College Cooking: Feed yourself and your Friends by Megan & Jill Carle

 If you’re sick of standing in lines in the cafeteria or spending your extra cash on greasy pizza and mediocre Chinese takeout, it’s time you head to the grocery store and break out your cooking utensils. College Cooking: Feed yourself and your Friends offers over ninety cheap and tasty recipes that are simple to make, even for the most culinarily-inept of college students. 

Written by college undergraduate sisters Megan and Jill Carle, College Cooking is not your run of the mill cookbook that simply lists recipe after recipe. Instead, it is an engaging and comprehensive tool for people cooking in their own kitchen for the first time, without the luxury of a well-stocked refrigerator and pantry at their fingertips. 

The book opens with five and a half pages of cooking basics, which include important information about common cooking ingredients, details useful cooking techniques, lists necessary tools you’ll need in the kitchen, and even provides a checklist of the cooking and baking ingredients that every kitchen should keep in stock. The Carle sisters take the guesswork out of setting up a working kitchen, making cooking meals a less intimidating and more exciting enterprise.

Instead of organizing the recipes by meal-type, the Carle sisters cleverly categorize the recipes into sections that are more relevant to college students. For example, “survival cooking” includes the simplest of recipes that anyone who “can open a can, use a knife, and boil water” can make. “Impressing your date” includes smaller, more gourmet recipes that are sure to make any boyfriend or girlfriend swoon. For people looking to save some money, “cheap eats” contains recipes that feed at least four people for the cost of just one fast food meal. 

My friends and I tested out the macaroni and cheese with broccoli recipe, and for only seven dollars, we ate until we were stuffed and still had at least four or five meals worth of leftovers. And as Megan Carle promised in the introduction to the recipe, now that we’ve tasted how creamy and cheesy homemade macaroni is, “[we’ll] never go back to that boxed stuff!”

Other highlights of the cookbook include themed party menus, like toga party and ‘80s party, which each feature not only five or six affordable recipes but also useful ideas for making the party a success. “Food trivia” and healthy cooking tips on almost every page are attention-grabbers and make the cooking experience more enjoyable and interesting.

Although College Cooking makes for a great introductory cookbook for college students, it would be better geared toward students living in apartment-style dorms with full kitchens or students living off campus. Many undergraduate students living in dorms don’t have the space to store pots and pans, a blender, knives, and other cookware, not to mention a large enough refrigerator and pantry to keep essential ingredients like sugar, flour, eggs, and various seasonings in stock. 

However, for anybody living and cooking on their own for the first time, or for students willing to go out of their way every so often to enjoy a delicious, homemade meal, save some money, and even make some new friends in the kitchen, College Cooking is a handy and well written cookbook that will not disappoint.