As my final recipe I wanted to make something that is a staple of virtually every American’s childhood, the first dish I was taught to “cook”, and a favorite of my idol.

By the time I was like 8 and my sister was like 12 my mom was sick of making us those boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese, but she also raised 3 cheese-lovin’ children so she just taught us how to make it ourselves. Woohoo for cooking!! Even though I now find Kraft mac and cheese utterly repulsive, it was a huge part of my childhood and the first thing I can remember cooking by myself!

To take it further with my love for mac and cheese, my idol Anthony Bourdain’s favorite guilty pleasures is actually a good, simple macaroni and cheese.

“Get that damn lobster out of my mac and cheese” -Anthony Bourdain, “Appetites” 

Bourdain and my mom actually have a lot of similarities in their philosophies. For starters, if you told one of them you didn’t “like” a food or picked the onions out of your bowl, you’d probably get a thump on the head- understandably. Whenever I’m home I binge on old episodes of Bourdain’s series, it’s become a staple of my breaks from school. With food being such an important aspect of my life, my family’s innerworkings, and the way I relieve stress, Bourdain’s travels and take on foods have become quite an obsession. In regards to this glorious dish, this is Bourdain’s recipe, and here is the one my mom uses. However, I decided to branch out this week and use a recipe that I have been perfecting over the past couple of years so here we go!

Mac and Cheese

Shopping

The total cost of this dish proportions out to just under $10 which is pretty cool! Another pricing victory! I bought two cheese packs each with mixed cheeses because I’m obnoxious but they were called “6 Cheese Italian Blend” and “Mac and Cheese Blend”.

Cooking

First things first, you may remember in earlier posts that I’ve mentioned that I am lactose intolerant. Well another “medical condition” I have is what’s known as a cheese addiction. My body is not a temple, its an amusement park and who can enjoy the ride without things like mac and cheese, pizza, mozz sticks, etc. etc. So basically I’m lactose intolerant for everything except cheese and I guess all of the other dairy in this recipe. Sue me. But honestly who would think it’s okay to substitute mac and cheese for mac and vegan cheese. That sounds like my worst nightmare.

I could’ve honestly written an entire blog about cheese. I literally love cheese so much. From cheese platters at family parties to late night grilled cheeses with my roommates, to cheese fries, to casseroles, to nachos, to literally anything with cheese in it… just know that I love you. Literally when the doctor told me I’d have to give up dairy I thought I’d have to sacrifice my one true love, but if I leave you with one thing it’s that you can always make exceptions if you really love something.

I’m sorry for my romanticization of cheese but come on you have to relate. Anyway let’s get to cooking! First start by boiling water for the pasta while simultaneously beginning to cook the cheese sauce.

Make sure that the oven is preheating to 350 degrees and that the pasta water is boiling, then begin the cheese sauce. After the butter is melted in the pan, add the flour into the pan and make a roux. This is definitely the worst part of the process because it looks so weird (as pictured to the left), but it also allows you to have a lot of fun and add all of your cheeses. Add the milk and the cream cheese first, then mix in the other cheeses. Not all cheese sauces use flour, but I feel that it makes it nice and thick. It is important to time this and do it while the pasta is cooking. Stir often to prevent burning and sticking! I also added some spices (basil, pepper, and oregano) to the cheese sauce too just to add a little more to it. Once the sauce and pasta are done, pour the pasta into a casserole pan and spread evenly. Next pour the cheese sauce over the pasta, mix, and spread evenly throughout the pan. Sprinkle some more cheese on top if you’re feelin it. Bake for about 10-15 minutes, then sprinkle some more cheese and breadcrumbs on the top. Bake for another 15 minutes and serve!

Final Product

Final Thoughts

This week was a fan favorite because it is such a universal and traditional meal. I also love the fact that this recipe is partially my own! Plus it’s always fun to add as much and as many kinds of cheese into one dish as possible! IT WAS SO CHEESY. For possibly the last time this semester I have cooked a family dinner for my roommates and friends which is very sad 😦 However, I am glad that it turned out so well and that we all, once again, shared a great meal together. As my last meal I am glad to be able to use both my mom and Anthony Bourdain to drive my love to cook, and love to cook for others. I’ll leave you with another iconic Bourdain quote 🙂 Happy eating everyone!

