Cooking Tips for a College Student From a College Student (FULL VERSION)

The time spent while trying to obtain a higher education can be a very liberating one. During this formative period of your life, you will be faced with many new experiences and challenges, none of which will be as informative or as enriching as that of living alone for the first time and discovering that eventually you will have to rely on yourself if you want to have any chance of surviving the coming years.

The first lesson you will learn is this: You need to eat. If you do not eat, you will get hungry and you will die. It’s a sad but true fact, and one that many students tend to forget about while studying and preparing for numerous assignments and tests. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you will either have access to cooking facilities or enough money and options to eat out three times a day, every day. If you’re like me, however, you’ll find yourself in a tiny little space with little resources and even less skills to whip up something delicious and nutritious for a reasonable price (come now, let’s be honest: mamak food is great, as are other fast-food options, but the thought of eating it for every meal makes my stomach recoil in horror).

While staring at the boxes and Styrofoam cups lining my desk, I remembered a trick my mother used: by adding mushroom soup to pasta, covering it with cheese and baking it in the oven for a bit, she managed to create a quick and simple meal that was both healthy and delicious. Widening my eyes at this revelation, I quickly tore open a pack of instant noodles and threw away the tiny package of MSG-laden goodness that it came with and used a packet of powdered soup. The resulting mix after I added hot water was both good and entirely different from what I had been eating for the past year that I rejoiced at the opportunities that I had uncovered before smacking myself in the head for not thinking of it sooner.

If you’ve been reading this far, you might start to wonder what else I was able to ‘cook’ in my room without the use of a stove or refrigerator, and surprisingly enough, quite a bit. When trying to cook in a dorm, you need three things:

·         Imagination

·         Patience

·         An electric kettle

It can be incredibly easy to create a meal with just a few ingredients. For instance, pasta can indeed be cooked using a kettle: all you have to do is add boiling water to the pasta, cover it and wait for about fifteen minutes. The sauce is even simpler: just open a jar and add as much as you need. They keep amazingly well, and a single jar can go a long way (the price may seem a bit steep, but it’s actually just as cheap when you consider how many meals you can make out of it).

Another option that I found fascinating was quail eggs. A carton of them is amazingly cheap, and as long as you eat them all in a couple of days you don’t have to worry about using a fridge to keep them cold (don’t worry, at least three of them are equivalent to one average chicken egg).  Cooking them is also simple, yet requires a lot of patience. One method would be to slow-cook them by placing them in a thermos filled with hot water and letting them sit there for a while (this, unfortunately, takes a long time and possibly changing the water at least once. I wouldn’t recommend relying on them for a quick meal). If you decide to open up a packet of noodles, you can crack a couple of eggs open and let them poach in the same hot water the noodles are in. 

Like I said, you need an incredible amount of patience and imagination when trying new ideas out. The same might be said about many aspects of life, too, but I digress. As of writing this article, I could barely find websites covering the fine art of cooking without a kitchen, so most of what I could think of was born of hunger and not enough energy to leave my room. In all honesty, living in a dorm room severely limits your food options, and ‘cooking’ with only an electric kettle and some imagination can only take you so far. But when your only options are eating out or relying on the limited variety of instant foods available in the market, you start to get a little creative and more willing to experiment. 

Written by Michelle Augustine Barbour

~American Flyer - Spring 2011 edition~