You can label Lena Chen according to sex toy references all day long, but now she’s going for something new: Donna Reed. The Ivy League’s semi-retired sex blogger and current domestic goddess wannabe recently wrote about her new foray into the culinary arts in a “postcard from abroad” for the Harvard Crimson. Forgoing her typical narcissism for an apron-clad version, she writes:

I started cooking last year after I moved off-campus to live with my boyfriend, who has an actual kitchen and uses it to make exactly three varieties of salad. When I decided that it was time for us to incorporate heat into our kitchen regimen, my mother saw it as a long-awaited opportunity to instruct me in Chinese cooking.

In retribution for the New York Times calling her a “small Asian woman who ate every crumb of everything,” Lena goes on to elaborate about acquiring the Chinese ingredients for her feast in a town of “exactly three Asian people.” (She’s evidently the go-to Geisha Girl even without the sex blog.) Turns out Germany isn’t the best place to find bamboo shoots.

This all comes in  the midst of Elle’s venture for self-improvement, which includes the regular shameless flaunting and calling everyone else fat.

But wait! Apparently, that orgasm isn’t the only thing she’s faked. Before the end, Chen admits to her guests that she found the recipe from a BBC cookbook, not dearest mommy. A-plus for effort on her final mother-daughter Lifetime-special moment:

I suppose my two-course Chinese feast turned out not to be much of a feast, or particularly Chinese, for that matter. But I think my mother would have nonetheless been proud.

Thanks for warming the cold, empty space where our hearts should be. Now bring us some steak, woman!

First we brought you some tasty-ass sandwiches. Then we brought you one tasty-ass drink (via WSJ.com). But sometimes you just want to eat pizza. Pizza serves as a flexible blueprint for greatness – like a good sandwich, by altering the basic idea, you can take it in nearly any direction. And you can pick it up by one end and eat it. So three cheers for the ‘zza and IvyGate’s latest (potentially) eight-part series. If you have any suggestions for your favorite local spot and might even want to write a post about it, send us an email at tips@ivygateblog.com.

At Harvard, the usual student haunt for pizza is Pinocchio’s (‘Noch’s), which I find mediocre. I like my food a little more radical. And I dislike their crust. Which is why I drag all my friends to try one of great, nontraditional pies of Harvard Square: the pizzas baked up at Veggie Planet on Palmer St, across the street from Border Cafe and Starbucks.

Drool over more picks with fewer vegetables, practical info, and scant mention of the just-for-crunchies Club Passim within Veggie Planet after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are several distinct tiers of chain restaurants. On the high end, we have California Pizza Kitchen, a swell spot for an eighth grade mall date; lower down, Outback Steakhouse, where just the name “Bloomin’ Onion” is enough to… ew. Intrepid journalists Marisa Calleja (B ‘10) and her friend Gabi Manga have taken it upon themselves to eat “at every chain restaurant in the Western Hemisphere” and write about it. Heart healthy!

Now, I really must back Marisa up when she says,

Bertucci’s rolls are probably my favorite starch-based food. They’re warm and soft and taste great with butter. However, two years ago Bertucci’s stopped giving you butter with your rolls, opting instead for a mix of olive oil, herbs and cheese. I don’t much care for it.”

So true. Perhaps this switch precipitated a rapid decline in the restaurant’s overall quality, because I don’t remember anything like the following happening when I went to the Brookline Village Bertucci’s during my formative years:

Then I got the wrong soup. Halfway through eating it, I realized that minestrone soup is hardly ever made out of cheese and sausage, and that I had probably received the cheese and sausage soup.”

Heh. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you know when a viral video is done, done done? When a Yale student group spoofs it. First their Senior Class Gift fund brought us “Senior Gift in a Box.” Now their women’s crew team has applied the winning formula to comedian Liam Sullivan’s ubiquitous “Shoes” video.

The original “Shoes” (2006) tells the story of Kelly, a blonde ingenue who, stifled by the tedium of family life, sets out to “get what I want.” Namely, shoes. She embarks on a journey that takes her from store to store, where she offers pointed, often devastating, critiques of various types of shoes. It eventually devolves into a decadent Boschian fantasy with flaming hula hoops and big stuffed purple dragons. If you haven’t seen it, you’re either dead or you’re J.D. Salinger. (Don’t play, Jerry, you know you read us.) In either case, watch it here.

The YWC’s homage borrows the original’s structure and spirit, but adds a thematic twist. Rather than combing the town for shoes, the crew team roams Yale’s campus in search of food. The result, while unappealing in most every way, is impressive as a shot-for-shot remake a la Gus Van Sant. We’ll leave the criticism at that, seeing as any one of those mustachioed women could absolutely manhandle us. If you find yourself getting the point, fast forward to the end: you’ll see one girl bench-pressing another.