~ Kelsey

I’d like to thank Lauren for her submission of this dorm-friendly recipe challenge! Although I had to go through many Tasty and Buzzfeed videos, I have found a recipe that is dorm-friendly and goes with the theme of my blog. I actually had a lot of fun making this one! I present to you: Microwavable Frittata. If you don’t know what a frittata is, its basically an omelette-loaf. I liked this recipe a lot because it’s a fun and healthy way to spice up regular old eggs. My roommate Nush and I are constantly cooking eggs as our meal so this was a good way to spice up the most important meal of the day!

Although I was eager to do this dorm cooking challenge, I wasn’t just going to make any old recipe, I still wanted to have a personal connection with what I was cooking. So, I was so excited when I came across a recipe for a frittata that could be made in the microwave. Every year for Christmas my aunt JoAnne would drive up from her house in Delaware super early on Christmas morning and make a huge frittata for Christmas breakfast (in the oven though, not the microwave ). This meal is also fitting because it basically feels like Christmas with all this cold weather… Anyway, I remember the first year that she did this, I was so confused about what looked like a cake made out of scrambled eggs. However, it is an absolutely delicious dish, that you can kind of make your own by choosing veggies, meats, herbs, and basically anything else you’d like in an omelette. After asking her for more information about her famous Christmas frittata, she actually originally inspired her recipe from one by the woman, the myth, the legend: Paula Deen. That just makes this whole thing so much better some how. Although, my aunt is super healthy so there’s no butter in this recipe like Paula Deen would love.

I got the recipe I used for the “challenge week” online because I didn’t want to take my aunt’s recipe and just assume that I could cook it in a microwave (aka did not want to risk salmonella). I still put a lot of veggies like my aunt would, but my recipe was inspired by this one.

Microwavable Frittata

Shopping

For shopping this week I went to Stop & Shop. This is more expensive than ShopRite, but its much closer to my apartment so we manage. One thing I don’t like about Stop & Shop is their vegetable section, other supermarkets just have a better and cheaper selection.

Cost Breakdown:

This week is about $1-2 for vegetables (depending on how much and how many you use), $0.50 for the onion, $4 for the cooked ham, I got a BOGO free deal for the cheese I needed for this recipe and for next week’s so it was about $1.50 for the cheese, and about $0.50 for the eggs. Grand totaling: ~$8.50.

Cooking

So I began the cooking process by chopping the vegetables. I know not many of us kept a knife and cutting board in our dorms, but you totally could have one, and if not you could just buy already chopped vegetables. As stated above, I used broccoli, red peppers, onions, and a little bit of spinach that I *borrowed* from Nush. My favorite part about cooking this dish was how colorful it was because of the vegetables. My aunt JoAnne has always helped me be as creative as possible. Whether it be taking me to broadway shows, buying me science kits, painting with me, or baking extravagant cupcakes with me, her visits were always special to me and she always challenged me a little bit. When I told her that I was using her as an inspiration for my challenge week she was so excited! As a little tribute to my aunt’s healthiness and creativity, I used the variety of vegetables to make this dish as fun, colorful, and healthy as I could!

This picture is after I mixed all of the ingredients into the “pan” with the whisked eggs. I used a lot of cheese as you can tell. The original recipe says to use a pie pan but I have minimal access to that kind of fancy kitchen utensils, so I crossed my fingers and hoped this tin would work. (spoiler alert: it did). As I mentioned before, my aunt has always encouraged my creativity, so she would be very proud of this inventiveness 🙂 . Even though I made this dish for dinner and not breakfast, I was so excited to pop this baby in the microwave. I was like a child waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven… I literally stared at the microwave from across the room watching the 9 minutes tick by.

Final Product

Final Thoughts

I was honestly so nervous about this dish because I don’t trust the microwave and I didn’t want salmonella… but it turned out so well! Not only was it so easy to make, but it’s healthy and filling! I definitely thought this dish was going to be a fail week, but Nush and I deem this as a 10/10 across the board! Maybe I’ll take over Christmas breakfast this year! I’ll see you guys next week where I’ll “spice things up” in a more literal sense. Happy eating!

~ Kelsey

This dish is truly iconic. Not only is it something that my grandmother and great-great aunt just made up, but it’s something that virtually anyone can cook and eat. That’s right ladies and gents, this is my family’s one and only completely vegan dish! I present to you Pasta Fagioli! Also, I’m not sure the “authentic” pronunciation of fagioli, but my mom and grandma always say “fazool”, so if you now are relating me to the “gabagool culture” I’m okay with that.

