College cooking extends beyond ramen noodles

Forget your mother’s mantra: “Finish your plate — there are starving children in… Forget your mother’s mantra: “Finish your plate — there are starving children in Africa.”

Every mother has wanted her child to be a member of the clean plate club. But there’s another way you can fulfill your grandmother’s recommendation, “Waste not, want not,” without overfilling your plate.

Rather than making a four-serving meal for one person that you feel obligated to scarf down in huge quantities, figure out how to use the same ingredients for a few different meals. This way you won’t waste food, but you also won’t be pressured to eat a lot of the same thing repeatedly.

It’s a combination of ingenuity, cooking techniques and having the right ingredients that add up to a more creative way to cook for just one.

Before jumping into the how-to, let me impress upon you the merits of eating this way. Once you’re past eating standard university-meal-plan food, there’s a big, beautiful — and wallet-busting — world of convenience food options. And they range from eating out to eating ramen.

Unfortunately, there’s only so much sodium one body can take and only so much money one college bank account holds, so eating in starts to look enticing. Better yet, not throwing out food and being handy with cheap cuts of meat or making vegetables count will save you a little cash.

But many of us will never get out of the frozen food and canned soup aisles without an idea of how to cook creatively.

Deciding you’re happy to eat the same food consistently is going to leave you miserable and potentially orange (it happened to the British girl who drank too much Sunny D).

Change starts in your kitchen. There are a few essentials to have on hand (besides the obvious pots and pans), such as a medium-sized baking dish, baking sheet and — if you’re really committed — a slow cooker. If you have the money, a slow cooker will absolutely change your life in unimaginable ways like allowing you to make the winning dish that snags that special someone, or even just improving eating alone with a really tender pot roast.

You should also have some basic foods on hand — bread, pasta, rice, tomato sauce, eggs, spices, etc. — to make sure you have some flexibility.

Then comes the grocery list, which might be subject to change when you start hitting the aisles and find great deals and discounts (unless you super-preparedly and commendably looked ahead). Figure out what your biggest budget-busters are — meat? Cheese? Exotic produce?

Use that as a base for the dishes you’ll prepare. Since many of these foods come in bulk or perish quickly, it’s best to make the most of them by using the ingredients for several meals throughout the week. Since meat goes bad in a short amount of time, consider freezing it if you don’t intend to use it immediately.

Once you’re stocked up on foodstuffs, finding recipes isn’t difficult. Get creative and look to cultures whose cuisines you haven’t tried or make the most of fusion dishes. The Internet is full of brilliant search engines and some cookbooks let you search their contents by ingredients. But the best recipes will come when you’ve got the confidence to get inventive.

These websites can help you get started with your own food creations. Check out www.allrecipes.com, www.epicurious.com and www.foodnetwork.com for ideas.

Recipes

Pork Fried Rice & Fruity Pork Tacos

For these dishes, I used a slow cooker, but you could also use a Dutch oven. You can buy virtually any cut of pork — I used ribs I found on sale. If you don’t have either of those, your best bet is using ground pork. Also, most of these amounts are approximations and can be changed to suit taste.

Pork Fried Rice

1/2 pound pork

2 cups cooked rice

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 cup cooked broccoli

1/4 cup chopped onion

2 tablespoons vinegar (preferably rice)

3 tablespoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon ginger

1 minced garlic clove

Optional:

Sesame oil and hot chili sauce to taste

If you don’t have a wok, you can make this recipe in a pot, but consider skipping the eggs.

Cook pork in slow cooker with broth (mine is 3 cups and includes chicken broth, soy sauce, garlic and hot chili sauce) for seven hours on low heat. When finished, shred pork and set aside.

To make the eggs, mix about 1 and 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil with equal parts water and heat in wok until simmering. Then, pour in beaten eggs and allow to cook for one minute before flipping and cooking it again. Remove from the water and allow to drain.

Pour out water and oil mixture before heating the remaining oil along with garlic for about a minute on medium heat. Add onions and cook for one minute before adding broccoli. Cook for another minute, stirring frequently.

Next, add pork, vinegar, soy sauce, ginger and eggs. Stir and heat for 30 seconds before adding rice and mixing well.

Fruity Pork Tacos with Mango-Cabbage Slaw

1/2 pound pork

Hot pepper and fruit jelly (I used habanero and cranberry jelly)

1/2 cup cabbage

1/4 cup mango

1 teaspoon vinegar

1 teaspoon sugar

Sprinkling of salt

Tortillas

Cheese

Cook pork in broth (I use just chicken broth) for 7 hours on low heat in slow cooker. Once finished, shred pork and mix in jelly.

To make slaw, shred cabbage and mango. Mix along with vinegar, sugar and salt. Cover and refrigerate at least 30 minutes.

Use meat, slaw and cheese to prepare tacos.