This week has been a strange one, even among the chaos of the quarantine. Within 48 hours, both of my D&D groups have collapsed for various reasons, to the point that I doubt either one will continue next semester. My younger brother has taken to spicing up dinner conversations by making uninformed political comments for my left-leaning sister or my tempestuous father to argue against. The President, amidst all the shelter-in-place orders, has decided to use this opportunity to fight against what truly plagues American democracy: mail-in voting. In short, my world has gone topsy-turvy, which makes it a perfect time to make banana pudding.

Now, this recipe is also one that I got from my grandmother and I love her dearly, but I’m pretty sure you can find a similar recipe on the side of a box of Jell-O vanilla pudding. Also, I’ve got a feeling that the more I point out that I call my grandmother “Meme,” the more likely someone is to make a wisecrack about the name. Trust me, I’ve heard it all before.

To start this pudding, you’ll need five cups of milk and two 5-ounce packets of instant vanilla pudding. Mix them together and let the pudding harden. Once it’s hardened, add about 3/4 of a 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk and 8 ounces of Cool Whip. Mix that into the pudding, and you’re pretty much halfway done.

Next, you’re gonna need a box of Nilla wafers and some pretty darn ripe bananas. How many bananas do you use? If you can’t answer that question yourself, then you have no business making banana pudding. I’ve made this stuff with as few as 4 bananas or as many as 10. It’s up to you to decide how much banana your pudding needs. Too few, and you might as well be making normal pudding. Too many, and the CDC will discourage your gathering of 10 or more bananas and confiscate your banana pudding once it’s done. The legality of this is still being debated in Congress, but in the meantime, the CDC is more than willing to take advantage of the chaos.

Once you’ve decided how many bananas to use, peel and slice them.

Plating the pudding is one of the most important aspects of making banana pudding. You can’t just hodgepodge this stuff together and expect it to turn out great. Order brings balance in all things, especially pudding. You’re gonna need a big bowl for this, probably one of the biggest bowls in your house. Coat the bottom of the bowl with your Nilla wafers. It doesn’t matter how many you have to use, as long as you can not see the bottom of that bowl through the cookies. Next, place a layer of sliced bananas on top of the bottom layer; you should use about half of your sliced bananas here. Then, you’ll need to grab that original bowl of pudding and pour about half of it into your new bowl. All that’s left is to repeat the process: wafers, bananas, pudding. If you have any leftover Nilla wafers, I highly recommend either using them as decoration on the top of your pudding or using them to remove and properly dispose of any pudding on the sides of your original pudding bowl.

This would be the part where I include a picture of the finished product, but only after writing this post about how to make banana pudding did I realize that I currently have none of the ingredients to make banana pudding.

Happy quarantine, everyone!

As this quarantine marches on, I’ve been greeted with an event that I didn’t think I’d be celebrating at home: my 19th birthday! To be honest, I’ve got mixed feelings about it all; on one hand, celebrating a birthday is a lot more fun with your family, especially when two of your siblings share the same birthday. On the other hand, I’m rather disappointed in the birthday gift sent straight from dear old State, which was two midterm exams in the same week.

While that can’t be helped, it was offset by the fact that I got to choose our birthday dinner this year; the three of us have passed this baton off to each other for the last decade. This was a treat, especially since I didn’t think I’d be home to celebrate it this year, so I chose a meal that I knew I could only get at home: cubed steak, green beans, and my grandma’s mac and cheese. My mom’s mother, who we call Meme, has the same birthday as the triplets, so normally, we try to spend our spring break down in South Carolina to see her. With everything that’s going on, that obviously isn’t possible, so I hoped that a call and a casserole dish full of her mac and cheese would make it feel a bit more like a regular birthday.

It also helps that this year is the first year that I helped to make it while my mom gave me the directions, so I can share this birthday dinner with all of you and see what you think of it. Keep in mind that this recipe is meant to feed a family of six, so I’d recommend using less if you don’t want leftovers.

You’ll start by boiling about 3/4 of a pound of elbow macaroni. Now would also be a good time to preheat your oven to 350. While the pasta is boiling, crack 4 or 5 eggs and beat them, adding half a 12-oz can of evaporated milk. Once the pasta is cooked and drained, put it into a casserole dish and let it cool; if you don’t do this, you’ll probably scramble your eggs. You’ll also probably want to coat your casserole dish with butter or non-stick cooking spray. When the pasta cools, pour your egg-milk mixture into the dish and stir it in. Once that’s incorporated, you can take the rest of your can of evaporated milk, along with a heaping handful of grated cheddar cheese, and mix that in as well. Put your macaroni and cheese into the oven for 15 minutes, then take it out and add more cheese; how much you add is up to you. My mom will sometimes sprinkle panko bread crumbs on top, but my grandmother always made it without the bread crumbs, and so did I. Stir it again, and put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. Let it cool, but not too much.

As I’m typing this, we haven’t had dinner yet or opened any presents, but I just finished calling my grandparents. We can all agree that we’d rather be together, but this will do for now.

Week Two of our second semester of RCL is well underway, so it’s time to decide on blog topics! Looking through the comments, it seems like everyone was pretty much in agreement on what topics they’d like me to cover, so I figured I’d use this post to go into more detail on why those topics caught my attention.

One weekend, over the winter break, I was off from work at McDonald’s and was watching TV with my parents. At some point, I looked away from the television to answer a text, and my eye was only drawn back to the screen when my mom commented, “You know, Thomas, you’re just like him!” I looked back at the screen to find that my parents were watching the Big Bang Theory, and my mother’s remark was referring to Sheldon Cooper. Confused, I asked her what she meant, and her response was something along the lines of, “Well, you just keep such a strict schedule! You always eat at the cafeteria in West, you always play Dungeons and Dragons with your friends on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, and you always study and do laundry on Sunday.”

Everything she said was true, but I was appalled at the idea of being compared to one of the leads of one of the least funny shows to hit daytime television. (Yes, I don’t think the show is funny, and you can quote me on that.) But she had raised a good point; as much as college life differed from living at home, I had allowed myself to fall into a schedule, and the idea just didn’t sit right with me. At first, I tried to find different ways to mix up my schedule, but to no avail. After all, Sunday was the best day to do laundry, and my D&D sessions are determined by my friends’ schedules. My eating habits, on the other hand, were completely variable. So, I decided that once a week, I would eat someplace either on or off campus that I had never eaten before. Hopefully, keeping this blog will help me stay motivated about the challenge.

As for my Civic Issues blog, I don’t have some personal story about the two-party system. What I have noticed is that over the past few years, debate between Democrats and Republicans has become less fruitful, and it led me to wondering if we would still have this polarity in a multi-party system. I would discuss America’s history with political parties, take a look at other states with more than two major political parties, and explore ways to change the way we vote in order to encourage more third-party candidates to run for office.

Regardless, I think that I am looking forward to running both of these blogs over the course of the semester, and I hope that you enjoy them as well.