A Celebration of Tortillas
culture  

A Celebration of Tortillas

By Gloria

For those who live in the houses (which includes all of the frosh), waited house dinners are provided on weekdays. Once a term, every house has formal dinner, where we eat and dress fancy. And every so often, we receive an email heralding the approach of a board dinner, planned by Caltech Dining Services, and open to all students on board. Our first board dinner was last term, baseball themed, where we ate traditional baseball stadium cuisine and lounged on picnic blankets with inflatable baseball bats. Early this term, there was “Ditch Your New Year’s Resolutions” board dinner, filled with decadent foods left and right. This past week, we had a board dinner in honor of National Tortilla Chip Day. As usual, I entered Chandler a couple of minutes before the starting time (5 p.m.). I was glad I did, because I got to see this beast pristine and untouched:

I don’t think I’ve seen a seven layer dip contained in a vessel bigger than a casserole dish. And this was…much bigger. I dug into the gloop to take my share before moving on. Here’s a close-up of this magnificence:

Other featured items were nacho and taco stations, carne asada, pollo asada, tortilla chip crusted tilapia and chicken taquitos. Even though I took a small portion of each, it piled up. Here’s my neighbor, Gregory, balancing his haul while dipping into the flan:

As you can see, we had a lot of dessert as well. There were churros, bunuelos (deep fried tortillas with cinnamon sugar – flat churros?), and flan. Here’s Gregory and blurry Sirus (another neighbor) enjoying their food while wearing the sombreros gifted to them by CDS:

The girls got flowers, which Sirus kindly modeled (whilst eating a taquito):

Everything was quite excellent. I especially enjoyed the taco chicken, seven layer dip, rice, churros, and mangos. We left Chandler with loaded stomachs and happy hearts. The board dinners have been excellent in my first year at Caltech, and continue to provide a festive change from the usual.

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