What Cooking Dinner Looks Like in an Environmental Co-Operative

On a Sunday night at Bryn Mawr College, most students are rushing to finish assignments or stumbling over paper topics. But in the college’s only environmentally conscious living co-operative, Batten House, spaghetti squash is a much more pressing issue. 

Varuna, 22, and Sophie, 21, signed up to cook dinner for the house that night. They began slowly and with conviction, two friends using each and every week-old vegetable in the fridge for their meal.

They prepped four pans for the stove with canola oil. Varuna, with one of her white t-shirt sleeves, pulled up and a dark green apron attempted to cut a hard spaghetti squash open with a long paring knife. Apparently, they tried a larger knife before but it couldn’t pierce the squash’s skin. 

Sophie, sporting a light green shirt and white apron, lifted the squash in the air with the knife handle and looked at the large yellow mound quizzically. After yanking the knife out, Varuna succeeded in cutting the squash with a bread knife. “Yay!” they exclaimed. 

There was some debate about what kind of squash it was. Sophie was the first to suggest spaghetti squash but was led astray by its tough skin. It was not until they sliced the mound in half that they could determine its true character. 

With a pile of chopped onions on the counter and various vegetables with no obvious resemblance, Sophie and Varuna debated what to make for dinner. 

Sophie suggested they chop the squash into cubes and cook it with lentils, Romanesco broccoli, and banana peppers. “So we use everything,” she said. 

Batten’s mission is to minimize its environmental footprint wherever possible, which includes composting food scraps, recycling properly, purchasing local, organic produce, and eating vegan meals. This mission encourages housemates to use as much of the food we are given as possible, ideally wasting none. 

“This is going to make a weird noise and maybe burn,” Sophie said as she scraped onions into the heated pan. “We’ll set the kitchen on fire again” Varuna joked, referring to last year’s fire incident in which some broiling bread caught flame in the oven. After extinguishing the fire, Batten’s oven was irreversibly damaged and the house waited three weeks for a replacement.    

Kitchen helper and friend of the house, Noelle, 21, was slicing week-old cabbage. She peeled the brown leaves off and filled a large silver bowl with what remained. Sophie sliced the older leaves further to save every green bit and started a pot of mystery beans. “That’s definitely lentils in there” she later claimed. 

Sophie opened the kitchen compost bin, which smelled of fermenting food and old coffee. In other words, perfectly atrocious.  

Batten has a composting system for food scraps in the backyard, and a large tub under the sink for in-house food scrap collection. When the tub fills up, one of two people signed up for the chore to take the food scraps outside to their backyard bin. Last semester, a beautiful squash plant grew from the compost pile. This semester, however, the pile generates maggots: a sign of healthy decomposition. 

What they can’t compost in their yard or recycle in Bryn Mawr’s municipal recycling they bring to Mom’s Organic Market. Mom’s has bins for things like compostable plastics, plastic grocery bags, Brita filters, shoes, and batteries. Training members of the house to recycle and compost properly is a long process. 

As a co-operative living situation with 12 college students, making sure everyone is on the same page to effectively carry out the house’s mission can be difficult. Every week, students have a house meeting where they plan community events, sign up to cook house meals and discuss house grievances like dirty dishes or a messy kitchen. They also have a house group chat where they remind each other to remove stickers from their banana peels or take the rubber bands off bunches of bad parsley. 

The house has meals Monday through Thursday nights as well as Sunday brunch and dinner. Six meals a week divides the 12 students perfectly into pairs, so each meal has two students cooking. Sophie and Varuna were free on the same Sunday and volunteered for the difficult task of cooking at the end of the week when the CSA is low. 

Once the squashes came out of the oven, Varuna and Sophie debated how to cut them. They considered cubes, spirals, and strips but decided to scrape the insides with a fork until it resembled, as its name suggests, spaghetti. 

Varuna combined the cabbage and onions in two large frying pans, both overflowing with their contents. She pressed the cabbage into the pans with both hands, hoping the leaves would shrink while cooking. After the squashes were cut in half, Varuna placed them on a cookie sheet. 

One of many house grievances is the cost of food. Olive oil is expensive and goes quickly in the house. After going without such a staple item for a few weeks, Batten decided to buy it once more but use it sparingly. It hasn’t been easy…

“I’m scared of using the olive oil,” Varuna said, again debating over the squash. Sophie decided that after doing more than her share of the house cleaning that day she would use it, and sprinkled some on the spaghetti squash. They slid the squashes into the oven at 420 degrees.

