Communal Dinner
Communal dinner. These are just two words on a page to most of you reading this post, but to me, these words mean a lot. I live off campus with some friends, and last year we started the tradition of communal dinners. Every Sunday night, one or two of us cook dinner for everyone. It’s such a simple premise, yet it has had such a strong impact on my time living off campus, especially this semester.
My mom always said that life is about how you spend your time and who you spend it with. In line with this advice, I try to make an effort to see all of my friends at Tufts on a regular basis. This can get pretty tiring, (I have awesome friends, which means they are doing interesting things a lot of the time) but it’s definitely worth it. But Sunday nights, I don’t have to think about who I’m going to eat with. Communal dinners epitomize my mom’s advice—I’m doing what I love, eating and/or cooking, with the closest thing I’ve got to family at Tufts, the people that I live with.
As the token foodie in almost every group I’m in (except Culinary Society, where the level of foodie-ness is off the charts), I especially appreciate our Sunday night dinners. I’ve learned a lot of great cooking tips by asking my housemates how they’ve made certain dishes and why they chose to add a particular spice or ingredient. For example, when you cook sausage with pasta and veggies, the pasta takes on the taste of the sausage, making the dish extra flavorful.
I’m also a firm believer that what you cook says something about who you are. If you make french toast for dinner, you’re down for a good time and are always up for an adventure. Preparing a dish from your cultural background speaks to the importance of family in your life. And making crostini with a variety of different toppings, as I did a couple weeks ago, proves just how much I love spending time in the kitchen after a busy week (it’s deceptively time consuming to spread toppings across slices of bread).
I’m so grateful for these dinners and look forward to many more. Traditions like these are what makes my time at Tufts so special. I’m also starting to feel as they should be called family dinners, not communal dinners. Living with my friends for almost three months now, we’re more of a family than a community after all.