College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends [Paperback]

Megan Carle (Author), Jill Carle (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 1, 2007

You have a midterm tomorrow and a fierce growl in your stomach. Your roommate just nabbed your last cup o' ramen. Do you: (A) Ignore your stomach and brew another pot of coffee? (B) Break out the PB&J? (C) Order pizza—again? (D) Make a quick trip to the grocery store? The answer's D, and College Cooking is the only study guide you'll need.Sisters Megan and Jill Carle know all about leaving a well-stocked kitchen to face an empty apartment fridge with little time to cook and very little money. They practically grew up in their parents' kitchen, but even that didn't prepare them for braving the supermarket aisles on their own. That's why they wrote COLLEGE COOKING—to share the tips and tricks they've learned while feeding themselves between late-night studying, papers, parties, and other distractions.Starting with kitchen basics, Megan and Jill first cover ingredients, equipment, and other prereqs for cooking a decent meal. They then provide more than ninety simple yet tasteworthy recipes—hearty home-style dishes, study-break snacks, healthy salads, sweet treats, and more (along with low-cal and veggie options). You'll find easy and cheap-to-make dishes, like: Tortilla Soup • Chili with Green Chile Cornbread • Chicken Salad Pita Sandwiches • Baked Penne Pasta with Italian Sausage • What's-in-the-Fridge Frittata • Peanut Butter Cup Bars • Brownie Bites You'll also find recipes for feeding a household of roommates, maximizing leftovers, cooking for a dinner date, and hosting parties with minimal prep and cost. Just consider COLLEGE COOKING your crash course in kitchen survival—and required reading for off-campus living.Reviews“College Cooking is a must-pack, along with the fry pan and the blender, for those going back to college or starting this year.”—Arizona Republic“The recipes are quick, easy, and simple.”—Kansas City Star“This is reasonable food reasonably fast. I was going too give the cookbook to someone in college, but no way. This is going straight into my collection.”—Oakland Tribune

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The authors of Teens Cook and Teens Cook Dessert are off to college in their third collection of easy-to-prepare dishes for those still finding their way around the kitchen. Prospective cooks are encouraged to prepare everything from Oven-Fried Chicken to Tres Leches Cake in this compilation of over 60 quick recipes. While dishes like Barbecue Chicken Pita Pizza, in which poached chicken is placed atop pita bread with barbecue sauce, shredded cheese and cilantro, aren't going to win any culinary awards, they're user-friendly and likely to become staples for the book's target audience. In addition, the authors offer tips on stocking a pantry and outfitting a kitchen, as well as a handful of themed menus (Toga Party, Cinco de Mayo). Their common-sense approach will no doubt sit well with novies, though their advocacy of bouillon cubes ("it's cheaper and a lot lighter to carry home from the store") and reliance on canned soup for sauces could kickstart some bad habits. That said, there is enough variety in flavor and cultural influence for most beginners, and it's all preferable to the likely alternative: fast food.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

* A full-color cookbook written by and for college students, from the authors of the best-selling TEENS COOK series.
* Includes more than 90 recipes to help students avoid the frozen-dinner-and-ramen rut, a primer in cooking basics, and kitchen- and pantry-stocking tips.
* Illustrated with 60 full-color photos.
* Theme parties include recipes and ideas for `80s parties, Oktoberfest, toga parties, tapas, and Cinco de Mayo.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press; First edition (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580088260
• ISBN-13: 978-1580088268
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.6 x 11.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #252,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Carles' College Cooking is Advanced Course May 29, 2007

By D. Byrne

Format:Paperback

I'm not a foodie, but I like to cook. I've also found its one of the greatest ways to pull together people from diverse backgrounds--nothing like closeting a group of unrelated people in a cozy kitchen, pulling out some good food and drink, and chatting. Beats the heck out of the cardboard pizza most study and discussion groups serve. So, when I received a copy of Megan and Jill Carle's College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends, I have to admit I was more than ready to give it a go.

Now, normally a cookbook labeled "College Cooking" is going to have 101 things to do with Ramen Noodles or 100+ ways to microwave canned foods so that they no longer resemble canned foods. The Carles didn't take this approach, however. They've put together real recipes, using real foods. The catch is, you're going to need a real kitchen--or at least access to one--to make their dishes. Sometimes that's not such an easy item to come by when you're still in college--even if you are a graduate student.

