Cook smart: Off-campus students craft easy, delicious meals, utilize few ingredients
This pasta dish takes bolognese sauce to a new level with the addition of bacon, garlic powder and garlic salt. Spencer Bodian | Staff Photographer
Bacon bolognese pasta
Ingredients:
Pasta
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Bacon bits
Garlic salt
Cheese (cheddar or other)
Wegmans meat sauce
Chili powder (optional)
Ramen noodles are a staple for college students, but for about $3 per meal, you can eat pasta that’s a little healthier, a little heartier and a lot tastier.
Angela Zonunpari, an arts journalism graduate student, recommended her red-sauce pasta for students who live off campus and have to cook for themselves.
“I think it’s a wholesome food,” she said. “You don’t have to make anything else with it.”
Zonunpari begins by boiling the pasta in a saucepan with olive oil and salt. In another pan, she fries bacon bits. After the bacon is cooked, she sets it aside in a bowl and uses the same pan to make the sauce.
She puts three tablespoons of Wegmans meat sauce into the pan, along with a splash of olive oil and sprinkle of garlic salt. She lets it cook for a couple of minutes before adding salt, pepper and cheese. She said she prefers a little spice in her life, so she adds some chili powder.
Finally, she pours the sauce over the noodles and mixes in the bacon bits. As a last step, she adds basil for taste and presentation before enjoying her quick and easy meal.
Zonunpari said she usually buys her ingredients in bulk, but each meal comes out to about $3. She said the dish could be made even cheaper by leaving out the basil and some of the spices.
“It’s very easy to make and it’s not very expensive,” Zonunpari said. “You can just play around with it. If you have the pasta and sauce, you can just add other meat to it and change it up.”
Coconut curry salmon
Ingredients:
1 salmon fillet
Wegmans coconut curry simmering sauce (or other desired sauce)
Broccoli
Aluminum foil
Steven Freund’s parents instilled in him a passion for food and cooking at a young age. And after spending a semester abroad in Italy, Freund, a senior chemistry and chemical engineering major, began to love food even more.
“When I went abroad to Italy, that’s when I really started getting interested in cooking for myself,” Freund said.
In his off-campus residence, one of Freund’s go-to dinners is a quick and easy salmon dish. It takes approximately 25-30 minutes to make, including preparation and plating time.
Freund begins by taking a fillet of salmon with the skin still in tact. He places it in some aluminum foil and adds a splash of coconut curry simmering sauce. If coconut curry is not appealing, Freund said you can easily add a different sauce.
“The sauce is from Wegmans,” Freund said. “It’s really easy to find very tasty sauces that you just use a little bit of, and it makes cooking a lot easier.”
After incorporating the sauce, Freund wraps the salmon and sauce in a small tinfoil package and places it in a pan filled with boiling water. He sets his timer for 20 minutes and continues to add water as the fish cooks.
With five minutes left, Freund places broccoli in a separate pot of boiling water to steam. This ensures that both the fish and vegetables are finished at the same time.
He then takes the broccoli off the heat to cool, removes the fish from the foil and plates the dish. Then, it is ready to eat.
