A College Guy's Guide to Cooking and Eating

To start off, let's get things straight, I am not a good cook. No matter how often I watch Top Chef thinking that I should be making more braised duckling canapés, I am probably never going to be anything more than adequate. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what a canapé is, other than that I think it in some way involves some contrived form of toast. However, I've spent over a year now shopping and cooking for myself without developing food poisoning and along the way I've actually concocted some semi-edible dishes and saved a lot of money along the way. Here's a few ways that you can dine decently with little cooking experience.

First, let's see what we have to work with. To get started cooking there are a few bare essentials that your kitchen (or in my case kitchenette) needs to have before you can do anything. You're gonna need at least two pots with lids and preferably 2 skillets. Have at least one or two cutting knives to work with and a cutting board (although if you really want run a skeleton ship you can use a plate). I would add in that, while not essential, for the young professional, few pieces of equipment can be more dependable that a George Forman Grill. You can make grilled cheese, burgers, chicken, steak and best of all, the food seems to taste better the less often you clean it.

Now let's look at the ingredients you can't go without. Olive oil: it doesn't get much more useful that this. It can be used to line the bottom of a skillet for cooking meat and vegetables, you can coat chicken with it and toss it in bread crumbs for oven baked chicken and it can be a substitute for butter in many situations. Pasta, it doesn't matter what kind, you can buy huge packages at Costco and the marinara to go along with. You can also buy massive amounts of frozen meat there, which comes in handy when you don't feel like having to go out and buy fresh meat every 4 days. Surprisingly enough, I've gotten away without butter, salt and pepper, but you still should probably invest in these three.