Back to School: Cooking Conundrum

After a relaxing winter break filled with mom making delicious home cooked meals, fending for yourself in the kitchen back at school can be a challenge.  After a hectic day of classes and meetings, you stumble into your apartment, starving, and have no idea what to make.  But instead of falling into a habit of unhealthy takeout, try some easy and cheap recipes.  Check out these sites for culinary inspiration: 
 
www.poorgirleatswell.com

Poor Girl Eats Well shows you “how to eat ridiculously well on a miniscule budget.”  The site is loaded with recipes, from lentil and sweet pepper tacos to chicken farfalle with mushrooms and chives.  Each recipe includes the average price per serving, and they’re all impressively cheap—$1.25 for creamy navy bean soup with chicken and veggies and only 90 cents for tuna, veggie and couscous salad.  Pictures accompanying the posts are enough to make you drool.  PGEW also includes a section called the $25 shopping cart.  It shows how blogger Kimberly spends just about $25 on groceries that last 10-14 days.  After a breakdown of her purchases and their prices, she even lists a few recipes that could be made with just those items if you had absolutely nothing else at home.  The recipes stress creative and sometimes-unusual groupings of ingredients so enter the site with an open mind and prepare to be surprised by tasty combinations.
 
www.smittenkitchen.com

Smitten Kitchen describes itself as displaying “fearless cooking from a tiny kitchen in New York.”  Pretty relatable.  Chef Deb promises “no excessively fussy food and/or pretentious ingredients.”  The site is great if you have a specific fruit or vegetable that you want to use (like that asparagus you bought at Wegman’s and have no idea how to cook).  After you enter the recipe section of the site, you simply click “asparagus” and you’ll be directed to a list of recipes that include asparagus, like ribboned asparagus salad with lemon.  Deb posts pictures throughout the cooking process, so you can see how exactly she shaves off thin asparagus ribbons. 
 
www.101cookbooks.com

101 Cookbooks is a recipe journal that focuses mainly on natural ingredients.  The site is broken down by categories like season, ingredient, vegan, low carb, gluten-free, main course, high protein, dessert–the list goes on and on.  One of the greatest parts of the site is the list of 172 quick recipes.  Green olive gnocchi, for example, takes just 20 minutes to make, and the tortilla salad will only take you five.
 
Bon appétit!