Hello there! Welcome to Her Campus Boise State’s first ever food series, the HC Frugal Foodie! Within the upcoming posts you will find a little bit of everything. We’ve got everything from college favorites with a twist (like Mac ’n’ Cheese and Ramen) to delectable desserts perfect for parties (cupcakes, cookies, pie…).
A little background on the creation of this series… Growing up, I used to find myself watching The Food Network nearly as often as Disney Channel, Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. I fell in love with the warm personalities of Paula Dean and Giada De Laurentiis, was drawn in by the passion for food presented by Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse and was fascinated by the close relationship between science and food that Alton Brown brought to light. One of my favorite shows was “Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee.” I almost never missed a show. I loved how she took things that we could find in our pantry regularly and transformed them; she showed me that you could make something delicious and different at an affordable cost and often without an insane amount of effort. Between the warm encouragement of the personalities on screen and the kitchen influences of my family members, I quickly developed a love for cooking. While some people are complete sticklers for following a recipe down to the last grain of salt, that was not how I was brought up. In my kitchen, if you thought something could be better, you found what that improvement was. My mother, notorious for not measuring much of anything, proved to be my biggest inspiration. She could take a mostly empty pantry and fridge and somehow transform the few ingredients we had into something amazing…all without even cracking a cook book or pulling out measuring utensils. So, I began experimenting. There were some attempts that crashed and burned, as there will be with any endeavor, but after a while I began to meet with more success than failure. With the rise of social media and Pinterest, I have had the luck of not only having family recipes and cook book recipes to access and make my own, but have also been able to find “pinspiration” by looking at what others have done and using their examples to expand my own horizons. I am incredibly excited to be able to share some of my favorite discoveries with all of you, and I hope to help provide inspiration to someone else the way that I have been inspired by so many.