Do something really and truly radical at college: Cook your own meals!
For the price of one fast-food “combo” meal, you can make three meals at home. Your mother probably has imparted this wisdom, but your raging hunger has probably prompted you to forget it. With a little bit of strategic planning and some super-basic skills, you can, however, eat much better for far less. Moreover, in the time you spend waiting in line at the burger stand, you can prepare your own food that actually tastes good without a ton of fat and sugar. With a little patience and practice, you even can put fruit and vegetables into your diet. Start with these five fundamentals…
• Work the freezer aisle—carefully– The freezer aisle is a dangerous place, because you find all your favorite home meals arrayed there for your cooking and dining pleasure. Only one problem: Like most things convenient, they cost. If, however, you shop carefully, you can max-out the munch for minimal cash. Start with a family sized lasagna, which will feed you three meals a day for a couple days, or more properly, will provide you several nights’ dinners. Other family sized entrees generally last several days and cost not very much. Then, become super edgy and add salad.
• Master “Crockpot 101”— Just a couple of super-easy crockpot recipes can carry you for weeks at a time. In half-an-hour on a Sunday afternoon, you can easily combine pinto beans, cooked ground turkey, and salsa style tomatoes in the crockpot, creating “burrito guts.” Add tortilla and grated cheese, and you’re good to go. Similarly, combine cooked ground turkey with prepared spaghetti sauce, add pasta, and behold at least two nights’ tasty meals. Seriously consider one other very healthy trick for these recipes: Add diced onions and celery, shredded spinach, and grated carrots into the mixes. The vegetables add only a little bit of flavor, but they add a ton of healthy vitamins and minerals.
• Eat breakfast— Strangely, a good breakfast is a time management technique. When you eat a good breakfast, you do not become so ravenously hungry you begin gnawing on your textbooks. A good breakfast buys you time to cook a decent meal after school. “Good breakfast” is a phrase which here means “balanced and nutritious,” because loading carbohydrates will just make you hungrier. The phrase most properly means yogurt, fruit, cereal—easy, healthy stuff that requires no preparation.
• “Top Ramen” is not a food group— “Just add water” is not a recipe. Although the simplest processed meals won’t get the job done, baked potatoes and “Hamburger Helper” will nourish when you properly accessorize them. For example, if you sauté diced onions, diced celery, and canned mushrooms, adding them to a regular batch of Hamburger Helper, you get all the nutrition you need, you stretch the recipe for more servings, and you cannot even taste the healthy stuff. Potatoes are generally very cheap for entire bags, so they’re a great staple, and they easily become nachos or pizza with the right toppings. Easier still, though, pour a can of beef-vegetable soup over a baked potato and watch these simple ingredients become a meal.
• Master the multiple meanings of “burger.” You can become proud owner of a dozen frozen hamburgers for fairly cheap prices at your neighborhood store. Of course, those can become tasty burgers, but if you put one on a grilled cheese, it becomes a patty melt, and if you add scrambled eggs and salsa, it becomes breakfast. Dice-up a patty and watch it become a taco. Allow imagination and appetite guide you into unexplored territory.
Allison Newman, a recent graduate of Arizona State University, suggests the ultra-radical alternative to cooking for yourself: “Work in a restaurant!” she urges. “Restaurant work has three great advantages for college students,” Newman explains. “It pays the best, and it lets you learn to cook by watching the guys in the kitchen. Most of all, though, you get a free employee meal every time you work.”
Photo credit: Spanish Cooking Workshop. musisches Gymnasium by Academia IF/flickr
(Guest Blog) Peter Harrington is a career counselor and content contributor for Top Online Colleges, a great source for tons of information on expanding your education, from top online colleges for nursing to School Counseling degrees.
Tagged: college, cooking, eat, food, make, students, university