What do the Carles have to offer? Let's take a look at last week's brunch: fresh tomato soup (ripe tomatoes, salt, milk, and pepper), chicken salad pita sandwiches (real chicken, lettuce, celery, cucumber, grapes and a peppery mayo), zucchini olive salad (strips of crisp zuchinni, garlic, basil, lemon, olive oil, salt, pepper, Parmesan, black olives and sunflower seeds), and lemon sugar cookies (made with real butter). Everyone had fun lending a hand with the meal and it was absolutely yummy!

Unfortunately, everything in this meal--with the exception of the zuchinni salad--required access to a full kitchen; and that particular fact applies to almost every recipe in the Carles' book. Also, the Carles give quite a few tips on making vegetarian dishes using their recipes; but few tips on making their recipes either low-cal or low-fat. All of which explains why I'm reviewing this particular "College" cookbook on the graduate school site and not the colleges site--graduate students have been out of the nest long enough to have learned a few tricks to manage these particular issues.

If you do have access to a full kitchen (and a nice enough bank balance to afford some of the more particular ingredients these recipes call for--like fresh black olives as opposed to canned), the Carles have put together a really nice collection of recipes covering everything from comfort foods to party foods in College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Eat well in college! April 9, 2007

By H. Grove TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Most college kids eat abysmally. I know; I still remember that period of my life. In "College Cooking: Feed yourself and your friends," college students Megan & Jill Carle decided to create a no-fail collection of recipes and tips to allow college students to cook delicious, reasonably healthy meals on a shoestring budget with a minimally-furnished kitchen.

The book starts out with a few "kitchen basics" including notes on their assumptions and decisions regarding ingredients. They've truly taken a college lifestyle into account; after all, your average college student doesn't have a ton of spare cash and probably doesn't have a car to go fetch groceries with.

There's a section on necessary tools and equipment--what you can get away with purchasing in terms of quality and quantity that'll allow you to make the widest array of recipes with the least outlay of money.

The simplest recipes in the cookbook--and the best place to start if you've never picked up a spatula before--can be found in the first main chapter, "Survival Cooking." Here is where you'll find a variety of recipes primarily made with a handful of simple ingredients, including classics such as chicken recipes that use cans of cream of mushroom soup and dry onion soup mix. Fine dining it isn't, but that isn't what we're looking for here--we're looking for something that'll teach a college student to cook and keep her in basic healthy food. It serves this purpose beautifully.

Many of the recipes include handy little sidebars featuring everything from tidbits of food trivia to suggestions for converting recipes to vegetarian versions, reducing the fat content of a recipe, substituting other interesting ingredients, or even finding cheaper options for some ingredients. Other chapters include healthier options, themed party dishes, and more.

These recipes and more could get any student through four years of college without having to resort to a solid diet of fast food and sugar. All you need are a minimal kitchen and the desire to give cooking a chance. When I was around college age I found that students were so desperate for a good meal that you could trade a home-cooked dinner for almost any sort of favor you needed done, and Alton Brown himself has waxed rhapsodic about the utility of being able to cook in wooing college dates. There are as many reasons to try out cooking in college as there are recipes in this book--so if you have any kind of kitchen facilities at all, I urge you to ask your own parents to pack this book along to you as a basic tool of college life.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great college cook book February 5, 2009

By K. McCarvel

Format:Paperback

I'm a 19 year old college male who just moved out of the dorms. I consider myself comfortable in the kitchen but not overly confident. This book is just about perfect. It was written by two sisters who were just out of college. They break up the book into sections from "survival cooking" and "avoiding the freshman fifteen" to "impressing your date" and "satisfying your sweet tooth." They also throw in a few party menus for an 80s party, or oktoberfest. Nearly every recipe has a picture to go with so you have an idea what it should look like, and while my dishes never look that good it lets me aspire to maybe reach that one day. They start by talking about cooking basics chopping garlic, finding the right kind of potato, and cooking broccoli. Then they talk about what kind of equipment, herbs and other baking goods every kitchen should have. Then they get to the recipes. At my first glance I thought wow these include a lot of ingredients and will be complex to make. But when I began making them they are simple and don't use too many ingredients. They offer little hints like instead of using chicken you can use tofu and how to cook it, or cheaper ingredients that can be substituted in. My one, and very small hold up about the book is that id doesn't have a prep and cook time on the side. This doesn't mean they don't say how long to cook everything. So for anyone who is moving out of the dorms looking for a first time cooking cook book this if for you.