Cooking Your Way Through College

With Thanksgiving around the corner and the recent publication of celebrity chef Ina Garten's How Easy Is That? cookbook, we started thinking about how easy cooking can be if you have the right tools and the right guide. A lot of college students go home to help out with Thanksgiving dinner, and some just go home to eat. Well, this Thanksgiving put in a helping hand by checking out these student friendly cookbooks and trying out some of these recipes.

1.     The Best Budget Friendly Cookbook:

$5 A Meal College Cookbook by Rhonda Lauret Parkinson with B.E. Horton, MS, RD, ($9.95)

The $5 a Meal College Cookbook is fantastic for the frugal chef. Although it does not contain pictures, which are always helpful, it breaks down the costs of each dish and tells you the serving size. It also includes nutritional information. Perhaps one of the most important sections of the book is the section on microwaveable meals. So not only can you budget your meals and create delicious cheap meals, but you can do so in a microwave as well as on the stove. It is definitely a cookbook to have if you want to save money and skip the meal plan.

2.     The Best Step-by-Step Cookbook:

The Ultimate Student Cookbook by Tiffany Goodall, ($14.95)

The Ultimate Student Cookbookby celebrity chef Tiffany Goodall is the perfect combination of pictures and easy-to-follow directions. This is a great beginner's cookbook because it has a picture for every single step of the cooking process. The tone of the book is light with humorous comments like "stop looking at the book and look at the egg." It includes optional extras that you can add to each dish, serving suggestions and what to do with the leftovers. It is helpful, healthy, inexpensive and an overall friendly book.

3. The Best Overall Cookbook:

Look, Dude, I Can Cook!; Four Years Of College Cooking Made Easy by Amy Madden, ($16.95)

Although not the first of its kind, this cookbook was written by a mother of two college students who realized the need for a book that teaches teens how to cook. The book is split up into four stages, Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors, and each stage becomes progressively harder as the book goes on. It starts out with simple recipes that anyone can master, such as mashed potatoes, but by senior year you will be able to make a full Thanksgiving dinner. It has tips to save money as well as lessons on how to go grocery shopping and what to look for in fresh produce. Madden gives readers an alternative to dining hall food and canned vegetables with her use of fresh ingredients. She even explains what tools you will need to successfully navigate a kitchen. It's a great beginners cookbook that will build cooking skills to help you out later on in life.

4.     Best Lazy Person's Cookbook:

I Hate to Cook Book By Peg Bracken, ($22.95)

When Peg Bracken first wrote this book, her target audience was married women like her, who were expected to have a fresh dinner on the table every night. Now five decades later, her famous book just got a 50th anniversary update and her target audience has changed. But her quick fixes and witty recipes and tips are just as relevant as ever for the college crowd, especially after a week of Ramen and takeout food.

Don't let the chapters entitled "Luncheon for the Girls: Or Wait Till you Taste Maybelle's Peanut Butter Aspic" or "Little Kids' Parties: Or They Only Came For Balloons" throw you off. The chapters "The Leftover: Or Every Family Needs a Dog," "Desserts: Or People are too Fat Anyway" and "Last-Minute Suppers: Or This is the Story of your Life" are just as entertaining, truthful and useful as they were back then. Buy frozen veggies instead of canned and cutback a bit on the salt and butter. Be sure to read every page because there are gems like "Hurry Curry," "Philosopher's Chowder" and "Chilly-Night Chili" sprinkled in throughout the nearly 200 recipes in the book.

5. The Best Lifestyle Change Book:

The Dorm Room Diet By Daphne Oz ($16.95)

Any physician will tell you that to lose weight and keep it off you need more than just a diet — you need a lifestyle change. Maybe that's why Daphne Oz's The Dorm Room Diet has only has one chapter dedicated to recipes and nine chapters about all the other changes you need to get your mind and body in a healthy state.

Step one in her 10-step plan for a healthy lifestyle is to just get inspired or, as she aptly puts, "get over the fear of succeeding." In the following steps, she goes through how to avoid the dreaded freshman — and sophomore and junior and senior — 15. From discussions on how to steer clear of stress eating and binge drinking and to how prevent loading up on free food at college events and haggling for fridge space with your roommates, Oz covers many realistic college scenarios and provides many helpful hints, often in bullets and boxes, to avoid these common pitfalls.

She goes through many dorm-room exercises with pictorial descriptions to incorporate into a manageable, time-friendly workout routine. She even has a whole chapter on which vitamins to take to overcome the common cold, headaches, PMS and other common ailments. Finally, if all these new ideas aren't enough to get you pumped, she talks about her plans on how we as consumers can change dining habits at our college dining halls and throughout the country.