Realms Beyond Recipies

[Kabuki]

As I am about to leave University I might as well share some of my discoveries... and with Sirian's post (which I wish I had before I got here) I don't need to say to much.

1. Fruits! The more the merrier. Depending on how close your nearest store is buy once or twice a week. Fruits definately fall into the 'not so cheap' variety, but with them you can drop your pop, chips and salsa and you will find yourself to be a much happier person. Apples and bananas have the advantage of making good sandwiches.

2. Curry. Check out chef2chef.net (or .com) for recipies (or e-mail me). If you put it in the fridge it will last a week, and actually tastes better the next day, excellent for batches and goes well with rice.

Basic curry:
- Dice Apples or Potatoes and put in a casserole with some butter or oil - on relatively low heat.
- Spice - salt, pepper, curry powder
- Add garlic and onions to taste
- Add vegetables as you chop them - I.e. as you finish chopping it up just toss it in. This is the easy fast and student way of doing it.
- Add your base food: Fish, chicken, beef, lamb or whatever. Cook until meat is done.
- If you have to add some water (not needed if you started with apples) if it doesn't seem to be getting the right consistency.
- If you want it milder add 250ml of plain yogurt and/or coconut milk.

3. Breakfast - Vary your weeks by the specials. Yogurt and cottage cheese (with some jam for flavour), cereal, sandwich, instant oatmeal...

4. Acquire the following skill/habit - Make food with whatever is in the fridge. My fiance has this skill and it is a life saver (at least financially). It takes some practice and often a bit of extra time, but it will save you a lot of wastage.

5. Use tofu as a meat substitute - It does take a while to figure out how to flavour the stuff, but it's cheap and nutritious.

6. Ask for cookbooks for your birthday and other appropriate present days, mothers and grandmothers are usually more than happy to provide these. Also next time you are home, raid the recipie stash.

7. Spagetti... like Sirian said it's fast and easy. The spagetti itself is max 30-40 minutes and the sauce depends on the amount of fresh stuff. There are alot of good sauces out there:

- Basic: Heat a can/glass of store bought sauce
- Intermediate: Heat a can/glass of store bought sauce, flavour to taste with spices (garlic and onions mostly) and add meat and vegetables (tofu, canned corn, ground beef, fish - whatever). If you make too much it either becomes soup or chili the next day.
- Advanced: From scratch - Can of diced tomatoes (pre-flavoured if you are lazy), vegetables to taste, spices and tofu or meat of choice. Also becomes soup or chili.
- Master: Clear, oil based sauces. Excellent for variation, but take a lot of practice (4-5 years will usually do the trick).

8. Cook with someone. It's way more fun, saves money, and allows you to do more stuff.

9. If you are not getting enough nutritional value (for example during exam time) make sure you have nutritional supplements. It wil lkeep your immune system up even when you are doing your best to crash it.

10. If price isn't too much of a concern look for a food delivery service. There may be a service that delivers groceries to your door, and that may allow you to order online (http://www.spud.ca is an example). Excellent time-saving and it forces you to plan your purchases. As a side benefit impulse buys go down so you may actually save money. Fish and meat you should buy seperately.

Enjoy!

[Kabuki]

And to add to this:

Just eat vegetables raw. They taste better and are more nutritious. Salads are great!

Basic tomato salad:

- Slice or dice two tomatoes (I prefer on the vine tomatoes, and if you eat them often enough you will notice a difference in flavour, or Roma tomatoes if they are properly ripe).
- Put on plate.
- Liberally pour olive oil over tomatoes.
- Sprinkle salt, pepper and basil (thyme and oregano will also work).
- Consume!

- mop up leftover tomatoes and oil with a piece of bread

Variations:
- Add diced cheese
- Add imitation crab
- Add spinach (fresh, and washed)
- Add lettuce

W.r.t. salads in general:

Use olive oil and vinegar as your dressing.

[Lissa]

Diet drinks are pretty much the worst possible things you can feed your body. Not only are they full of carbon dioxide (like all soda drinks), but they are full of artificial sweetner, which is far worse than sugar for your body. Instead, if you really like the fizzy drinks, try this. Go out and buy one of the big two litre bottles of juice (whichever one takes your fancy). Buy some cheap plain noname brand carbonated mineral water. Mix 50/50 for optimal taste. Varients: Squeeze a lime into a full glass of cold mineral water and have a nice homemade lemonade (that tastes pretty good too!

Better way of doing this is to get a hold of some dry ice. Take the juice and add in dry ice in small pieces (large pieces will just freeze the liquid around it and be of no help) while still in container. Reseal container and let sit a few hours. Come back and you have carbonated juice... :D Friend of mine did this when we were growing up with Koolaid and it was pretty good... B)

[Doc]

For poor college students, or anybody for that matter, my best advice, and advice that I took for my self, is to invest in a good crock pot.

You can fix entire meals in a crock pot. Healthy delicious meals that take little to no effort.

Go out and buy the cheapest chunk of roast you can find. Doesn't matter what. The fattier the meat the better. Nice and marbled. Slice a few carrots, potatoes, onions, some peppers, etc, into the bottom of the crock pot. Add a cup or two of water. Add roast. Add a few tablespoons of corn starch mixed with milk or water beforehand to avoid clumps. Add your fave seasonings. Set pot to low. Go away. That evening you will come back to lovely pot roast. YUM. Complete with veggies and gravy, all the fixings. Good stuff. It's better if you bown and sear the meat before hand in a cast iron skillet, but, not required.

