There is nothing like being the last one standing on the day before holiday shutdown, and I hope most of you never have to deal with it. I've had good training for this--most of my classes at Purdue had Saturday finals, and I was inevitably there until after shutdown. At least at work, I don't have to worry about the hot water being turned off.
But this does involve getting lunch. If I have the time, it's off to bento. If I remember, and have stuff in the fridge, it's leftovers. Since I was cleaning things out in the kitchen, that was out. So, with no time, and no plannning ahead, it was off to the cafeteria.
Trying to find something edible at the cafeteria just before a shutdown is always an adventure. No,it doesn't have the "we're closing the dorm for the summer" weirdness from university, nor does it have the finality of the "we're moving out of the building" bizarre combinations, but it gets pretty weird
I should have known when I saw the "chicken, spinach and raspberry dressing" salad that was featured the day before--featuring a pile of raw spinach, a chicken breast on top of it, and a package of reaspberry dressing on the side--that things were going to be interesting.
So, the soup selection--"vegetable pasta soup with barley", featuring, not one, not two, but three starches--they threw potatoes into the mix as well. And then the "pasta e fagiole" soup. I have never seen a "pasta e fagiole" soup recipe that had a cheese base. I have especially not seen one that did that with what appeared to have been repurposed from a canadian cheese soup served earlier. Throw random veggied and pasta in, and there you go. However, no beans. Um, guys--fagioli means "beans" in Italian.
The beans were in the chili, though. It looks like they just kept adding more beans to the mix as the week went on. As far as I could tell, it was now an archeological expedition into beans.
Salads included the aforementioned "chicken and spinach", and two variations on caesar salads. And the entree was definitely a "there's stuff in the fridge--make a sandwich", because it was a "make your own sandwich" bar.
The pizza slices were too scary looking to investigate further--I've found that the descriptions that the cafeteria gives aren't what one might call accurate.
But by close-down, there wasn't much that the cafeteria had to worry about.
Posted by lsefton at December 25, 2004 04:04 PM