In my family we have one centripetal force: food. You might think “well duh, you’ve literally only talked about your family eating for the whole semester”, but it goes deeper than my mom just making me food. We have 2 main “rules” as a family:

1. Family dinners: Growing up, I had a lot of rules, but the most important was that we all sit down to eat dinner as a family any night that we were all home.
2. Food is not a selfish concept: We make food. We eat food. We share food. One thing that every woman in my family does is make sure everyone is fed. Not just their kids and husbands, but also the neighbor’s kids, their kids’ friends, those friends’ siblings, etc. etc. You know how everyone has someone that they call “aunt” or “uncle” but you’re not actually related to them? Well yeah, literally half of my “family” is not actually my family (yes, it did make my childhood very confusing). Well I’m pretty sure most of those people mainly kept coming around because of the food. From neighbors to friends to coaches to priests to teachers to people my mom just met, we rarely had a week where someone didn’t just show up and sit down to dinner with us.

I bring up these 2 “family rules” this week because this dish is the token dish for both of them. Every story I’ve ever heard about my great-great aunt Mary has to do with her cooking dinner for her 20+ nieces and nephews, along with the neighborhood kids, friends, plus ones, etc. Pasta fagioli is a great dish to make and share because you don’t have to alter much more than the quantities of ingredients in order to make more of it.

Pasta Fagioli

Shopping

I shopped for these ingredients at Target, which is typically a little more expensive than a Shoprite or Stop & Shop. This dish boils down to about $5ish. Maybe a little more, I confused myself a lot with the math (it’s midterms week please forgive me). But it is definitely under $10 and is about 5-6 servings!

Cooking

First things first, I poured out the amount of pasta the recipe calls for. I was looking at how small 1 cup of pasta is and I thought my mom was absolutely crazy for that amount in the recipe. For this reason I added a little less than 2 cups (just under half a box). This still may not seem like a lot (I feel like I could eat half a box of pasta on my own) but I promise it all worked out! I boiled this, drained it, and let it sit off to the side. If you have 2 big pots, I would recommend boiling the pasta at the same time as the steps that follow because it will save a lot of time. While the pasta was cooking, I attempted to dice the onions, a shitshow would be an accurate representation of how that went. For that time I forgot all that my mom has taught me about cooking and resorted to my memory of the Nintendo game “Cooking Mama” (random I know). Obviously Cooking Mama wasn’t much help but in the end I managed pretty well. My mom makes this shit look so easy.

After following the beginning steps of the sauce recipe, the whole house smelt SO f*ing  good… I’m working on bottling that smell into a candle, stay tuned.

Pasta fagioli can be prepared like pasta in sauce (think spaghetti in red sauce), or in a more soup-like manner (think chicken noodle soup, but with a lot of noodles).

If you prefer your pasta fagioli more soupy, just add more water or use less pasta! The consistency should be pretty easy to control!

This meal is definitely has a tradition in my house, especially during Lent. If you’re not familiar with Lent, it is a time a sacrifice to honor Jesus’s sacrifice for us. To cut to it, one of the things we sacrifice is eating meat on Fridays. So, this was a key Lenten Friday night meal for my mom to make. One problem: when my brother was little he hated this dish, I think the beans genuinely scared him. So, my mom would always make or order a pizza with this dish. Pizza and pasta fagioli ultimately began to go hand-in-hand in my house. Over the years this became a Friday night tradition, even outside of the Lenten season. My mom still invites our neighbors and friends over each month for pasta fagioli and pizza, even after my brother got over his fear of cannellini beans.

Final Product

My mom typically makes it more soup-like, however mine didn’t turn out that way. It actually made the dish look very soupy in the gif, but if you look above, you can see that the pasta absorbed a lot of the liquid.

Final Thoughts

I am so happy that I made this meal! It was so much easier than I expected it to be! Also, sitting around the dinner table eating this with my roommates made it feel like a Friday night at home, enjoying this meal with my family and neighbors. Also, as for the sharing of this meal, I was able to feed like 6 people (we all ate a lot) and still had enough for lunch for myself the next day.

I am happy to declare this dish as another success! I’m thinking though that I should try more challenging dishes soon. We rated this a 10 across the board and it will definitely be on the menu for future housemate dinners! Tune back next week for a challenge dish recommended by a fellow classmate: “Dorm-Friendly Dinners”, should be fun!

~ Kelsey

By popular demand I present to you dessert week!

