Articles by lucia

If you’re this customer from Thursday, you ordered a cinnamon soda just as we ran out of seltzer, so I raced to try to buy some before you finished your sandwich. I made it just in time. Hope you liked the cinnamon soda.

We didn’t know sodas would be such a hit at dinner. We make Italian style sodas: fill the glass with ice, add syrup, then top off the soda with seltzer. Problem is, we’re running out of seltzer every night.

We’re opening and throwing out a bunch of plastic liter bottles every night to make sodas, paying a couple bucks for each bottle, and I’m pretty sure the guy who owns the corner store near Kendall isn’t happy that because of Clover, he doesn’t have any seltzer left at the end of the week. And we’re still running out.

We don’t want a hand-held soda dispenser or anything that looks like it would be behind a bar. And we need something that will stay fizzy. A couple people have talked about carbonators you can make yourself, and there are a few companies that make carbonators for “home use” too (Soda Stream is one). Not sure which would be more cost-effective than buying seltzer.

I found this great honey from JP, so I thought we could do a honey rosemary soda. Peter said he’d make a recipe. We thought we’d be serving the soda that evening. I think this was Monday…

So, what we learned: rosemary does some strange things when you heat it up.

First Peter tried blending up the rosemary, and combining it with a hot honey syrup. You couldn’t taste honey at all. It tasted like eating a Christmas tree. The next day, we tried steeping the rosemary in hot water and combining that steeped water with honey. It tasted like menthol.

We were about to give up on Friday when Peter had the morning off. He spent the whole morning at the kitchen testing the soda recipe, and brought this to us for dinner service. Pete steeped rosemary in cold syrup, then poured the honey over the top. You get the honey taste first, then a really good rosemary taste at the end. Look for this one and a couple new sodas (cinnamon, brown sugar ginger) at dinner next week.

The new folks might not know this, because I’ve tried hard to keep it it under wraps, but I have a nickname. It’s “Bad Looker,” or Bill for short. Jeremiah made it up, and it’s not really that funny. But sometimes, it really fits. Sometimes, I just don’t look hard enough. Yesterday was one of those times.

We’ve been doing an afternoon special for the past two weeks. I love these specials. This week, fried plantains. At 3pm, it was time to start frying up the plantains. We ran through the few plantains left from yesterday, and then I started looking for the plantains that had been dropped off that afternoon in the resupply van. I looked everywhere. Kevin looked everywhere. There were no plantains on the truck.

I called Rolando, I called Chris, I even texted Enzo, suggesting that our truck had been sabotaged as part of the truck-to-truck competition.

Then, a customer came by, saying she’d been thinking about fried plantains all day. We had to tell her we were all sold out. I looked one more time. Right at the front of the truck, hidden under some crates, was a white plastic container, full of plantains. Kevin tried to call after the woman, but she was already gone. We didn’t get your name – but please come back tomorrow. Ask for Bill. I’ll fry you up some plantains.

Those of you who’ve been following us for a while know about the back door on the MIT truck. It is exactly the right height for banging your head when you’re stepping off the truck. Nearly everyone has fallen victim to it at one point or another.

Last week, LJ banged his head really hard and Chris Anderson (who’s just come on full time) decided it would be the last time.

That’s LJ in the foreground recovering, and Chris in the background, attaching foam and bright red tape to the ledge. It’s an ugly fix, but the alternative is worse. Sorry LJ. Thank you, Chris.

This is Antony. He was our last dinner customer of the night last night. And as far as I know, he is our most shining example of a successful pre-order.

Nearly every day, Antony comes by for breakfast, and while he’s at the truck, he pre-pays for his lunch order – one chickpea fritter and rosemary fries. He comes back at 1pm to pick it up.

The crew, and especially Brian, has gotten really good at having Antony’s chickpeas and fries coming right out of the fryer by the time we see him rounding the corner at 12:59.

Soon Antony won’t be at MIT every day. He promised us he’ll still come by on the days he’s on campus, but Antony, you’ve trained us well! – I think we’ll always have a chickpea and fries waiting at 1pm for you.

When I was working in Washington DC, I wanted to see Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. I tried to track it down, but ended up at a small garden outside the headquarters of the US Department of Agriculture right near the Smithsonian. There are a bunch of vegetable gardens the USDA has started to run this year. In May, chard and kale were growing.

I went inside the USDA headquarters to check out the visitors center. It was really strange. It had some of the nicest volunteers, who showed me a display of food the USDA has been involved in creating (like boxed mashed potatoes) and gave me a collection of pamphlets. Like this one, about attack worms.

Really cool gardens, kind of outdated visitors center.

It didn’t take too many evenings of unloading the Clover truck to realize that regular sneakers weren’t going to cut it. During the winter I wore some men’s boots, they were really comfortable and had great grip, but they were really ugly.

This week I decided to spring for kitchen clogs. There are a couple brands of clogs that you see in kitchens. Crocs (less expensive), and Danskos (expensive).

This is a picture of my new pair of Danskos, on the springy “turf” at the playground near our commissary. After a week of wearing them, I’m not so sure they were worth the money. They’re really supportive if you’re standing still, but as some of you may have witnessed, I’ve come really close to twisting my ankle. Somehow I don’t think it’s part of the breaking-in process…

Chris, Bonnibel and I were driving the truck back to the commissary Friday afternoon. We stopped to fill the truck with gas and propane. A huge moving truck was blocking the propane-filling station, and it wasn’t going to move for 45 minutes.

We were stranded at the gas station.

At least it was a beautiful day. A couple of people came by and asked what we were serving. We almost opened back up and started service again. Instead we ate ice cream from the gas station.