As much as some would like to believe ramen and saltines are a healthy part of a normal diet, having real food might actually stave off a few trips to McKinley. Though daunting, cooking can actually be rewarding and fun. Often it’s as easy as following a recipe. Here are a couple tricks to get you started.

Shop smart

Those pre-cooked or ready in 15 minutes type of meals may be very tempting, but often you will end up paying more for food that will taste half as good. As a general rule, buying ingredients and making food is cheaper than buying pre-made food. Buying ingredients is also more nutritious than popping in a frozen pizza.

Old reliables

If you’re new to this whole “using appliances other than a microwave thing,” here are two of my favorite meals that are difficult to mess up–knock on wood.

Pasta — Pick out your favorite shape of noodle and follow the directions on the box. Usually the instructions for making pasta consist of boiling water and putting the noodles in, so it should be pretty simple. Just make sure to check and stir your noodles frequently so they don’t turn to mush. For sauce, you can make your own or dress up some store-bought tomato sauce with oregano, sugar, salt, pepper, onion or basil. If you’re not feeling particularly confident with your skills, grate some cheese over the top and you’re good to go.

Stir-fry — I use stir-fry as an excuse to throw a bunch of random ingredients together and call it cooking. Prepare your pan with some olive oil (or any type of oil you prefer). You can get some good flavor going by cooking some onion in your pan first, then adding various veggies. Add your meat (if you’re having any) last because it will take the vegetables longer to cook. Stir-fry is a great end-of-the-week meal when you toss whatever ingredients you have left together and make something yummy. A nice sauce will often bring a stir-fry together, but it’s not required.

Use spice

Half of cooking is how you spice and flavor things. You can have the same slab of chicken and spice it two different ways and it will taste totally different. Spices can be expensive to get all at once, so unless you can steal some from your mom’s kitchen, try picking up a different spice every shopping trip. Start with the necessities (pepper, salt, garlic) then branch out (cayenne, cinnamon, soy sauce) and go crazy. Use recipes as a guide, but start making your own combinations.

Reuse food

If you buy chicken for one night, hamburger for another, fish for a third and then eat out, you’re going to have a lot of wasted food on your hands. However, that doesn’t mean you’re left to suffer with the same leftovers for the next three days after you make a meal. Instead, have a plan. If you make baked chicken one day, the next you can use the leftover meat for tacos or a stir-fry. The next day you can make a breakfast scramble by adding eggs on top of the leftover beans, peppers and meat from your tacos.

Experiment

The fun of cooking is trying out different recipes and testing combinations of spices and sauces. You will definitely make something completely gross sometimes, but it will all be worth it when you find that sick combo of curry, soy sauce, honey and a little dash of cayenne that makes it all worth it.

Melissa is a sophomore in LAS.

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