Making something out of nothing
The age-old question: what should I make for dinner tonight? I myself have this qualm far too often, and I can only assume other students do as well. So when this question comes up for me, my mind wanders to how my mom could always come up with dinner solutions.
For as long as I can remember, whenever I’d go to the grocery store with my mom, it would be at least a 45-minute excursion. She would wander up and down the aisles (multiple times sometimes), which made me want to shut myself into the milk fridges until she completed her rounds. Although it took her a while to find all the good deals in various grocery stores, especially Safeway and Capers, very early on she taught me how to cook and be grocery-shopping savvy. She was, and still is, the ultimate deal-seeker.
Her talent for whipping something up for dinner always amazed me — she could literally make something from nothing.
Since living alone, I have definitely applied a lot of her little tricks to my own shopping and meal prep — it’s tough when you’re living alone as a student, without the privilege of parents doing the grocery shopping and cooking for you.
As the school year comes around and schedules get hectic, it can get tricky to balance everything. It’s easy to become take-out food victims, even if it seems there is nothing in the fridge (when, in reality, there are always a few items to work with). So, here are a few quick tips that I’ve found helpful for making something out of nothing — because we all have some random vegetables or cuts of meat that have been in our fridges for longer than we’d care to admit.
Always have some “staple” ingredients in your fridge: mine vary throughout the month, but the most consistent are spinach, mushrooms, cucumbers, yogourt, eggs, and bread, to name a few. I’ve found that I can quickly whip something up with those, whether that’s a mushroom and spinach tartine, scrambled eggs, or a light cucumber sandwich.
Items like peppers can be quickly forgotten in the fridge, and it takes them a while to go off. Hollow them out, cook some rice and mix whatever protein and vegetables you’ve got with it. Add any spare parts of the pepper within the mix, toss in some seasoning, and layer it with some cheese. It’s a super quick meal: literally anything can be a filling.
Costco salad kits are a blessing. They’re a great side to put with a lunch or dinner meal. Meal prep as much as you can; I’ve really been loving Bircher muesli for a quick meal-prepped breakfast. It’s a bit of an obvious one, but buy things on sale as much as you can — using apps such as Flipp really helps with that!
Finally, try to have at least three meal ideas for the week, and make larger portions so that you can have dinner leftovers for lunch the next day; it is truly a kill-two-bird-with-one-stone situation.
