Friendsgiving is a great way to celebrate Thanksgiving with your close friends. Being a college freshman living in a dorm, I thought for sure this tradition was going to have to wait until I had my own kitchen and dining room. However, with the help of my friends, we were able to cook a tasty dorm-style Friendsgiving meal in our communal kitchen! Stay tuned to see how we did it.
Getting the Goods
The first step in constructing this feast was making our grocery list. We knew that we wanted to make a few homemade items and buy a few easy items to offset the difficulty of this process. Here’s the list that we constructed:
Prepping & Cooking the Goods
Anyone who lives in a dorm knows that the communal kitchen is either occupied by one of the eighty other people living on the floor or just lacks the space to prep ingredients. To save space and time, we decided to grab our cutting boards and knives, clear our dorm room desk, and start chopping right in our dorm!
Start by chopping and peeling the sweet potatoes, chopping the stems off of the green beans, and mincing the garlic. Once these are all set, head out to the kitchen to start boiling the sweet potatoes and frying up the bacon.
Once the bacon is crispy, let it rest, chop it up and set it off to the side. In the same pan, cook the garlic and green beans.
When the sweet potatoes are boiled, prepare them according to this recipe. Mash the boiled sweet potatoes with butter, brown sugar, bourbon and salt, then spread them in a baking dish to cover with butter, cinnamon, marshmallows and sugar. Note that we left out the pecans in this recipe and replaced them with marshmallows. Once that is in the oven, go ahead and get the crescent rolls and Kraft macaroni & cheese prepared. Cook each of them according to the package. Note that we also put our rotisserie chicken in the oven to warm it up before we ate.
To finish things off, add the chopped bacon back into the green beans and let them cook until they are soft. While those cook, mix together some softened butter, a bit of honey, cinnamon and sugar. This will be the perfect topping for the warm croissants. Everything else should be coming out of the oven or off the stove at about the same time.
Setting up the Goods
The lack of a dining table in the dorm (or even space for that matter) called for some creativity. We decided to clean off the floor and set everything up on the carpet (a picnic blanket also works). From there, we filled our plates and enjoyed our feast, criss-cross applesauce of course.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to celebrate the holidays or are just sick of the dining hall food, I highly suggest rolling up your sleeves and hitting the communal kitchen! This was a fun and fairly easy way to make the most out of dorm living.