Megan Carle - College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends [A Cookbook]

Copyright 2007 by Megan and Jill Carle
Photography copyright 2007 by Jessica Boone

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carle, Megan.
College cooking : feed yourself and your friends / by Megan and Jill Carle.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Cookery. I. Carle, Jill. II. Title.
TX652.C3277 2007
641.5dc22
2006030526

eISBN: 978-1-60774-121-3

v3.1

As always, there are people that deserve our undying gratitude for their continued help and support.

To Lorena Jones, Lily Binns, and Brie Mazurek of Ten Speed Press: Thanks for believing in a couple of kids and keeping us on track, which is no small feat.

To Jessica Boone: Its amazing that youre able to take fabulous photos even with us singing every musical known to man at the top of our lungs. Thats talent.

To Yvonne Govea: You set a new standard in friendship. You showed up to help every day, knowing you were going to be subjected to the dreaded musicals. We promise we will never again play The Sound of Music when you are around.

To our ace team of taste testers, Jim Govea, Chris and Diane Worsley, Amy, Todd and Connor Tennison, Mark and April Barry, and Richard Rhoades: You guys showed up every day for weeks on end to be our guinea pigs. Your honest comments and critiques helped us fine-tune these recipes. This book is better because of all of you.

To Mom and Dad, last on the list, but first in our hearts: Thanks for always supporting us and not complaining too much when we stuck you with all of the dishes. Wed like to tell you we promise never to do that again, but we probably will.

Megan and Jill
M & J

I learned the hard way that cooking in your first apartment is not the same as cooking at Moms house. When I left for college, I had grandiose ideas of the meals I would prepare. After all, I could cook and had written two cookbooks to prove it. This would be a piece of cake. I was moving into a furnished two-bedroom dorm apartment with a kitchen, a living room, and, oh yeah, three roommates I had never met. I was loaded down with all the food staples necessary to amaze my new friends with my culinary skills. Well it didnt quite work out that way. I just wanted to make chocolate chip cookies, something I had done at least a hundred times before, but I got stymied on the first step: put the butter in a bowl. After looking through all four cabinets in the worlds smallest kitchen, I soon realized that the universitys idea of furnished did not include mixing bowls. But hey, Im adaptable, so I put the butter in the banged-up stockpot with the peeling nonstick coating. Next came mixing in the sugaroops, no mixer. It kind of went downhill from there. The final straw was realizing there were no baking sheets. Not that it mattered because the oven was too small to fit a normal baking sheet anyway. I ended up baking the cookies six at a time in a 9 by 13-inch pan.

Despite all the problems, my new roommates loved the cookies and were thrilled that I could cook. (None of them had progressed past ramen noodles and frozen dinners.) After a trip to the local discount store to supplement the not-so-furnished kitchen, I was good to go. I began cooking meals every night for the four of us, and I soon learned that an ancillary benefit to cooking was getting to meet a lot of people. Im not sure if it was word of mouth or the food aromas wafting through the air, but other people in my dorm seemed to stop by to visit whenever I was cooking. It didnt take long before friends were offering to buy ingredients if I would turn them into real food. As hard as it may be for our parents to believe, even college students get sick of fast food.

After watching so many of our friends stumble around the kitchen, Jill and I decided that we needed to write a book specifically geared for college students. In other words, very little equipment, very little cooking experience, and very little money. (We are particularly well versed in very little money.) The recipes included in this book are dishes we adapted to fit our college lifestyle in different ways. Some of them are things that we make just because the leftovers taste so good and theyll make meals for several days. Some are low in calories to help balance out those over-indulged days. Some go easy on the budget, and others are like real home-cooked meals.

We also had to make some changes to the ingredients. The first time you have to walk home from the grocery store and trudge up several flights of stairs with all your food, youll understand. Food is heavy. Some things we couldnt do anything about, but things on our list like chicken stock soon became dried chicken bouillon. One container of dried bouillon weighs a few ounces, but the equivalent amount of chicken stock weighs over twelve pounds. (Okay, so the fact that dried bouillon also costs about one-tenth what stock does might also have something to do with it.) We also started using seasoning blends so we wouldnt have to buy so many different spices. The point is, you might find that some of the ingredients in these recipes are different from what youd expect, but weve chosen everything for a reason and the finished dishes still taste great.

Weve included lots of helpful information to make the transition to your own kitchen a little smoother. There are lists of equipment and basic food items along with a short cooking class to help you avoid some common mistakes. There are tips throughout the book to help you save a little money, adjust recipes for vegetarians, and cut out unnecessary calories. And we couldnt resist adding a smattering of trivia just for fun.

If youve never cooked before, start with the Survival Cooking recipes and work your way up from there. In no time at all, youll be able to handle the Impressing Your Date recipes. If you have messed around in the kitchen before, just dive in, therere lots of terrific dishes to choose from.

Megan

Here are some basics about ingredients and cooking that you should know before starting in on the recipes. We dont explain this stuff throughout the book because it would be incredibly redundant and take up a lot of space, so youll probably want to refer back here often.

Bouillon: We use dried bouillon instead of canned stock because its cheaper and a lot lighter to carry home from the store. We buy the granules because it dissolves faster, but the cubes are fine too. Each cube is equivalent to 1 teaspoon of the granules. Just make sure you cook the cubes enough for them to completely dissolve.