Cooking for a College Student?

July 9, 2015 4:59 PM

I've moved into an apartment and am trying to become a Real Adult. I've got some basic cooking skills, but would like a cookbook or something to follow since I lack variety. I cook a lot of soup at once and freeze/store it as my next few meals due to time constraints. I'm looking for advice, guides, sites, real-life books.

I have a lot of baking experience, but not so much cooking. I'm getting by okay though- just googling recipes and following them- mainly from seriouseats/the Food Lab and The Kitchn. I know my kitchen basics, so I don't really need a hand-holding, never-stepped-foot-in-the-kitchen book, but I lack ideas since my cooking repertoire is limited to soup and stir-fry.

My ideal is things that can be frozen and reheated- I tend to cook a large amount and freeze it for my lunch/dinner for awhile, since I don't really have time to cook every day and go grocery shopping about once a week or less. At the same time, I like to have a bit of variety so I'm not eating the same soup for five days straight. Most of what I cook right now is various kinds of soup. If anyone has advice for cooking for just one person while keeping it varied and fresh, I'd appreciate it.

My food tastes lean towards Asian or Indian, relatively healthy, and less so Western- I don't do too much cheese and tend to cook with oil instead of butter.

In terms of gadgets I have a hand mixer, food processor, Instant pot pressure cooker (also has a slow cooker and a bunch of other functions).

posted by Just Another Entity to Food & Drink (19 answers total)

The New Doubleday Cookbook is pretty handy to have around.
posted by humboldt32 at 5:06 PM on July 9, 2015

If you like Indian food, you can't go wrong with Madhur Jaffrey's books. Her recipes are great and Indian food freezes well in my experience.
posted by quince at 5:09 PM on July 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really liked Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything as a good reference cookbook. I also have his Best Recipes In the World, which is more international in scope.
posted by vunder at 5:20 PM on July 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pam Anderson's books How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart and Cook without a Book: Meatless Meals: Recipes and Techniques for Part-Time and Full-Time Vegetarians are great. They're less about individual references and more about how to develop techniques that can be adapted based on whatever ingredients you have — how to make a frittata, a simple stir fry, a pan sauce, etc.
posted by Lexica at 5:30 PM on July 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

I like Going Solo in the Kitchen -- it's focused on cooking for one, and has extremely helpful advice about storing food and reusing leftovers in interesting ways. It's also pretty budget-conscious.

It doesn't have pictures, and the health advice is outdated -- there's a bit in there about how dieticians now say eating up to four eggs a week may be OK. However, the recipes are classic and are intended to use food efficiently and tastily while taking full advantage of the refrigerator and freezer for food storage.
posted by pie ninja at 5:41 PM on July 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seconding Mark Bittman's HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING. It's just a really solid reference, nothing in there is too difficult, and it's so big that it will give you lots of ideas.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:44 PM on July 9, 2015

This may already be what you're doing, but when I lived in my own in grad school, I'd spend one week doing a lot of cooking: stove top stuff on Sunday, slow cooker meals the rest of the week. Everything was then frozen in single serving sizes, and then the next few weeks was reheated stuff, but at least with some variation (supplemented with salads/fruits).

Slow cooker dishes: pot roast, chili, pulled pork, various soups (I'd usually set it up at night, then dump in crackpot for the morning).

I'd also sometimes get a whole chicken, roast it/strip it/make stock w/carcass on the weekend, then rotate through chicken quesedilla, chicken wrap (veggies+ranch), chicken Caesar salad, add to stir fried or roasted veggies.

You can sort of do this with other stuff if you keep the base generic: so pulled pork can be tacos one day and BBQ sandwiches the next.

Now, I get a lot of ideas from Pinterest, usually relying of family or friends to try it first.
posted by ghost phoneme at 5:46 PM on July 9, 2015

I think this is a good one to start that I have:

Help! My Apartment has a Kitchen Cook Book Description:
When Kevin Mills moved into his first apartment, he soon realized he couldn't live on just take-out food alone, so he called his mother, Nancy. She taught him to cook, and now the two of them have put together a collection of easy recipes (actually, they're graded, most are Very Easy or Easy, a few are Not So Easy) for inexperienced cooks, along with lots of "Mom tips" and "Mom warnings." (Because Kevin's girlfriend is a vegetarian, more than half the recipes are vegetarian.) Less ambitious than either Elaine Corn's Now You're Cooking (LJ 10/15/94) or Lora Brody's The Kitchen Survival Guide (LJ 5/15/92), and with a more scattershot approach, this should nonetheless appeal to recent graduates and others cooking for themselves for the first time.
posted by maxg94 at 5:49 PM on July 9, 2015

Budget Bytes is great for this. It is a little on the hand-holdy side, but I think you'll like it because she definitely bases her recipes around the "cook once or twice a week" model.

