Dinner Revisited

After two months at Princeton, eating every meal out of the Rocky-Mathey dining hall, I’d forgotten how amazing a home-cooked meal could be. On Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, I went to Rocky College Master Jeff Nunokawa’s house to cook a pre-Thanksgiving feast with some other students spending Thanksgiving on campus and couple of food-loving grad students (whose conversations sounded like a well-scripted Britcom, but more on that later). We spent three hours cooking squash soups of varying degrees of spiciness, roast chickens, stuffing, enough roast potatoes and parsnips to feed a small village, and snazzy little canapés with toasted French bread, sliced apples, goat cheese, and cranberry sauce. We spent the next couple of hours dining (or feasting, depending on your idea of dinner), assembled around Jeff’s spacious, if infrequently used, dining room table, listening to the two grad students’ exquisitely British repartee (almost reminiscent of Fawlty Towers). One of the other undergrad dinner guests summed it up when she said, “They’re almost like grownups.” Because that is what it was: a grownup dinner with real food and real conversation. How strangely novel.