College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends

I am laughing with tears in my eyes at the Food Trivia on page 98 & because I once video taped one of my graduate school housemates (who I was teaching how to cook) chopping onions with a piece of sourdough clenched in her teeth upon her insistence that it would absorb part of the volatile chemical irritant… ah what can I say, we were both science geeks.

I love this book & it is fun, cute, quaint, friendly and investigative, as any cookbook geared towards college students should be & and I don't mean that in a patronizing manor.  In fact the only questionable aspect is that just a couple of the cooking times and techniques are a little off of what I would recommend & but hey experiment away, and when you are in college your timeline revolves around classes and work!  I think it is fantastic that they included the information that they did, as well as making it playful & Toga Party, Oktoberfest (my favorite, and I am a hardcore German food fanatic), and of course the Freshman Fifteen, and don't forget Cinco De Mayo.  Of course Cheap Eats, Eat Your Greens, and Just Like Mom Makes are terrific chapters to even out the party flavor.  Food For the Masses, and Impressing Your Date & oh so majorly important in college.  Great on the trivia and all of the windows of information on the recipe pages & but hey, I think you stole the wings from under my Nightshade Napoleon recipe -)!  Oh, and someone made a family recipe strawberry spinach salad for me yesterday and I had never had that delicious combination before & then low and behold you present a spinach salad with strawberries and goat cheese (and pecans & mmmm).   Excellent crab cakes, banana cake, POTATO PANCAKES (sorry, slightly biased & oh, and I didn't know Albert Einstein was a vegetarian!), beef chimichangas, and brava on the mini blueberry turnovers for simple and lipsmacking. 

Jessica Boone & outstanding photographs.  Enough said.   

Point blank & college is tough enough, and for Megan and Jill Carle to put out this book is phenomenal.  Personal note -- kudos for this and your previous books & you are definitely talented & good luck with all future efforts. 

My vote…?  You don't have to be in college to buy this one, and its a great gift for a second or third year student moving into an apartment with food court card withdrawal in need of a kitchen creative outlet.