Blue on Grease

By Timothy Vick

It was not until the glory days in the dusk of the 1970s that we got around to trying the obvious, although in self defense we must add that it was not until then that we had the talent available to do it.

In the fall of 1979 Fred Seymour '80 was a senior, on the home stretch of his geology major here at Carleton. He also had achieved the rank of cook at Dino's Restaurant on Water Street just around the corner from the Second Street bridge over the Cannon River. Many of you will remember Dino's as the place that served gigantic hamburgers, milkshakes and onion rings for something like two decades, although now it has been demolished to make way for a fancy pedestrian bridge over the river. Dino's was where the police hung out when things were dull; there always seemed to be at least one squad car parked in front of it.

It was a matter of course, then, that we would someday think of having a Dino's dinner on a field trip, and the lucky unsuspecting diners turned out to be those who went on the 1979 departmental fall trip to Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Kim Jones '80 was in charge of the supper cooks for the trip, but even culinary panache of her caliber (she made wonderful baked beans, Texas style, and then belittled her accomplishment) was shoved aside to make way for the assault of fried brutality that was Dino's Dinner.

There was no secret to Dino's hamburgers and milkshakes, bulk was everything. But the onion rings, they were different. They were not only bulky (roughly the size of a Quality Bakery doughnut, which Kim also excelled at making), but they were made according to an ancient secret recipe known only to the cooks at Dino's. And now, to us.

The secret: the onion rings must be deep fried only after having been dipped in pancake batter which had sat in the back of the refrigerator for at least a day. Aha! This we could do. So it came to be that we assembled all the ingredients for the dinner and made up a big pot of pancake batter ahead of time.

The ingredients for the dinner were considerable even by Dino's standards. For 34 students, four faculty and one technical director we packed 40 large sesame seed buns; 13 pounds of bulk hamburger; 30 giant onions; 10 heads of lettuce; 80 slices of cheese; 15 tomatoes; a half gallon of pickles; 15 oz. of Miracle Whip; 2 bottles of ketchup (was that enough?); 10 oz. of mustard; 6 lbs. of pancake mix; 20 lbs. of frozen French fries; ice cream, malt and flavored syrups that were bought enroute; milk and a blender, all bound together with the help of (hold your gut) 4 gallons of frying oil.

To handle the aftermath of this corporate gluttony Jean Buchanan '80 was in charge of KP and Glenn (Greilich) Lee '80 masterminded the trash collection.

Well, it was a powerful success. At least, I remembered being more than adequately sated by the meal. There was but one minor fly in the ointment and it had to do with the meal's centerpiece, the fried onion rings.

We were a little too economical for our own good. It happened that the morning we made up the pancake batter we had had Ed Buchwald's blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Noticing there was some pancake batter left from breakfast and not wanting to either waste the extra batter or make an extra dirty pot, Fred and I lost little time in deciding to just make the new batter for the onion rings in the same pot as the breakfast batter had been made in. It seemed fine until dinnertime when we had turned out a large number of onion rings from the fryer and launched into eating them.

The leftover blueberry pancake batter colored all of the onion rings blue. If there's anything that will turn your stomach more revoltingly than a huge fat greasy onion ring, it's a huge fat greasy blueberry onion ring!