I also will not apologize for the Hollaback Girl reference because it was THE ICONIC song of my childhood. Although, as a 6 year old no on told me the inappropriate words and innuendoes in this song.. whoops! Anyway, it just so happens to fit in with this post because this week I made banana bread! As I stated in my post last week, my mom was hesitant to let me share this recipe. I believe her exact words were: “Really? You want me to share my banana bread recipe?!”. It was like I was asking her to sign her life away. But lo and behold I bring to you my mom’s famous banana bread recipe! Like Hollaback Girl, this banana bread is up there with the most iconic parts of my childhood. I can’t wait to get this baby out of the oven and into a glass of (dairy free) milk so I can act like I’m back at home as a kid on a rainy Sunday.

Michelle’s Banana Bread

Shopping

This week’s shopping was much less intimidating than last week because shopping for baking needs is so much easier, everything is pretty much in one place! Something that took me by surprise was how damn expensive vanilla extract is… remind me to get my mom to buy it for me in the future.

Cost breakdown:

2 eggs is about $0.32, a stick of butter is about $1.25, 3 bananas is about $0.50, flour was $1.49, sugar and vanilla extract would equate to around $0.50 each, baking soda would be like $0.05, and the tins to bake in were about $1. So overall it comes to about $6… an absolute steal if you ask me! Also I didn’t have anything to bake it in so I bought some tins that were about $0.99 for 2 of them… and yes I actually get out my calculator and do these calculations LOL.

Cooking… or shall I say Baking

This is a recipe I am very familiar with because it is one that my mom would make every chance she got. If she was given the choice between me and never eating bananas again, lets just say she may hesitate for a second (mom if you’re reading this, I’m kind of joking)

Now if you’re looking at this picture thinking that I’m crazy for showing you brown af bananas please don’t click away! One of the other reasons that my mom would make this all the time was because she would always buy a lot of bananas and my siblings and I wouldn’t eat all of them before they went bad. Instead of wasting all of those bananas (because Italian-Americans, or honestly maybe it’s just my crazy family, treat wasting food like a mortal sin), she would throw them into the freezer until she was ready to make banana bread. My roommates and I do the same thing when we buy bananas so I have been throwing them into the freezer too and used 2/3 of the bananas for this recipe that were previously frozen #MakeMomProud

The first step is to mash the bananas, this is a lot like making mashed potatoes. My mom has some special tool to make this process easier but I used a fork. I wish I packed that tool because this took a little while. A word of advice from me would be to take as many utensils from your home kitchen and bring them to college with you. When your mom complains just tell her YOLO… my mom doesn’t react well to that but I was not spending money on all of those utensils. Anyway, after mashing the bananas you add the sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla. I had an idea to add a splash of vanilla almond milk too and it ended up making it extra moist! After adding the other ingredients, the batter is done!

Another handy utensil to make sure you pack with you when you move into an apartment is a whisk. Baking becomes a lot harder when you have to mix dry and wet ingredients with silverware. But all turned out well and I can even provide a weekly basic white girl gif! I actually posted this gif on my Instagram story and a few of my childhood neighbors responded because my mom would always make it for our neighbors too so it was a big part of many childhoods! I also got some responses from other broke college students who jealous and wanted some banana bread too… I should just send them the link to this post now! I may have just started a banana bread revolution across Rutgers University! Instead of a “blackout at the birthplace” I will rename it “banana bread at the birthplace”, I’ll send you guys that petition ASAP.

peep Nush’s chicken cooking below… I hope it doesn’t add chicken flavors to the bread… stay tuned…

One important step that my mom failed to include in the recipe is probably the most important step in this whole recipe. That step is getting a spoon or spatula to scrape the excess batter off and eat it. Now if you’re going to tell me that I am going to get salmonella (like my housemates yelled at me mid-spoonful) then I would politely respond that I have gone nearly 20 years without contracting such illness so I don’t actually believe in that myth… and you’re probably just lame.

Final Product

Final Thoughts

Well overall I’d say that my apartment has smelt like banana bread for many hours after it was done baking so I basically found the ultimate cure to homesickness to say the least. Also just to clarify, the chicken cooking below had no effect on the taste of the bread incase any of you were worried about that.

