New Experience: Apartment Shabbat

Hi! It's time for my second (third?) new experience post. To recap, my New Year's Resolution was to have a new experience every week this year and to blog about them on Saturdays. This week's new experience was slightly more exciting than last week's (which was watching new movies). I decided to have a Shabbat dinner in my apartment here at school.

For those of you who don't know, Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest. It goes from Friday night through Saturday night. My family celebrates Shabbat by having a nice dinner together on Friday night. We also light candles, drink wine, and eat challah (a specific type of bread). It's a nice way to end the week. But I haven't had any Shabbat dinners here at college (besides a couple hosted by Hillel, the Jewish group on my campus) so I decided that this Friday, I would arrange my own.

A couple of elements were not so easy to put together. Candles are banned in my apartment under the fire code. Wine is banned on my floor because we're substance free (and I'm under 21, and I don't really like wine anyway). And challah is difficult to find (unless I were to actually venture off campus- scary!) So I improvised.

Friday morning, I headed out to the pub. The pub is not a bar, it is the name of a small dining location on my campus that sells baked goods, junk food, salads, sandwiches, grill stuff, etc. I have no idea why it's called the pub. But anyway. I went to the pub and I bought one of their croissants (which I love) and a bottle of cranberry juice. Then I had lunch there and headed back to the apartment, where I probably wasted some time watching Pushing Daisies or something.

Around 6 pm, I started preparing dinner. Last semester, I had used up the last of my meal plan on buying various expensive foods, so I had some fancy pasta in my kitchen. I went to the convenience store on my campus and bought some vodka sauce (which essentially means creamy tomato sauce; I am beginning to realize that I have to clarify my lack of alcohol consumption way too much). Then I set some water to boil.

While I waited for the water to boil for my pasta, I set the table. I couldn't use candles, so I unplugged the little desk lamp in my bedroom and brought it to the kitchen table. (My roommates had ordered pizza, which they were eating in their bedroom, so they were fine with me using the kitchen). I poured some of the cranberry juice into a glass and put the croissant on a separate small plate.

The water boiled, so I poured in a little less than half the bag of pasta. Then I waited for it to finish cooking, tested it, drained it, and mixed in the vodka sauce and some extra virgin olive oil. I put some pasta on a plate and turned off the lights so that the table was lit by just the desk lamp. And then I ate my dinner, while reading The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland. (Which I really recommend. It's so good, ugh. Read the first book in the series first, though.)

Anyway, in the process of writing this I realized this sounds incredibly pathetic. Just so any readers know, I know it's not a big deal to make dinner for yourself. But it was fun and I decided to count it as my new experience for the week, so too bad if you think I'm sad for writing a blog post about it.

In other news: on Thursday night I hosted a video chat for Ch1Con, the young writers' conference I help run ("help run" is a very generous term for my job). The link is here. It was a talk about diversity in YA books. It's two and a half hours long, so I don't recommend watching it until one of us bothers to go in and put the little Google+ buttons for where the important parts are.

So, that's that. See you on Wednesday when there'll be a regular blog post!

-Ariel