Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student [Spiral-bound]

Jean Patterson (Author), Danae Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 3, 2003

College kids living on their own for the first time are startled to realize that now they have to cook for themselves. This attractive spiral-bound book is exactly what they need, serving up easy recipes and basic cooking methods for beginners. The resulting meals are nutritious and appetizing, more healthful and less expensive than relying on the local pizza parlor or Burger King every time hunger pangs strike. Practical advice and helpful tips instruct busy college kids on everything from food and equipment shopping and sharing a kitchen to scrambling an egg and preparing a complete, well-balanced meal. Recipes are divided into these general categories:

Munchies * Breakfast * Main Courses * Pasta and Rice * Soups * Veggies and Salads * Desserts *

Munchies include a great array of snacks and finger foods, from garlicky humus to pizza-flavored popcorn. Breakfast recipes include egg dishes, French toast, pancakes, and others. Main courses range from simple grilled sandwiches to more ambitious entrees like roasted chicken with lemon and herbs. Vegetarian dishes include tasty Portobello mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, pan-fried Asian dumplings with dipping sauce, couscous and veggie salad, and many others. Among the dessert recipes are instructions for making brownies, cookies, chocolate cake, apple crisp, and a remarkably easy pumpkin pie. Recipes come with a special trouble-shooting and mistake-avoiding feature called Don't Let This Happen to You. Attractive line illustrations and a handy index help make this book a godsend for hungry college kids. Makes a good high school graduation gift!

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Anyone living on his or her own for the first time will benefit from using this wonderful book. … This would make a perfect purchase for any high school graduate!"


—KLIATT, September 2004



From the reviews:
"Many of these recipes are a lot better for you and cheaper than Domino's on auto dial. ...easy recipes for budget minded students."


—Constance Kurtz, USA Weekend, July 30 - August 1, 2004



"Rather than sentence your kid to two bleak semesters of dorm room food, consider bestowing the gift of an age-appropriate cookbook that could save them from delivery pizza and Ramen noodles. ... [a] friendly useful guide to building a kitchen, mastering cooking basics and putting together some dishes that the modern teen would actually be interested in eating. ... best of all for dormitory residents, most recipes are microwave-friendly."


—Erin Crawford, Des Moines Register, August 2004
—Erin Crawford, Asbury Park (NJ) Press, September 2004

From the Back Cover

[back cover]


Your moment of truth has arrived! You’re in college and on your own, you’re feeling those familiar hunger pangs—and Mom isn’t around to make breakfast... or lunch... or dinner.





Don’t despair. This very special cookbook has the answer to all your food problems. It’s filled with basic cooking methods and recipes for meals, snacks, and munchies that taste great, are nutritious—and best of all, are quick and easy to prepare! The recipes fall into these general categories:







* Munchies * Breakfast * Main Courses * Pasta and Rice

* Soups * Veggies and Salads * Desserts





You’ll also find a trouble-shooting and mistake-avoiding feature with most recipes. It’s called Don’t Let This Happen to You. What happen is plenty of good eating with recipes and food ideas that are guaranteed to please!

Product Details

• Spiral-bound: 160 pages
• Publisher: Barron's Educational Series (December 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764124951
• ISBN-13: 978-0764124952
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #694,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jean Patterson is a Pasadena, California-based freelance writer and editor whose articles and recipes have appeared in Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Sunset, Vegetarian Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the co-author of Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student.
Twitter feed at: http://twitter.com/penandfork

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for People New to Cooking, January 11, 2007

By 

Karen Kline (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student (Spiral-bound)

I originally bought this book for myself, and found it to be too introductory for me, so I gave it to my brother, who despite being older than me still calls me to ask things like how you mash a potato. The recipes are very easy to read, making no assumptions about previous knowledge, and they utilize store-bought pre-prepared ingredients (the author is especially fond of frozen potsticker dumplings) in a way that is helpful to college students, although I thought occasionally the scratch alternative would have been no more difficult and probably cheaper and better tasting.
What I love best about the book is the way it is organized. Recipes that require no cooking or are microwave-only are marked with big icons on the page, and while the recipes are organized by meal or food type, like most books, the book also contains multiple tables of contents that group the recipes differently--vegetarian, microwavable, appropriate for a date, seasonally, etc.--and even has one set of listings that put together recipes for a complete meal. While not particularly elaborate (as most of the recipes are pretty simple anyway) I love this feature, because matching flavors can be particularly difficult for a new cook, and for any cook a recipe book can be unhelpful in planning a meal if you don't kind of already know what you want.
The first section of the book is also really good for first-timers because it goes over the basics of setting up, cleaning, and sharing a kitchen. It provides lists of basic equipment and the basic ingredients you should always have on hand, and this list is in general pretty sensitive to the limitations of dorm sizes and mini-fridges. It even gives cleaning instructions for some of the less obvious cleaning challenges in the kitchen. I thought the list of things to discuss and agree on with roommates regarding kitchen use was particularly helpful. Lastly, the book itself is well-designed, being spiral-bound rather than a traditional paperback, so that it lays flat easily while staying open to the same page hands-free. This seems like a silly note, but I have a lot of cookbooks, some with a similar target market as this one, and I've had to waste a lot of time copying recipes down onto other paper or recipe cards just because I needed both hands and the book kept closing itself or flipping to another page.
In summary, a great book for someone who doesn't know anything about cooking. Would make a great high school graduation gift perhaps made more interesting by pairing it with some of the basic kitchen tool necessities listed in the first few chapters of the book.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Just For College Anymore, May 12, 2004

By 

C Dennett (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student (Spiral-bound)

I don't know about college students, but I do know that I'm not sure how I've made it 33 years in life without this book. The great thing about this cookbook is, the meals don't take 5 hours to prepare, and it's all very simple--almost as fast and easy as calling up the pizza delivery guy, and a helluva lot healthier. I even impressed my new fiance. ;)

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for busy professionals..., June 20, 2004

By 

Jules (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student (Spiral-bound)

These recipes are quite simple and perhaps someone who is an experienced chef might not like them, but I am a singleton who works 60 hours per week and this book is full of quick dinners, and more importantly, stuff that I can make and take to work to reheat for lunch.