I always say that one of the reasons I love going to school in Philadelphia is because the food here is so good.

There is hardly a restaurant downtown that I don’t enjoy (unless it’s La Viola West three times in two weeks). But when it comes to food on campus, there is something left to be desired.

Though my friends at more isolated schools will call me “sustenance-spoiled,” I don’t care. Because it’s true: I’m sick of the menu at Greek Lady, tired of the sluggish service at Marathon, and can’t bring myself to eat Qdoba more than once a week.

Izzy and Zoe’s has fallen to a level so far below acceptable that I try to forget it exists.

Even though Gia and Metro add some quality to the overall food options on Penn’s campus, we have a serious dearth of selection when hunger strikes… and it strikes a lot, considering that thousands of people in the Penn community eat three times a day.

Fed up with my options (and not willing to wait more than an hour to order something online from campusfood.com or 20 minutes physically in line for Magic Carpet in 40 degree weather), I finally mustered up the energy and ambition to do the unthinkable: cook. In someone else’s kitchen, obviously.

It. Was. Delish.

Coming from a girl whose greatest culinary feat is cheesy scrambled eggs, you have to trust me with this: It’s worth it. Even if you’ve never turned on a stove, never read a recipe, or never set a table.

Get off campus, go to a market — the Italian market, Food & Friends, or even just Fro-Gro — and imagine that you can cook whatever it is you crave. It doesn’t even have to be from scratch (because let’s be honest, who has time for that?). Throw something as simple as pasta into a pot of boiling water and… voila! A meal that is sure to be way more satisfying than yet another slice-to-go from Allegro.

Although Penn doesn’t offer culinary courses, we all have access to thousands of simple and satiating recipes to satisfy our unfulfilled food desires. So take half an hour out of your hectic day, and see what happens.

If all else fails, you know you can have reliably bland salad at your door in “anywhere between 50-70 minutes.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.