12 thoughts on “Cooking In College”

  1. This article shocked me. Looks like things are even worse than when I was in college – and they were bad then.

    Cooking? No more essential that breathing IMHO. And no less. No way in heck could I have afforded the abysmal campus food, or eating fast food all the time like many of my friends did (Their staple, pizza, was expensive as heck). They were broke all the time, and couldn’t seem to figure out why.
    I soon found out that a microwave alone wasn’t cutting it, so I went down to the thrift store (where I also got my few bits of furniture) and bought a toaster oven. Cost me $1. So did a recipe book called something like cooking on a budget.

  2. I know words are important, but fresh(wo)man? Really?

    Is this a man or woman getting fresh? because freshman has a perfectly understandable gender neutral meaning.

    1. I was banned for a month from a Star Trek forum for using the word “co-ed”. Most of the idiots assumed it was sexist, while a few others didn’t even know it referred to a female undergraduate (as a noun. As an adjective it means mixed-sexes).

      1. Lord, most of the fans are the most progressive, politically correct, angry, bitter people I’ve ever run across, which is why I started posting there when an embattled conservative I knew asked for help in some Iraq War thread back in 2005. It was the richest field of rampant, angry stupidity I had ever seen, and I’d frequented DKos and IndyMedia! There are virtually no conservatives or libertarians allowed, as they get perma-banned really quickly. I’m pretty sure I set a record by surviving the mods for 9 years, but finally got banned for 10 infractions in a place where they hand them out like candy to anyone who seems remotely right-of-center.

        A lot of dictatorial progressives have flooded and taken over science fiction fandom in the past decade, and I think Star Trek has quite a bit of the responsibility for that. The progressive are among the few who can;t see the idiotic nonsense of the idea that we can do without money, and that people will die in mines for personal growth. The plot holes we try to overlook made sense to them! So they have a vision, not that much different than ISIS, but far more strictly enforced, and in the future people will die in mining colonies for personal fulfillment, not wages. The UMWA would just strangle them all and leave their bodies hanging in trees.

  3. That is the issue with so many today…Some of the women who work for me (in their LATE 20’s) never learned how to cook, or plan a meal, or shop frugally. Those that can cook seldom venture beyond “Hamburger Helper”
    Many cannot cook at all, and wonder why their food budget is too high.

    Sadly, not many of them want to learn. Too easy to get a handout.

  4. In Boy Scouts, I used to cook for the patrol on camp outs. I did marinated kabobs with steak and vegetables for dinner, and German pancakes (a cinnamon crepe) with bacon for breakfast. People used to want to join my patrol for the food. I was 10 at the time…

  5. My dad was in the Navy for 30 years and my mom was an RN, so all of us kids (I was 5th out of 6) had to know how to cook. And when my mom did have a schedule that allowed her to be home for dinner, I would often sit on a stool next to the stove and talk with her as she fixed dinner. When my dad retired at age 46 (he had enlisted at age 17), he took over most of the cooking chores so that Mom wouldn’t have to worry at all. So when I left for college a few years later (1971), I had the basics of cooking pretty much down.

    That freshman year of college, there was an apartment of girls where I would visit regularly, since I had become friends with a few of the girls living there. One evening, one of the other girls was fixing dinner for the apartment (it had a full kitchen); she was going to make spaghetti, but seemed a bit at a loss. So I helped her through the whole process, having watched my mom fix it many, many times. Turned out great. Got strange new looks of respect from all the girls in the apartment. It was cool.

  6. Allow me to reveal to you a secret for cooking for one (or two) quickly and efficiently. Buy your meat in bulk and while you’re out pick up a 300 pack of resealable bags. When you get home, cut up the meat (if needed) and weigh out on your kitchen scales (you have kitchen scales, right?) an appropriate amount for each meal and bag it. Now the secret: flatten the bags. Squeeze all the air out of them and seal them, then stack them like playing cards into your freezer. When dinner time rolls around, fill the sink with water, extract a single bag of your choice from the freezer and place it into the sink. Put something heavy on it if it floats a little. Start the preparation of the meal and in 10 minutes the meat will be defrosted and ready to cook.

    I used to cook up big batches and freeze the cooked meal, but since discovering flat packed meat freezing I much prefer cooking a meal fresh each night.

  7. Cooking wasn’t allowed in our dorms. Supposedly because of the dangers of the heating elements, but more likely as an excuse to force people to meal plans. Alas, we learned cleaver ways to hide certains things.

    I haven’t seen my kids cook often, but when they do, they create good dishes. I’m not worried about them.

    1. “Cooking wasn’t allowed in our dorms.”

      This.

      Hot plates, rice cookers, and anything else with a heating element was strictly forbidden in our dorms. We could have a refrigerator and a microwave, and that was it. Halogen lamps weren’t banned yet, but they were just starting to light colleges on fire during that time, too.

      Each of the two dorm buildings (5 and 6 stories, respectively) had a single common room with an oven that looked like it was installed when the buildings were built in the 50s (and last cleaned the year after they were installed). I think that half of the range elements were broken, too. I think they only ever got used when some poor soul tried their hand at baking cookies (which almost always ended badly due to the poor thermostat control in the oven).

      College was also the time when I learned to just go to the local laundromat if I wanted access to decent laundry facilities without overcrowding (who puts only 4 washers and 4 dryers in a 6-floor dormitory?!?). The newer dorms built after I left are all suites with a common full kitchen in each unit, which alleviates a good portion of this concern, and I think they put laundry facilities on each floor of the buildings, too.

      My last year in college I lived off-campus with a large mammal friend who loved to cook. I’m sure I probably over-ate while living with him, but I never went hungry, and weekends we had near-gourmet meals. I’m too apathetic to cook that way now, despite my knowledge that I need more protein and fewer carbs in my diet. I think I actually had more counter space in my dorm than I have in my current house, which doesn’t help matters at all.

  8. I’ve been coming up with a few ideas of my own about economical, quick cooking out of necessity, recently. One I’ve come up with is remarkably simple.

    Beans and peas (the dried kind) are good protein and nutrition sources but suffer from long preparation time as an issue, largely because of long soaking time in most cases. I’ve got around the latter in a very simple way; soak the beans for as long as necessary (for some of the tougher ones it’s 24 hours or more), drain them after a rinse (to get rid of the fart-inducing exotic sugars in the skins) and pop the soaked beans in the freezer. I usually keep 3 or 4 batches, of different kinds of beans, in the freezer.

    Meal planning gets a lot simpler that way.

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