By Emmie Huynh and Jade Montenegro
Right after Dan and Mary Anne headed to bed, the Low and Slow crew began the student sleepover festivities! After some playful cookie throwing fights and a failed attempt to make ice cream (the group is still unsure where the ice cream leftovers remain … ) we abandoned our ideas to cook anything in the kitchen and made our way over to the String Ensemble room, where we camped out for the majority of the night. Many of us stayed up past our regular nightly bedtimes, but the sleep deprivation was well worth it. We brought blankets and sleeping bags with us to the room to get cozy and stay warm. Then, we created a talking circle surrounding Zev’s sleeping quarters, and started off the night with lots of laughter playing Truth or Dare. The night concluded with us watching the first 15 minutes of Crazy Rich Asians on the TV, before all prior promises of pulling a group all-nighter were broken, and the group went to bed. Although some of us chose to sleep on plastic folding tables as a mattress and others of us used table cloths as a blanket, our rest was much needed and appreciated for our long day to come feeding lots of faculty and staff in the morning.
Bright and early at 7:30 a.m., after some reluctance to get up, we all awoke from our slumber and got ready to go to the Cubby Hole for a delicious breakfast. The meal fulfilled a much-needed boost for the group, as a long day of food prep and fun awaited.
Upon our arrival back at our Van Meter homebase, we began to prepare for the annual Low and Slow feast open to faculty and staff that we were hosting during lunch. Chloe and Grace made sauce to put on the pulled pork while Jade, Emmie, Devin, and Graham created homemade pipe cleaner flowers and paper garlands to decorate the room. Mary Anne prepped leftover iced hibiscus tea and sweet tea for our guests to drink. After that, the group got a head start on washing dishes and cleaning up, and even called some friends from the Japan IL to catch up and see what they were doing.
We then began preparing Dan’s famous biscuits with premade dough from the day before, and all took turns mixing buttermilk with the flour and grated butter mixture. Dan showed us how to laminate biscuit dough, a specific process of splitting and stacking lots of layers of dough. Lastly, we used cylinder biscuit cutters to make perfectly round biscuits that were ready to bake in the oven.
After smoking the pork for 18 hours straight, we carefully took our pork butt babies out of the smoker and into the kitchen to be shredded. We all took turns shredding the meat while Zev and Allan debated what the proper name of the four-pronged shredding tool we were using was (the common name seems to be “turkey fork.”) The meat smelled so delicious that some of us even snuck a couple of pre-feast pork bites while Dan wasn’t watching …
By 12 p.m., guests began trickling into Van Meter Hall, excited to taste the feast we had been crafting for the past couple days. The faculty quickly dug into the fruits of our hard work and we were overjoyed to see the smiling faces of our community.
After watching others have their fill of BBQ, Dan said the long awaited words — it was our turn to eat. The aroma of BBQ sauce and butter had haunted us for the last 48 hours, and we had trained for this moment. From countless hours of digging holes to perfecting the craft of chopping vegetables, our final feast together had come.
The pulled pork was married perfectly to the homemade sauce. Mountains of mac and cheese scattered across the plates, complemented by the flavor of collard greens. And, the group was ecstatic for the return of the tender ribs we had cooked earlier in the week. Dan’s biscuits did not disappoint either; they were deliciously paired with Chloe’s homemade apple butter and Zev’s honey (provided by his hardworking and talented bees).
At the student table, we played a couple rounds of Photo Roulette, a game where we had to guess which photos were from the right person’s camera roll as fast as possible. Although everyone else played as a solo competitor, Emmie and Zev partnered together for the game and ended up winning most of the rounds.
After the feast was over, we began the sad cleanup process of packing up our Low and Slow headquarters in Van Meter Hall. We folded up tables, wiped down counters, triple washed Dan’s pot that wouldn’t stop smelling of collard greens, and watched Dan unclog the extremely backed up sink drain by plunging it with his bare hands.
With around an hour of free time to spare, the group was feeling nostalgic and decided to play a couple rounds of Among Us. While we all argued over who was suspicious, Grace, who was randomly chosen as the imposter almost every round, silently watched the group dispute over the wrong suspects and won almost every time.
Looking back on the day, we had a great sleepover, staying up until around 2:30 a.m. to hang out, and had an even better final Low and Slow IL meal!