If you are just starting college or moving out of the dorms and thus phasing out of your meal plan, you have likely been thrown to the sharks when it comes to using your kitchen. Complaining about meals was something we took for granted until we were actually forced to prepare them for ourselves. It can be challenging at first, but here are a few tips that have helped me along the way:
- Never go to the grocery store on an empty stomach
-
Even before cooking, it’s important to make sure you have a plan to buy your ingredients. Shopping hungry is always a recipe for overbuying, which can really strain a broke college student’s budget and create a lot of waste later on. Make sure to get your groceries after a meal or a few snacks so that your cravings don’t cloud your better judgements.
- Always make a grocery list
-
Other than shortening the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, this is a great way to keep inventory of what ingredients you need and how often you need to replenish them. Lists are a great way to know what you have and what to purchase. Much like buying clothing that matches with other items in your wardrobe, purchasing ingredients that can fuse with multiple items in your pantry is crucial to prevent waste and keep your meals interesting. But before you make a list, you need to plan out your meals.
- Find what meal-prep works for your schedule
-
There are many different ways to meal-prep and the only way to find what you prefer is to try them out. You may find it most efficient to spend a Sunday evening fully making most of your meals for the week, or you may instead opt for ready-to-cook ingredients that you have organized in a way that minimizes daily cooking time. Freezing batches of recipes you make months in advance is another long-term plan that may work for you. It would conserve cooking time on a few more rigorous days potentially further out in the future. Feel free to experiment and alternate between these methods to adapt them to your circumstances.
- Be realistic
-
If you do not often cook lots of fancy dishes, you are probably even less likely to do that when you are overwhelmed with school. Don’t buy ingredients for a bunch of aspirational dishes that you are unsure if you would ever sit down and make (whether this be due to a lack of time or motivation). It is good to venture out of your comfort zone and stretch your culinary palette; however, keep plenty of safe options at the ready if this falls through and you just need a quick meal to pull you through finals week.
Learning how to cook is an ongoing journey and it is okay to slip up along the way. As I write this, I am taking a bunch of frozen food my mom made back to my apartment because I have a lot of rigorous classes that make it difficult to make my own meals. However, these tips helped me survive at least this far. Good luck cooking, and try not to put any aluminum foil in the microwave.