College Cooking Part Two

The last couple of weeks, I have gotten the chance to expand my Sunday night dorm cooking with new recipes and new people helping me out. Dishes have ranged from brunch to Mac and Cheese to Kool-Aid Pickles. I have had a blast cooking for my friends every weekend and trying to think of new simple recipes due to our limited equipment and kitchen. So here are some of the fun things I have made over the last bit.

1. Lasagna: the first week we got back to campus for the spring semester, I decided to make a super simple Lasagna. We bought ingredients at our local grocery store in Bethlehem, C-Town, and then went back to cook it. My friend, Jordan, made a homemade tomato sauce with crushed tomatoes, tomato paste and some seasonings. I made the cheese mixture by combining mozzarella, ricotta, and parmesan cheeses in a tiny bowl as it was the only bowl we had. We then started to layer our lasagna first starting with our sauce, followed by the noodles and cheese and then repeating. We used oven ready lasagna noodles to make things a bit quicker and easier. Once we had filled our whole deep bottomed baking dish, we put it into the oven for 30 minutes at 350 degrees and ate it. Overall, it had great flavor but unfortunately the cheese mixture was a bit thin. We chalked that up to the fact that our kitchen is not ideal and called the meal a success.

2. Swedish Meatballs: The next meal we made was Swedish meatballs with a pan gravy, egg noodles, and lingonberry sauce. We wanted something different and we thought this would do the trick. I combined ground pork and beef with eggs, milk, cream, breadcrumbs and of course lots of salt and pepper. I then (with the help of Jordan) formed them into balls and started cooking them which was a bit hard due to our burner being bent and small pan. But we made it work. After that, Jordan cooked the egg noodles while I made the gravy. For the gravy, I combined butter, dijon mustard, salt, pepper, heavy cream, and red wine vinegar. I let it all cook down for a few minutes and then called it good. To finish thing off, we put the noddles into paper bowls followed by some meatballs, gravy, and lingonberry. Although these turned out a bit bigger than normal Swedish Meatballs, they still tasted just like them! And they were quite good!

3. Mac and Cheese: Mac and Cheese was the most requested meal by my friends so we had to give it a go. We cooked elbow macaroni on the stove, which took way too long, yet again, due to our burners. We then poured the cooked pasta into a deep bottomed baking sheet and combined it with cheese sauce made of heavy cream, butter, milk, cheddar and parmesan cheeses and of course seasonings. Our cheese sauce turned out a bit thin and it was hard to melt the cheese itself when we were cooking it. But once we baked the Mac and Cheese it did not matter. Also, per my Mom’s request, we put raw hotdogs into half of the mac and cheese and topped it with Lays Classic Potato chips to make “Trailer Mac”. The other half was topped with just bread crumbs and did not have hotdogs. To finish it off, we baked it at 350 degrees for thirty minutes. The “Trailer Mac” was to die for and I highly recommend giving it a go. It sounds weird, but trust me. Overall, everyone loved this meal and it was super simple to make.

4. Brunch: One of the more recent meals we did was Brunch. Instead of it being a Sunday night deal, we did it Sunday during the day. We had pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausage, fruit, and of course Orange Juice. The pancakes were pretty simple to make although it was hard to find a good bowl to mix the batter in and we did not have a whisk. The sausage and bacon took a while to cook and we had to do it in about five batches as we had so much of it to make. The hardest part by far was the eggs as since the burner was still bent. All the liquid eggs went to one side of the pan. We did our best to salvage them, but it was tricky. Another challenge was making bulk amounts of all this food as it took a really long time. But overall it was really worth it as this was one of the highlight meals of the semester! I think we are for sure going to do another brunch at some point.

5. Flavored Pickles!: The last thing we made does not constitute a meal but it was for sure fun to make. Jordan kept seeing videos of flavored pickles on TikTok so we decided to make them. We bought mason jars, cucumbers, vinegar, sugar, kool-aid mix, cilantro, and taco seasoning. We made one set of pickles taco flavored with the taco seasoning and cilantro. The other two were Kool-Aid flavored, one being tropical punch and the other cherry. Everyone, including my family members, thought they would be super strange but they were actually quite good. We first had to let them cure for three days. The tropical punch kool-aid were the best as they were sweet and sour. The taco pickles were alright and had the most pickle taste. Unfortunately, the cherry pickles had too much Kool-aid so they were too sweet. That was my fault though as I added too much of the Kool-Aid mix. Also, the cucumbers got really limp and were not crisp after a few days which was sad. All in all though, these were awesome and we are planning to start another batch soon.

To conclude this post, I have had so much fun cooking in my college dorm. More specifically, I have had a blast connecting with my friends and sharing great meals. Shoutout to my friend Jordan for helping me out in the kitchen! I cannot do these meals without you! I am looking forward to cooking more and especially looking forward to when we have a better kitchen so we can do it often. Thank you so much for reading this blog post! I hope that maybe I have given you some inspiration to try cooking some new dishes! And hopefully, these dishes are easy examples of what you can make.

—ChefWalker out ✌🏻🎉😁