Happy Halloween! Despite the diminutive “kitchen” in my dorm, and deficient collection of appropriate cooking tools, I am not always discouraged from making/helping make a meal for myself and friends. Really anything is better than cooked broccoli and soft beef tacos from the dining hall. This past weekend Rebecca, Tommy, Wei En and I got together at Shyla’s apartment to make dinner. Definitely on the top 10 list of potluck dinner-making events…if I had more than 10 occasions to rank. Rebecca started us off with tubed (tubed? already processed, perhaps) polenta. I’m still relatively unfamiliar with the dish as it was the first time that I know of that I had it. Rebecca put some balsamic vinegar on the pieces and finished them off with some goat cheese and craisins. She also made a salad with raspberries, homemade dressing and more of the craisin-cheese topping. Then Tommy made this baked brie dish thing covering a block of brie in a brandy and brown sugar glaze. Toasted some appropriately French bread to ingest with; what a concept. There was pasta…I was “cooking” it, though no one seemed to trust my see-if-the-pasta’s-soft-or-not skills…-_____- Red sauce and pesto were made for the pasta. The one thing they apparently did trust me in (and rightly so mwahaha!) was dessert. Dessert would definitely be my area of expertise…not that I can’t produce an exceptional pan-cooked lamb kebab dinner, either 😛 Aanyway…appreciating the season and preferring health over grease and simplicity over effort (or so I thought…oops), I made a satisfyingly sweet finale. I have to credit Tumblr for this brilliant idea of apple donuts which were legen-wait for it….dary! You slice apples horizontally and core them to cover them in peanut butter, and top them off with chocolate chips, raisins, dates, sliced almonds, or whatever your heart desires. So no, there were no real donuts involved. And of course you can use whatever spread as well, like NUTELLA! My budget did not make space for such luxuries, but next time…definitely next time…