Cooking in College
If you are like me, you are wrapping up your first semester of living in Collegetown, which means they have officially survived their first couple months with the temptation of ordering food each night. Everyone knows that Collegetown is filled with dozens of restaurants that can make you food at the click of the button, allowing us to ignore the responsibility to actually cook ourselves dinner. As we navigate our classes, assignments, and extracurriculars, sometimes carving out time to both cook and eat dinner is difficult. That being said, on nights where cooking is inevitable, not every night is the same. In fact, I have identified four types of nights that all completely change how we cook, what we cook, and how quickly we have to do it. .
It all starts with the preparation going into the week. Don’t even get me started on grocery shopping. Don’t get me wrong, it is always fun to walk up and down the aisles, but I don’t know what I am going to do in an hour, let alone what I am going to want to eat for dinner next Thursday night. Trader Joe’s is the perfect place to get a balance of frozen and fresh food to prepare you for the week.
Let’s start off with the leisure nights. These are the kinds of nights where you don’t get home too late from classes and the library, and you don’t have a significant amount of work to do for the night. These are the kinds of nights where we can spend an hour cooking in the kitchen – we have an ample amount of time to try out some new recipes and possibly meal prep for the week. In my apartment, these are the kinds of nights where I spend time cooking chicken, roasting vegetables, creating a fun sauce, and throwing different kinds of foods together. I can leisurely watch TV while I cook and eat, I can spend some time sitting at the kitchen table with my roommates, and I can calmly clean the dishes afterwards. These nights really make you feel like you’re a chef; last week, I made spicy tuna crispy rice – who would’ve thought that I could have been able to do that? These are the best nights!
Next we get into the frozen nights. These are the types of nights when I either have way too much work to do that night or I am just way too lazy to be cooking up an entire meal. These nights are when Trader Joe’s frozen meals become your best friend. Not only can you take a pack of Cauliflower gnocchi, frozen vegetables, and premade sausage right from the freezer, but you can place it all right into one pan on the stove. With a 10 minute cook time, you are definitely being conscious of your laziness or business and, as an added bonus, you only have a small amount of dishes to clean at the end. If it is a lazy night, then I casually eat dinner in the kitchen, but if it is a busy night, then that’s a-whole-other story. The busy nights are the ones where the homework or studying is piled up, and dinner is more of a chore than it is a luxury. Once the frozen meal is cooked, you quickly eat with very little dinner conversation, then you do your dishes, and you’re done for the night. In my apartment, these busy nights are the ones where my roommates eat their dinner right off of the pan or the cutting board and don’t even bother transferring their food to the plate – like I said, less dishes, and less work.
Next we have the poorly timed dinner nights. As someone who lives in an apartment of 6, I am proud to admit that these nights do not happen that often. But oftentimes we definitely run into the problem where multiple people are trying to cook dinner at the same time. “Can I borrow that” and “excuse me” statements are thrown around left and right. Some people might be in the midst of one of the other nights described above, and those are the most stressful. Personally, the craziest ones are when we are all trying to cook at the same time, and we have the stove, oven, and microwave running at the same time. This is when the disaster happens – the smoke alarm goes off. Immediately everyone goes into their set positions: one person is tasked with grabbing a chair and waving a dish rag in front of the alarm, one person opens the kitchen window and places a bowl underneath, and the rest of the people in the room pace around until the alarm shuts off again. Eventually the alarm will stop, we all laugh, and we go back to cooking again. Although there are many people running around the kitchen at the same time, these nights are always the most fun and chaotic because we can all sit down at the kitchen table and enjoy our dinners together.
Finally, we get into the nights that everyone fears, and everyone experiences at least once – the big study nights. These are the nights when we have a big prelim the next day and or a paper that we procrastinated on. The nights when it is already 7 pm, you’re starving and you have to eat at some point, but there’s no time for food. These are the types of nights when we place those to-go orders. We anxiously wait to receive the text that the food is ready, run through Collegetown to pick it up, and take our to-go food back to campus to continue doing work in the library. I would say my go-to restaurants for late-night pick-ups in the library are usually Poke Lava, Dos Amigos, and Fusia Bento Bar. These might be hot takes but I stand by them.. These meals are brought to the library where you take one bite every five minutes in between doing practice problems, memorizing flashcards, or writing a paragraph.
Cooking in college is definitely an experience each night. The realities of these nights include chaotic schedules, small spaces, and don’t even get me started on the nights right before you go shopping again and you barely have enough groceries to put a full meal together. It is definitely an opportunity to try new recipes and become closer with your roommates. Although everyone experiences different emotions with each of these nights, I would say that it is definitely one of the highlights of finally living in an apartment in Collegetown.
