Forty years too late

I recently received the latest issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine (Spring 2023), which is billed as “The Food Issue.” One of the stories is about Dharshan Munidasa, who got an engineering degree from Hopkins in 1994 but is now a chef and restaurateur best known for his Ministry of Crab restaurants (great name!). Munidasa’s recollection of the food offered at Hopkins’ Homewood campus in the early ’90s is that “You could eat it, but it was never interesting. It was mass-produced. Boring.” That’s actually a slight step up from what I’d say about the food we were served at Homewood a decade earlier. His reaction was similar to mine though, that is, “to eat well [given the crappy Hopkins dining hall food] he needed to teach himself to cook well.” Which is how I started making spaghetti alla carbonara for your Mom on a regular basis after we began dating.

 

Gilman Hall (Daderot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Hopkins is apparently now seeking to change the food culture on campus. In his opening letter in the Food Issue, Hopkins president Ronald Daniels says that food “brings people together, expanding our tastes and inspiring us to greater creativity. It truly binds a community.” To that end, Hopkins has “spent the last year bringing all our dining operations in-house instead of contracting with an external partner,” like they did in my day. Now, Daniels writes, the improved “Hopkins dining experience should be a source of joy, comfort, and the feeling of home.” New offerings on campus will include Puerto Rican pernil, barbeque jackfruit, the new Director of Culinary Innovation’s favorite tandoori-style chicken, and even—oh, the irony—“house-made gelato.”

 

To which I say, forty years too late, assholes. Where was your interest in creating a joyous food community when Mom and I were at Hopkins in the early ’80s? The big treat back then was the thin, gristly steak that the contractor meted out once a week. They thought their steaks were such a divvy that that they ensured you could only get one by giving you a ticket—the kind you get when you win a game at a carnival—when you got your meal card punched that day, which you then had to turn in when you claimed your prize steak. As if anyone would possibly want to choke down more than one of their nasty steaks. Ugh. But despite my obvious bitterness over our "Hopkins dining experience," I can only grouse so much, as one of the defining moments of my life happened in the dining hall early in my freshman year. You should all know what that was by now.

 

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I've gone through multiple versions of sesame noodles and still never been entirely happy with any of them. One thing I'm now convinced of is that if you're going to use rice noodles, as we always do for Mom's benefit, you have to run cold water over the noodles as soon as you drain them; otherwise they'll continue to cook and get mushy by the time you're sitting down to eat. If you want warm noodles instead of room temperature, cool them off anyway, then zap individual portions in the microwave once they've been tossed with the sauce. This sauce isn't significantly different from previous versions, but it's noticeably better to my taste, and it makes the right amount to dress a pound of noodles, so I think I'll finally be stopping my sesame noodle experiments here.

Sesame Noodles 3.0

Adapted from Deb Perelman via Smitten Kitchen (Aug. 4, 2015) and Sam Sifton from the New York Times

Time: ~29 minutes

You can add the chile garlic sauce or sambal oelek to taste, or you can leave it out entirely and add it at the table, which is what we do for Mom's benefit.

Noodles
1 tablespoon fine sea salt
1 pound dried rice noodles such as A Taste of Thai (you can substitute Chinese egg noodles or spaghetti)

A good splash of toasted sesame oil

 

Sauce

32 grams (2 tablespoons) tahini or Chinese sesame paste, stirred well

16 grams (1 tablespoon) smooth peanut butter

55 grams (3½ tablespoons) low-sodium soy sauce or tamari

30 grams (2 tablespoons) rice vinegar

27 grams (2 tablespoons) toasted sesame oil

12 grams (1 tablespoon) brown or granulated white sugar 

10 grams (2 teaspoons) chile garlic sauce or sambol oelek or sriracha or chile crisp (see note)

1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger

1 medium-large garlic clove, grated on the same Microplane you used to grate the ginger

 

Assembly

227 grams (½ pound) cucumber, preferably a long, thin English cucumber

70 grams (½ cup) roasted & salted peanuts

A handful of chopped cilantro, optional 

 

    1. For the noodles: Bring 4 quarts of water to a roiling boil in a large, covered stockpot over high heat. Stir in the salt until dissolved. Add the noodles and stir a few times during the first minute or two to keep them from sticking. Cook until al dente (firm yet tender), about 6 minutes for Taste of Thai linguine rice noodles. Drain in a colander, then immediately rinse with cold water until cool. Drain well again, then transfer to a serving bowl and toss with a good splash of toasted sesame oil.

    2. For the sauce: Meanwhile, whisk all of the sauce ingredients together in a medium bowl.

    3. Cut the cucumber into very thin slices. You can do this—very carefully—using the 2- or 3-millimiter blade of a mandoline. Roughly chop the peanuts. Roughly chop the cilantro, if using.

    4. To assemble: Toss the noodles with sauce until evenly coated. Pile some of the noodles into each individual bowl. Top generously with cucumber and peanuts. Garnish with cilantro if desired. Serves 4 generously.