College is EXPENSIVE. Food is ALSO expensive. Food that's cheap and relatively nutritious and can feed you for a while can be difficult to come by, especially in LA where meat and fresh produce prices are ridiculously high. It's also hard to find time to cook, when you're always on the go or perpetually exhausted.
My solution is basically to make something on the weekend that will last me the entire week, so with the new school year year upon us, and to help all you college students or experimental foodies out there, here are a few recipes I've sort of "invented" over the course of the last year, which Do Not Taste Bad At All.
1. Spaghetti Con Vegetales
This is what it says on the tin, pretty much; you stick some sauce in a pot, get out your veggies of assorted types, chop them up into pieces large or small, depending on your preference, and stir them in! This is a good way to make something that lasts, tastes good, and contains a lot of good vitamins and minerals. You can add meat too, if you have it, and I recommend sticking some onions in your sauce and sprinkling in a little bit of garlic powder (not salt; the tomato sauce is salty enough, and you don't want to over-sodium yourself).
You can boil the sauce in a pot on the stove, of course, but I usually prefer to just make it in the crockpot, set to low, which frees you to enjoy your day, and lowers the risk of burning or slopping sauce over the side. Then, once you're satisfied with your sauce, you can boil spaghetti in a pot on the stove. I usually set it to high and watch it like a hawk, stirring intermittently to make sure that the noodles don't burn. They say you'll know it's about ready if you can throw it on the wall and it sticks, but that's a rough estimate, and I find nothing but a texture/taste-test can really cue you in.
Once your noodles are done you slap them on a plate and dump some sauce on, and there you go, dinner for the night, after which you can either wrap the sauce and spaghetti separately, or stick them in the same pot to conserve space, depending on your preference.
2. Stir-crazed stir-fry
Stir-fry is great because you can basically just use whatever's in your fridge, fry it with soy sauce, and there you go, there's your food, all nice and edible. I usually use at least one meat and then tons of vegetables--it even works with bologna and hot dogs, if you're hard-up for meat, but beef or chicken taste best, in my humble opinion.
When you're not the type of person who just has veggie leftovers, you can buy packs of frozen or canned vegetables at the store and chop those up. Again, as always, I recommend throwing in some freshly-chopped onions, but that's just me.
Stir-fries are called stir-fries because once you stick those bad-boys on a pan you crank up the heat and stir constantly to avoid burning it while it fries in the sauce you've chosen--my preference is soy, but you can fry it in other things too, probably, it's your food and I encourage you to experiment.
While you're frying these things, I recommend making rice, in a rice cooker if you've got one, and if not minute rice will do fine. Once it's finished, you dump some rice in a bowl, add fried meat and vegetables, and either douse it in your seasoning of choice, or just eat it like that.
This isn't really my recipe, I learned the basics from my brother and then just got loosey-goosey with it (because rules are for SUCKERS), but it's delicious and will feed you for at least a week if you make enough. I personally never get tired of it, and I think every college student should know how to go about using up those random odds and ends cluttering up their kitchen. As I said, I've used bologna, I've used hot dogs, I've used olives and ground turkey and peppers and celery and corn; stir-fry doesn't have limits. It's as boundless as the skies.
3. Irish Rice
Speaking of random odds and ends cluttering up your kitchen, that's basically what this entire list is. Irish Rice is another crockpot invention (not to be confused with a crackpot invention--though depending on your personal sense of taste, you may consider it that, too), inspired by spanish rice, and works best if you have a rice cooker. Again, though, minute rice works just fine.
You start off by taking your tomato sauce, dumping it in your crockpot, and adding vegetables, as thinly chopped as possible. If you have meat, all the better, but if not, oh well. Then you slap that sucker on, cook it all day, make yourself some rice, and pour it on top.
The only ingredients that are necessary to make it Irish rice are the rice, the tomato sauce (though I guess if you wanted you could swap it out for something else), and the thinly-sliced potatoes sprinkled therein.
4. Sloppy Mags
So this one actually has a story attached--a dumb story, but a story. I was tooling around at the local CVS a while back, and caught sight of a can of Sloppy Joe mix. I, stupidly, assumed it came with the meat inside, so I purchased the can and went on my merry way. At the end of second semester, I needed to get rid of all my excess food stuffs, so whilst questing for edibles one day I got this can out and said to myself, "Oh, I can make sloppy Joes!"
Then I looked at the instructions, and realized it expected you to buy your own hamburger. I'm wasn't looking to purchase new things when I still had yet to utilize the old things, so I said "screw it" and did what I always do--haphazardly, consulting only my own internal reasoning, tossed the sauce in a microwave-safe bowl, poured in a bunch of frozen vegetables, and popped it in the microwave, stirring every two minutes, for probably around ten minutes--if your vegetables aren't frozen it won't take that long, so be sure to use your own judgment. Or you could use the stove or whatever.
I then took some mozarella cheese I had in the fridge and sprinkled it into the hot sauce, stirring, then buttered a piece of bread, ladled some of the sauce out onto the bread, and put another slice of bread on top, eating the mess with a fork.
It's actually pretty good, and the one can lasted about a business week. Since I don't know what else to call this vegetarian-friendly alternative to Sloppy Joes, I figured I might as well name them after myself, so unless a better name comes along, Sloppy Mags they will remain.
So there you are, friends, some relatively quick and pretty damn easy meals for students on the go! Best of luck to new students, and I hope everyone has a great school year!
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