DINRAR, or Let's Dine Together!

To set the stage a bit: this is one of my favorite songs to blues dance to. This song feeds my soul; this post is going to feed us all.

Hi friends. In case you didn't know, I like food. (I was going to link to all the posts I've written about food here on the Oberlin blogs but there were a lot, so here's a Google search instead and I'll link to relevant posts when I can.) I can also tell you that Oberlin students are a little bit into food as well (THANKS Google; it turns out over 500 mentions of food on the Oberlin blogs. That's... a smorgasboard, if you will.) And lest we forget, our Oberlin Alumni Magazine dedicated an (award-winning issue!) entirely to Oberlin people working for, with, and because of food last spring.

I need to stop. I'm drooling. But I can't stop now. I'm still hungry, and the problem is, now you probably are too.

For many of us here at Oberlin, food is a way of life. Whether it's your co-op cooking shift, the group you go to Feve brunch with every other week, the dorm cooking you pieced together and then excelled at over winter term, any way you look at it, food is synonymous with community. And Oberlin is all the better because of it.

I love that community experience. My time at Oberlin was punctuated by wonderful meals, on my own late at night in Harkness, adventuring to the West Side Market in Cleveland, with my Foodship friends, with special meals of epic proportions, with adjective sandwiches of all shapes and sizes, with soups and senior projects. I lived well, and I ate well.

But my time before and after Oberlin has been marked by many of these meals, too. My dad's co-op friends from the 70s were our potluck buddies for years in Kentucky, and since graduating, that's been the world I've created for myself, too. I'm teaming up with my newest foodie friend, Tanya: cohort in crime when it comes to thinking up cool social media projects, fellow Oberlin blogger, and lover of good sandwiches, to bring good food to you.

Or rather, you bring good food to us. Let's call it a virtual potluck.

You see, we've decided we want to eat with you all and we want you all to eat with each other, too. We're calling our project Oberlin Family Dinner, because a collection of your family's recipes, the things that remind you of home and the tasty things that come along with it, is the best thing to take along with you to college. College is when your family becomes bigger, too, and with our recipe collection, your new Oberlin family can eat along with you.

Tanya and I were so excited about this project we took some family portraits and a family gif. Enjoy!

Okay. Enough silliness (for now). Here's how it goes:

• From now until August 1st, we'll be collecting your family recipes and sharing them on our collective cookbook. (If you're a Tumblr-er/Tumblarian/Tumblrite, follow it and you'll get all the recipes as they're posted.)
• Not a cook? Creative in other ways? We're also looking for ART to accompany each recipe: if you see something in our cookbook and feel inspired, create and share it with us, and we'll add it to our Tumblr.
• Then, in August, we're stepping it up a notch. From August 3rd-17th, we want to see your family dinners. Choose a recipe from the collection, make it, and share it with your local family and then your Oberlin family.
• We may or may not have some plans for the fall semester here on campus, too... stay tuned for that!

Ready? Set? GET COOKING!