Do the same as above except with a whole chicken. Or chicken parts. What ever you can get. Just not chicken nuggets. Might need to pull out a few bones, but nothing beats chicken stew served over a nice hot bowl of rice. Mmmmm.

Drop a slab of bacon into the bottom of the crock pot. Let it cook in the crock pot for a while over high heat, sweating out a bit of fatty grease. Toss in a chopped onion. Add seasonings. Add pinto beans, the dry kind, in a bag. Add water to fill pot to desired levels. Go away. When you get back, delicious beans. Serve with cornbread if you can.

Toss in el cheapo stew meat. Add veggies. Add water and seasons. Many grocers sell the veggies and the meat all in one package in the meat section. Come home to beef stew. Once again, serve over rice.

One word, chili. There are tons of chili ideas out on the net for crock pots, ranging from vego chili to super hot butthole burning chili. Find something you like.

To recoup the cost of the meal, offer to sell hot steaming bowls to dorm mates or friends.

What Got In Pot?! Whatchallgot Stew. Have everybody bring something to throw in the pot, then have dinner together later. Can lead to... Interesting stuff. And it's social fun!

[Drasca]

This is going to take a while to assimilate... but any suggestions on the corn? I still want to eat it.

[Kabuki]

I don't know myself, but check out http://www.chef2chef.com they are bound to have something, and if they don't have, just sign up for the board there and ask.

[Griselda]

I've never frozen corn, but what I do with fresh corn on the cob is just shuck it and then boil it until it gets a bit softer. Add butter, and eat.

It's also great on the grill. Leave the husks on, and grill until it's getting pretty dark on the outside. Then, once again, just shuck, butter, and eat.

I hardly ever do anything fancy with corn, because it's just so good as it is. Sometimes I puree it with beans and salsa to make a dip, but that's about it.

-Griselda

[Griselda]

There's nothing about this recipe that's good for you, but it sure does taste good. Luckily, it's rich enough that I don't really want to eat a whole lot at a time- best made when you're expecting several friends or relatives. It also needs to be refigerated overnight, so plan ahead.

Preheat overn to 350.

Melt 1/4 cup of butter and cool to lukewarm. Meanwhile, combine 1 cup of unsalted roasted peanuts, 1 cup of graham cracker crumbs, and 1/3 cup brown sugar in a food processor (I think a blender would work, but I've never tried it that way). Chop it until the peanuts are just about indistinguishable from the graham cracker crumbs. Add the butter, and process again until just mixed.

Press into a cake pan. I use a 10" springform pan, but if you don't have one, any 9 or 10 inch cake pan would work, although the deeper the pan the better. Bake for 10 minutes and then cool completely.

In a mixing bowl, combine 1 pound cream cheese (at room temperature or close to it) and 2 cups chunky peanut butter (apparently the hydrogenated kind works best, because the nice fresh stuff doesn't blend with the other ingredients). Mix well. Beat in 2 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla, and continue to mix thoroughly.

In another bowl, beat 1 cup of heavy (whipping) cream until it forms stiff peaks. Beat cream into the peanut butter mixture, and spoon into the cooled crust. Cover with foil, and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, make the glaze. In a saucepan over medium heat, add 3/4 cup heavy cream. When it starts to simmer, reduce heat to low. Add 8 oz. bittersweet (dark) chocolate, and whisk about one minute, or until smooth. Remove the glaze from the heat, and let it stand about 10 minutes or so. Then, pour it over the top of the cheesecake (which should still be in the pan, so the glaze will cover the top but not the sides. If you have any peanuts left over, you could garnish the top with them.

Re-cover with foil, and refrigerate until the glaze hardens, about 2 hours.

Enjoy! :chef:

-Griselda

[Sirian]

Drasca (and other bachelors),

What Doc said, except you can also use a small electric slow cooker. If you can do a toaster, you can do a slow cooker. A small one. Barely fits a small cornish game hen, wouldn't dream of doing a turkey, but does everything Doc said on a slightly smaller scale and it works without a stove or much anything else, plus is light and portable. Takes all day to cook anything, though, so takes planning.

Incredibly, I usually find this more work than the large batch-type food I mentioned earlier, because no matter what you cook in it, cleanup will be a mess. I don't do so well on cleanup. That was why I suggested sandwiches (almost no cleanup at all) and large batchmaking recipes, because you cleanup once and then don't have to bother much (wash a plate and a fork) the rest of the week. Crock pots or slow cooker, you're cleaning up every night. Still a good option, though. Less up front work and makes great food. You'll have to decide what fits best for you. Perhaps a combination.


- Sirian

[Ozymandous]

You must have some weird crockpots up there Sirian, becasue the one I own is super easy to clean. Consists of three items: Ceramic 'pot', the plastic cover lid and the spoon I stirred and served the food with. I can wash all three of them in about 5 minutes, if that.

Also... You don't need a stove with a crockpot, just an electrical outlet. This isn't a pressure cooker here, just a bigger version of that electric slow cooker you mention, one that will hold much more stuff it seems.