College chefs ask homesick students for family recipes

Rice serveries are redefining home-cooked meals

The scent greeting students entering Seibel Servery last week was heavenly — a potent blend of Caribbean-style curried beef, toasted coconut rice and sweet plantains — and for at least one Rice student, it smelled just like home.

“Mom’s Jamaican curry beef” was the dish Mikayla Hurley submitted for the Taste of Home campaign to recreate. (Photos by Jeff Fitlow)

“My mom is from Jamaica and curry is a dish that never fails to comfort and please my family,” said Mikayla Hurley, whose mother was the inspiration for the meal in more ways than one.

That lunch was the second meal created this semester as the result of a new Housing & Dining campaign, “A Taste of Home.” Using both an online form and traditional recipe cards, the program encourages students to share instructions for recreating their favorite meals from back home, which the Rice dining team then tackles with gusto.

It was Hurley’s mother who told her about the campaign, in fact, and encouraged the Lovett College freshman to submit a recipe herself. Hurley’s mom was ecstatic to hear her dish had been chosen, sending “a celebratory GIF to commemorate the moment,” Hurley said.

Tackling the recipe was a fun challenge for sous-chef Tony Cadaing and the Seibel staff, said assistant dining director and senior executive chef Kyle Hardwick.

“A lot of the recipes I’ve been seeing are already in our wheelhouse of stuff we like to do, but just a little different,” Hardwick said.

“I’d have this for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said assistant dining director and senior executive chef Kyle Hardwick.

For the last 18 months, they’ve been serving sweet plantains as a breakfast option in Seibel, which serves Will Rice and Lovett Colleges. Halal beef is always on order for a university that serves a diverse base of students. And the large stock of spices in the kitchen, which is constantly experimenting across cuisines, made it fairly easy to reproduce Hurley’s recipe — even down to her mother’s serving suggestion: “Serve over a bed of coconut rice and with sweet fried ripe plantains (sliced on the bias).”

“I think it’s really important to share with the students and the parents that we really care,” said Johnny Curet, Rice’s director of campus dining and senior executive chef. “They’re an extension of our own families.”

In the past, Curet said, he and the other servery chefs often encouraged homesick students to tell them what they could whip up to make them feel a little better. What dishes did their dads make? Their grandmothers? Any holiday favorites?

“We thought it was really important, especially with so many new incoming students and our international population, who have the double whammy of learning this country and missing the cuisine they may be used to back home,” Curet said.

This is the first year, however, it has been formalized into a campaign.

Look for more student-submitted Taste of Home recipes coming soon.

“Now that it is, we’re getting all kinds of recipes coming our way,” Curet said.

Two Taste of Home meals are planned for South Servery this week, with dozens of other dishes planned throughout the semester. And so far, the campaign has met with resounding success.

“Nothing can beat my mom’s cooking,” Hurley said. “It would be sacrilegious to say otherwise.” But she was impressed with the way the Seibel staff interpreted her mother’s Jamaican curry and how well they scaled it up to serve hundreds of people, calling to mind the way her family gathered for this special meal back home.

And now that Hurley has shared her own Taste of Home with her Rice family, she’s eager to try other students’ recipes.

“So far I’ve really enjoyed experiencing the vast array of cultures that we have at Rice in the form of food,” Hurley said. “It’s so cool to learn about other people and connect through common bonds like food.”