Didn't Make it to Cloyne

Everything you have heard about the co-ops is true. I came to this realization last week in Euclid Hall's kitchen-some Bear Grylls-looking dude was going to town on a wet coconut while praising the nutritional value of his meal. Meanwhile I'm standing there with refried beans on a piece of red Tupperware. What sort of man eats a coconut for dinner? A good man, it turns out. A good man with a good coconut (he let me have a bite), living in a good house with good beans served on modest, functional Tupperware. There's something charming about plates that are not plates, y'know?

(Thought: Pancake plates?)

Last week was Co-op Dinners Week, which meant free food and house tours for prospective residents and "journalists." I suppose the main thing I took from the experience is that a meal is only as good as the company you share it with. I don't know how reliable or useful a discussion of their food would be-residents at each of the four co-ops I visited all presented their dinners with the qualification that "it's different every night"-but there's more consistency found in the people eating that food, and those people were pretty great.

But enough mush, let's talk about food. First up was Kidd, the teensiest co-op in the land. After ducking through their miniature doorway and greeting the Kidds, a kindly race of mini-people who all stand three apples tall, we sat down at their tiny table to a dinner that consisted of vegetables, spiced rice, peanut chicken with soy sauce and caramelized green beans with walnuts. As you might have guessed, the combination of peanut, soy sauce and caramelization made for a particularly thirst-inducing meal, but it was delicious nonetheless.

(A brief digression: I was talking to someone at Kidd about all the adorable things co-ops do, like themed parties or having wars with each other. In some cases co-ops have even been known to date each other. And then this someone earnestly asked me what "the apartment scene" was like. There isn't one. Apartment dwellers live in apartments, and sometimes when we walk by other apartments, the dogs in those apartments bark at us from the other side of the door. That's about the extent of it.)

Next was Euclid, which is slightly bigger and has an awesome roof. They also have beans, rice, red Tupperware and coconut enthusiasts, but you knew that already.

But! Did you know that gorditas weren't invented by Taco Bell, that they're actually an authentically Mexican dish? That's what dinner at Andres Castro Arms taught me. Other things I learned there: The secret ingredient to a Castro flauta is love, Castro dinners are best paired with Roman Polanski movies and gordita is Spanish for "little fat one."

You'd think that a larger living situation would necessitate a more generalized meal, but it seems like the folks at Casa Zimbabwe like to keep things specific. Their eggplant parmesean certainly didn't taste like it was made in mass quantity, and neither did the noodles with quinoa, a South American seed described by one CZ resident as "some tasty cous-cous looking shit." And yeah, it was pretty tasty.

Didn't make it to Cloyne though. I like to think that their dinners are always simulations of the invisible food fight scene from Hook, and I didn't want to do anything to refute that hope.

Tags: THE MEAL PLAN