Surviving college means surviving, among other things, your diet. You may fancy yourself a high-achieving, independent adult, but chances are you’re still eating Easy Mac five nights out of finals week. We wouldn’t have it any other way: nutritionally bankrupt, character rich. Freshman roommates bond over illegally boiled ramen; library insomniacs bring each other bacon-egg-and-cheese bagels. Comfort fuel.

We are, you can tell, a little cockeyed about food* — food, that is, made delicious by circumstance as much as ingredient. Get ready for some enthusiasm: introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League, an occasional series that will rhapsodize about the culinary genre — stuff between bread — that feeds us best. Either you understand this feature or you don’t. First up: Columbia’s Spicy Special.

[Ed.: Thanks is owed Armin Rosen, Columbia '10, for penning an impeccable Spicy tribute last week that gave us an excuse to do this. Go read it after this, it's superior.] 

We had our first Spicy at 2 or 3 in the morning on a Wednesday, having been bodily carried halfway to the Crack Deli on 109th Street by an incredulous, evangelical hockey player. No sandwich was as good as he was promising, especially not this meager apportionment of turkey on what had to be two-day-old bread, sold for three dollars and fifty cents at an establishment we knew primarily as a clutch spot for looseys.

But then we peeled the foil back and bit, finding Christ, and/or heroin, in a Baghdad mouthful. (Hot, and explosive.) It was Nov. 11, 2004 and now it was our turn to be incredulous, as we worked our dropped jaw up and down, discovering the immaculate layering of just enough cajun turkey, pepper jack cheese, L, T, and an indeterminate brand of deli mayo in a flattened, toasted hero. It lasted the exact duration of the walk home. It was perfection. Had the owner put the crack in the sandwich?

It’s difficult to explain the Spicy Special to the uninitiated. Is it spicy? Yes, a little. Is it special? How dare you. As Armin wrote, a Spicy is a night out at Columbia; sold at the deli right down from upperclass bar 1020, forgoing one at the end of the night just isn’t thinkable. Look, all we know is that we tend to get overexcited — can you tell? — about things like this, and yet despite our incessant hyping of the Spicy to friends and professors, the sammich still exceeds expectations. Stretches of Amsterdam Avenue can sound like a gonzo after last call, as the sloshed comment unsubtly on their Spicies on the walk home. Once we gave a grown man a bite and he hugged us. Bridging the gulfs between jock and hipster, cokehead and study rat, the Spicy is the undisputed sandwich of Columbia University.

We’ll confess, this series is only half-baked; we know of excellent ‘wichcraft at Penn, Princeton, Harvard and Yale, but need taste buds on the ground at Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth. If you’re a student at the latter set, and you feel us on this, get in touch. Club Sandwich begins now.

*(A couple years ago, half of us made the other go a week without paying for food, subsisting only on club-meeting pizza and dining-dollar benevolence. He gained weight.)

What, are they eating Snackwells instead of Doritos after getting lit now?

A new study by researchers at Brown finds that freshmen there only gain 5.6 or 3.6 pounds (men and women, respectively), less than the storied 15 our RAs gravely warned us about way back when. Brave Eunice Eun ‘09 offers herself up to USA Today as a student who did pork up the full amount (“It was really startling for my parents when I went back home for Thanksgiving break”), and then burned it off with eight months of vegetables and exercise.

So congrats, Eunice, and congrats, Brown. You make Yale’s yayo fiends look like the waffle fries line at Six Flags by comparison.

Compute the eight corresponding Eigenvectors in n-space? No problem. Decontextualize Baudrillard’s main thesis of radical semiurgy? Piece of cake. Create an actual piece of cake? You know, like chocolate? Ridiculously difficult.

“The only recipe I have the patience to follow is on the back of a Styrofoam cup of noodles: pour hot water, stir, enjoy. Pretty pathetic for a senior at Yale,” says Adriane Quinlan, writing about a Washington, D.C. kitchen boot camp in yesterday’s Post. Fellow culinary moron Ben Schneider, a junior at Penn, “is a chicken lover who has never actually stared its flesh in the face. He pokes it curiously, as if it could somehow be resuscitated, coddled back to life.”

We’ve long said that the cure for thinking highly of the Ivy League is attending one of its schools. But this — wait for it! — takes the cake. [Ed.: Rimshot! We'll be here all week, folks. Tip your waitresses.]