After receiving responses to my Instagram story from some of my boyfriend’s friends, I decided it may be good to expand from just me and my housemates’ ratings. So, I decided to be a good girlfriend and drop a loaf off to my boyfriend and his friends… to no surprise a group of hungry college boys will rate any free food highly in hopes to get more free food… so yeah back to me and my housemates: we gave it 11/10 across the board for recreate-ability, affordability, and taste. I’m still shocked that I made 2 loaves for just around $6, at that price I’ll end world hunger with banana bread alone.

I was going to include a picture of all of them eating from the same container with their hands but I didn’t want to scare you guys away I will never understand boys but at least I know it was good food! See you guys next week when I spend my grocery money on something besides dessert!

~ Kelsey

I looove shrimp! I was so excited to prepare this meal this week. This is a dish my mom would always say was simple to make so I decided to test it out. Even if you don’t like seafood, stick around because the sauce is still good on pasta or other things! However, in my house we love seafood. From salmon to shrimp to lobster, a week isn’t complete without a seafood dish. Shrimp scampi was another meal that I would always ask my mom to make. Out of all of my mom’s shrimp dishes, this one is not only my favorite, but also the one I predicted to be the least expensive to recreate. One thing that made me laugh when cooking this dish is remembering the first time my younger brother had shrimp because we all realized too late that we neglected to tell him not to eat the tails. The first of many “yikes moments” in his life. I feel that this dish will cure my homesickness this week because it isn’t just pasta or chicken, which I can cook any time. Shrimp is much more of a college delicacy that makes this feel much more like my mom’s cooking.

Shrimp Scampi

A Lost Child in the Supermarket

Shopping for this was kind of a mess. I get serious anxiety when I am shopping in the grocery store alone. I just keep calling my mom so a) I have someone to talk to and b) I don’t have to keep texting her a million questions.

I also didn’t plan to cook this dish until I was already in Target and saw the shrimp (because we always find what we don’t think we need in Target).

To start the journey, I accidentally bought cooked shrimp (because I’m dumb???). However, to look on the bright side, it did end up making the cooking process in my small ass kitchen a little bit easier. However, to look on the dark side, I think this may have increased the overall cost negatively. This meal was a little more expensive than the previous week because we decided to be boujee and get zoodles (noodles made out of zucchini) which were $4.99, to cut costs I would recommend linguini or rice. I also used a bottle of white wine that was $7. Side note: no one tell my mom that I bought a bottle of wine under $12 because she may seriously disown me.

“If I ask one thing of you, it’s that you never buy a bottle of wine under $12.”

– my Mom circa 2017

To get down to costs: the shrimp was $7, the two cloves of garlic would end up costing around <$0.25, the 1/2 cup of wine was about $2, the butter was half a stick so that equates to about $0.60, and finally, the zoodles were $4.99. That makes the grand total of this dish $14.85, which is a boujee price but it’s still under $15!

Cooking

So cooking this meal was very, um, interesting. I started with mincing the garlic, which I have never done before and really stressed me out, but I got through it with all of my fingertips intact so Kelsey: 1 Garlic: 0. I went on to sauté the garlic in the butter and oil, possibly one of the best smells in the whole world and it definitely made me feel like I was in my mom’s kitchen back home. In my house my mom doesn’t even need to call us down for dinner because we can always smell the goodness from upstairs.

So after realizing that I bought cooked shrimp I had to turn to prayer so that I wouldn’t mess everything up by over cooking the shrimp or something, but everything turned out just fine and I got another cliché gif!

Next, I added the wine and let it cook for the 2 minutes. As a kid whenever I saw my mom add wine to sauces I was always so nervous I was going to get drunk off of dinner and truly believed my mom was feeding me alcohol at 6 years old… logical I know.

After the shrimp and sauce were done, I mixed in the zoodles. Zoodles don’t need to be cooked, but they aren’t very tasty without sauce so I made sure they got a good swim with the scampi.

Please notice the cork floating in the wine bottle because we didn’t realize that we didn’t have a wine cork until I was half way through cooking

Final Product

Final Thoughts

So I cooked this dish for me and my housemate Nush, and we both were able to have a plateful with like 10 shrimp each! Overall the dish was very good and was a 9/10 for recreate-ability, an 7-8/10 for affordability and a 10/10 for taste. One way to minimize costs would definitely be substituting the zoodles for regular pasta or rice. I chose zoodles because I am trying to eat a little healthier, but this dish is definitely great, maybe even better, with linguini or spaghetti.

Check back next week for something you’ve all been waiting for……. dessert! Seriously I had to beg my mom to let me use this next recipe so I better see you back here! Happy cooking!

~ Kelsey