Coming from someone like me, who has no idea how to cook, I know how frustrating it can be to live on your own and try to plan out your meals everyday. Hopefully this article can help you to come up with some new and easy ideas for your college kitchen.
1. Take advantage of your Crock-Pot
You can make so many different things using a Crock-Pot. Dips, soup, lasagna, chicken…the possibilities are endless. If you decide to buy one for your kitchen, you’ll definitely get a lot of use out of it.
2. Buy a George Forman grill
You can load up and keep chicken breast and burgers in the freezer for when you want to defrost it and make something delicious. Having a portable grill in your kitchen allows you to get the taste of grilled food at anytime of the year. It can also be used as a panini press to make really good grilled cheese sandwiches, and speaking from experience, the cheese melts to gooey perfection.
3. Frozen meals
Your freezer should be your best friend. Although it’s not the healthiest thing in the world, on a night when you need a quick bite to eat, it’s good to have Stouffer’s meals and Lean Cuisines stocked up. Other things that I like to stock up on are chicken patties, French fries and DiGiorno pizzas for the weekend when I’m too lazy or broke to go out to eat. It’s also good to freeze bread and bagels, so you don’t have to worry about them going bad quickly.
4. Pinterest
If you look up an ingredient that you want to cook with, hundreds of recipes will come up. They’re all usually pretty easy and doable, especially for a girl like me, who can barely cook mac ‘n’ cheese.
5. Eggs, milk, butter, cheese and bread
The essentials. If you have these five things, you can get away with making at least a couple of basic meals.
6. Pasta Roni
It’s 99 cents a box, and it’s not half bad. Pasta Roni makes for a perfect side dish with a meal, or you can make a whole meal out of it by just eating the pasta. If you’re eating alone, you can easily eat half and save the other half for tomorrow’s dinner. I’m all about the leftovers.
7. BuzzFeed food
We all know about those food videos that pop up on Facebook and leave our mouths watering. It’s fun to actually try to make some of those recipes and see if they taste as good as they look.
8. Buy a cookbook
There are so many cookbooks out there with easy, cheap, doable recipes for young college students. Of course there are plenty of recipes online, but you can buy cookbooks that are specific to something that you want to learn how to make, and you can keep them forever.
9. Have your mom give you her recipes
Everyone has those few favorite meals that his or her mom makes. Have her write down the recipes for those meals so you can make them while you’re away to get a little taste of home.
10. Have your mom make your favorites
If you don’t want to make these meals yourself, have them made for you while you’re home. Bring them back to school with you in a Tupperware, stick them in your freezer, defrost them and enjoy them whenever you want.