I’ve always been intrigued by cooking, but it’s definitely been a passion I’ve picked up over the past couple of years. I started to really get into cooking when I wanted to change my eating habits. When I was in high school, there weren’t many healthy options for lunch because nearly all of the food places in the vicinity were fast food restaurants. When I decided to put the time and energy into my meals, I could eat healthier and prep meals for the week. That period definitely drove me to continue this passion.
Now, I’m in college and live in a college dorm. As most people know, an average college dorm doesn’t have a fully stocked kitchen with all of the ingredients you could ever need to make an adequate meal. This results in finding easy alternatives that could easily be achieved with any living situation.
To find these easy alternatives, I tend to turn to Tasty from Buzzfeed. Tasty has a YouTube channel that provides endless satisfying cooking videos. Their tutorials appear to be so simple and do-able by anybody. One theme they have on their channel are dorm-friendly meals you can make in the microwave. From these videos, I discovered their iconic “mug mac-and-cheese.”
Now let me tell you, when I thought this would be an easy, tasty meal—I was sadly mistaken. When I decided I wanted to make this, I was so pumped. I had my mug ready to go, along with all of the necessary ingredients. The only thing I was missing was a measuring cup, but I like to think I’m fairly decent at eye-balling amounts. Once I started the mug masterpiece, it quickly went downhill. My noodles weren’t cooking, my milk was overflowing and it just tasted awful. Every step I tried to take to help my situation ended up making it worse in some way. My goodness, was this a disaster. They make it look so easy and delicious in the tutorial!
Perhaps it’s a trial-and-error, practice makes perfect situation. Whatever it is, I can at least say I gave it a shot. From now on, I’ll just stick to the meals I know I can do best with my current kitchen situation.