Opening the spice cabinet, Jasodanand picked up a tall, thin jar of merkén. “Smells like barbeque sauce,” she said before sprinkling some in the lentils. They added coriander, thyme, rosemary, onions, and a cinnamon stick. 

The smell of caramelized onions lingered as Sophie began chopping Romanesco. She was distracted, however, by a piece of cabbage that had fallen to the stove’s flames. Sophie tried to fish it out with a wooden spoon, but Varuna was worried. “Not with the wooden spoon” she exclaimed. They used a metal fork to retrieve the piece of flaming, now singed cabbage. 

Varuna placed the spaghetti squash in a new frying pan and Loring continued chopping Romanesco, its pieces flying up and over the kitchen island. She popped one in her mouth. “Crunch,” she said with a smile. 

Sophie poured the remnants of a jar of brown rice into the house’s biggest rice cooker, which sings to you in Korean. The rice cooker belonged to Cindy, 22. She hit it in her room for a whole semester but decided to share it after some weeks of poorly cooked rice. It is now a staple in Batten’s meals. 

Housemates walked in and out of the kitchen grabbing small snacks before dinner, and the stove fan hummed at low speed. “Does it taste good?” Sophie asked. “Yeah, I think it’s ready to go in” Varuna replied in reference to the cabbage. Sophie noted that no one would eat the cabbage if it wasn’t made indecipherable in the soup, so she poured it in the pot and cooked lentils and cabbage together until each was soft.

“I hate lettuce” Varuna noted. “All lettuce?” Sophie asked. “All lettuce,” Varuna replied. Looking at the pot of lentils and cabbage, the cooks agreed it was time to break out the immersion blender. “This thing is magic,” Varuna said, marveling at the speed and efficiency of the blender’s small blade. 

Before long, it occurred to them that they had left a cinnamon stick in the pot. Sophie jolted to a spoon to fish out the lone cinnamon stick. Unbothered, Varuna noted, “my mom will put cinnamon sticks in anything, and cloves.” 

Every week the house picks up their Community Supported Agriculture share. During the summer and fall seasons, the food is fresh and plentiful. But in the winter, they have to supplement the share with extra shopping. Sometimes, the CSA comes with spicy vegetables like habanero peppers or mustard greens, which are hard to cook with. 

“There are some really spicy lettuces in here. Stay away” Sophie said of Thursday’s leftover salad. She put the lettuce in the soup hoping cinnamon and cloves would mask the taste of the spicy salad. It was a successful venture; the soup was a creamy combination of sweet spices and savory vegetables. 

Noelle, who had been lingering in the kitchen corner waiting for the spaghetti squash to finish in baking, began forking its cooked insides. “Oh my gosh, it looks like spaghetti!” Varuna exclaimed. Mounds of thin angel-hair strips of squash twirled from Noelle’s fork. 

She labored for almost 45 minutes over the squash, surrendering its contents to yet another sizzling pan with fresh garlic and margarine. Varuna sprinkled rosemary and basil into the squash, mixing it with the same wooden spoon she just dipped in the soup.  

Sophie slid a pan of Romanesco into the oven to bake, which beeped just as Bruno Mars’s hit “Count on Me” sang from the speaker. The rice cooker’s pressure regulator rattled suddenly as steam escaped its narrow hole; Sophie listened attentively to its Pacman-like jingle. 

Not wanting to waste the squash seeds or skins, Varuna separated the spaghetti guts from its seeds and sautéed them on a pan. Though a bit over salted, when garnished on the soup the seeds added lovely texture and flavor. 

“Dinner!” Varuna called. Each dish was placed elegantly on the kitchen island with an accompanying spoon: roasted Romanesco, cabbage lentil soup, brown rice, and pumpkin seeds. The night garnered a small turn-out totaling five Battenites and three guests. 

For dessert, Varuna and Sophie reheated the morning’s pancakes and made of chocolate, coconut cream sauce. At the end of the meal, housemates brought their plates to the shallow kitchen sink. A barrage of dirty dishes met a soapy sponge, each one half-covered in chocolate sauce and soup, not a single bite of dinner left.