Mother and author of “College Cooking Crash Course” Eva Gold is out to prove college cooking is possible if you just have a plan. Her cookbook contains 20 ingredients that will prepare a student for two weeks’ worth of recipes and will cost about $50 at the grocery store.
“I’m kind of a do-it-yourself kind of person, and so I tried to think of ways that you could eat inexpensively but also with all the limitations that people cooking in dorms would have,” Gold said.
According to the book, all anyone needs is a microwave and a rice cooker, which most dorms allow and are inexpensive. The book includes prep times and cooking durations.
“The real issue is that all college cookbooks that are out there just present a bunch of recipes, but every time you cook a recipe you have to go to the store,” Gold said. “You buy the stuff, make the recipe and the next day have to do it again.”
Gold explained the difficult part with cooking actually comes from the planning involved.
“It’s very time consuming, and it takes years of cooking really to learn how to plan out what you are going to cook,” Gold said.
Gold’s son, Samuel Fick, gave his mother his imput in the cookbook.
“When I first read it, it was kind of terse with incomplete sentences,” Fick said. “So what I tried to do was make it more personal, as if someone was cooking alongside you…for me, cooking is not so much of an exact science. For instance, with the African Peanut Soup, you can gussy it up by adding chicken to it,” Fick said.
Gold said she made sure all the options are quick and easy, but also made sure variety was a factor in her recipes.
“You can make something different each night for variety,” she said. “You can have macaroni and cheese one night, and then the next night you can have a vegetable and rice dish with peanut sauce, which is really just soy sauce and peanut butter.”
Currently, the cookbook ranks around 157,000 on Amazon. With such a variety of cookbooks, Fick said the trick is to get the information out there.
“The hardest part is getting it into people’s hands, but once my friends have it, they like it. Compared to going to the dining hall, you have so much more control over what you eat, its quality not quantity,” Fick said.
