapioca bubbles [on Amazon]. I store them in a zip-lock bag in the freezer so they don’t dry out. You can buy fat straws on Amazon as well.

2. Boil water in an electric tea kettle or on the stove, as much as you can imagine you and your friends drinking in one sitting. Add several (three to six) bags of whatever tea you want to drink. When the tea is done steeping, move the pot or the tea kettle to the fridge to cool.

3. Boil water in a pot. Once the water is boiled, add a very small handful of tapioca bubbles for every two people. They will expand in the water.

4. After five minutes, remove the tapioca bubbles from the water and put them in a cup. Cover them in honey or fruit preserves. I think fruit preserves work better than honey, but other people (sample size two) disagree.

5. After a while the tapioca bubbles should have soaked up some of the honey or fruit preserves. Distribute the tea, add milk, and add the tapioca bubbles. Drink with a bubble tea straw.

Real bubble tea is prepared with some powder instead of just tea and milk. I haven’t figured this out yet and I’m probably not going to, because I’m happy with tea and milk, but you might want to.

For the full post on the MIT Admission website and all recipes, begin with Part I.