I'll note that her "portion sizes" are intended for part of a meal, not a whole meal, so you may not get as many servings out of one of her recipes as it says on the site.

I also like the other blogs you mentioned so I'll note that my #1 cooking blog Smitten Kitchen has a freezer friendly section.
posted by capricorn at 5:56 PM on July 9, 2015 [7 favorites]

Best I've seen for college student cooking would be " The Urban Peasant"
aka James Barber.
Was on CBC television years ago.
If you can find it,

Pretty much quick home cooking

Rarely measured, everything's close enough.
No exotic ingredients,.
Always provides substitutes.
Very much close enough, good enough.

But he does explain why one is better and the other will do.

No problem using frozen or canned.(yeah fresh is better.)

They are all quick menus,

Thing is he doesn't over complicate cooking.
He expects variations , there is no hard, must not deviate from recipe.

Major theme is:
"You cook with what you got".
posted by yyz at 6:22 PM on July 9, 2015

nthing How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. The vegetarian version is also solid. He has a bunch of charts and sidebars scattered throughout the book that give suggestions about how to combine things into meals or howOne thing to pay attention to is the charts. he has a bunch of them in various chapters of the book, and they suggest how to mix recipes together. A lot of the recipes also have suggestions for variations, which can be helpful in going from following recipes to throwing together ingredients that match what you're craving.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 6:24 PM on July 9, 2015

Nthing How to Cook Everything and Madhur Jaffrey for Indian food.

I can also recommend the following:

Frugal Feasts

The Joy of Cooking
posted by Snazzy67 at 6:25 PM on July 9, 2015

How to Cook Everything is available as an iOS app in case you have an iPhone/iPad. I don't know if it is available on Android platforms.

Some of the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks, I'm thinking of Moosewood Cooks at Home and Moosewood Book of Desserts, have pretty straightforward and tasty recipes.
posted by plastic_animals at 6:33 PM on July 9, 2015

Everyone else is right about How To Cook Everything, but it's very Western.
Manjula's Kitchen is incredible for Punjabi/North Indian food. Her recipes are solid, and she does a video walkthrough for all of them.
Mexican Food at Home by Thomasina Miers is a great, accessible Mexican intro.
You're doing the right thing freezing leftovers. I've got four different curries, pizza sauce, ragu, and some other bits and pieces frozen right now. The trick for me has been to cook slightly more often than I need to, building up a bank of varied leftovers.
posted by Kreiger at 6:39 PM on July 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bittman's books can give you good building blocks but holy shit are his recipes as written BLAND. Just a heads up. Salt.
posted by easter queen at 6:43 PM on July 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Hazan's "Classic Italian Cookbook" and Claiborne's "New York Times Cookbook" are my go-to's for learning and variety.
posted by rhizome at 6:46 PM on July 9, 2015

The Fresh 20 has a "cooking for one" meal plan now, and a one month subscription is $10. The subscription model will give you the recipes and the shopping list. You may find that if you can get the shopping and meal-planning right, you won't necessarily need or want to cook ahead as much.
Having a subscription has increased my cooking skills and my confidence so much. (I belong to emeals.com and I really like it, but they don't have a plan for one.)

Possible drawbacks for you - if they don't have enough recipes with Indian and Asian flavors, or if the ingredients are too costly or hard to find, or if you find that cooking ahead is still way easier for you. But for $10, you'll still get 30 recipes to keep.
posted by hiker U. at 7:12 PM on July 9, 2015

Get one of the Moosewood cookbooks. Everyone loves them - particularly those just starting to get their hands dirty in the kitchen. Lots of Asian/Indian options and big pot options to freeze.
posted by Toddles at 9:10 PM on July 9, 2015

Seconding The Moosewood Cookbook. Lots of easy, healthy and tasty recipes you can easily bulk up and freeze for later. I especially love the original version (linked) with the whimsical illustrations; just thumbing through the book makes me incredibly happy and inspired to cook.
posted by rivtintin at 8:53 AM on July 10, 2015