College Dorm Food

you could just buy prepared foods from a grocery store. it's not the best, but it's not the worst.

Pasta with tomato sauce.
Any pasta with sauce/pesto.
Mac 'n cheese or so.
Gnocchi, spinach and fried eggs.
Lentil stew.
Any stew.

And so on.

i guess to be more serious...

there's a lot of guides out there for cooking in your dorm room, but at the end of the day it's a lot of effort (and a huge pain in the ass) for pretty marginal results. beyond having things like a rice cooker and a microwave, most jerry rigged/half assed concoction you can come up with is probably: a. not going to be particularly better than ordering a pizza, or b. going to run you at risk of offending the RAs.

while its good you have access to a stove -- in a shared common room? -- do you have pots and pans and a fridge? i'd also suggest trying to work with your dining hall/meal plan options, or buying easy to eat things like cereal, rices, pre-cooked meats, etc at the grocery store to supplement your on-campus options. a lot depends on where you go to school and what it's like.

Just eat the fucking food lol. Whatever you can easily prepare can't be all that much better than the food you get in the commons.

Also, canned tuna is pretty cool for the cheap+convenience+nutritious factor.

Vs.

mexican bean salad

diced carrots, frozen/canned corn, black beans, kidney and white kidney beans, cumin, paprika, some kind of pepper, salt pepper, olive oil, cilantro, and lemon/lime. toss in some diced tomatoes if you want. no actual cooking required.

to mix it up, toss in a can of tuna every now and then. its good with a crusty bread or pita bread. its filling and nutritous.

initial cost may be high to buy olive oil and the seasonings, but if there is a dollar store nearby, you can always get them for less than a buck each, sometimes 2 for 1. tuna is like 79c/can. lemon/limes may be expensive depending on where you live, but where i live, theres a citrus tree in every yard so those are free. canned corn/beans are $1 each, sometimes cheaper. ethnic markets will have .39c cilantro or .39c/lb carrots or .89c/lb red/green peppers.

I actually kind of miss eating in my dorm, we had sandwiches and soup. I can eat sandwiches and soup most days. (stuff white people like) The problem was that they wanted like $7-10 for a sandwich and a soup and this was like, 11 years ago, so that was relatively expensive if you multiply that by like 50-70 meals per month on the plan. There was no value there. It is so expensive on those meal plans that it's hard to even get an underclassman to take you to the dining halls and swipe you for a free crappy meal, it's like a commodity. There were all you can eat buffets with overdone pasta and bolognese sauce, crappy salad bars, etc, but somehow those were always in the girl's dorms way across campus, never went.

Still though, you might have basic refrigeration and stuff, but trying to cook in a dorm room is not the best way to spend your time in college. You're gonna eat shitty food in college, that's pretty much it. I think truly Asian college kids might be able to pull off eating food other than cup noodles in their room all the time, but they inevitably weird out their roommates.
A rice cooker, a pack of eggs, and some soy sauce = meal. Rice cooker, kimchi, some seaweed, a microwave and a some eggs and sesame oil = meal. The Chinese folk I've seen in dorms get pretty elaborate, they are making hot pots and stuff in there, lol.

I dunno man, if I could go back to college, year 1, clean slate, all I'd be taking with me to school is several sets of sheets upon which to bed tender young ass, a wardrobe full of amazing clothes, a MB Air, and an iPhone. I'd just eat whatever is quickest and cheapest. No way to be a dorm gourmand.

Yes, yes this isn't a meal, but homemade cookies went over well with hot wimminz in my freshman dorm.

It would be me, and 2 hot girls roomies from the opposite side dorm making peanut butter chocolate cookies late-night. We'd come back after night drinking in the common kitchen, shoot the shit, baking, and having fun...
Once we'd had more than our fill we'd head over I'd head back to Roomie A's room to bang, while Roomie B would head out to sleep with her boyfriend.

That was probably the only time I'd ever use the dorm kitchen, I usually ate at dining halls.

So, I don't really have too much suggestions other than impolyt's where you're better off using most free time having fun and doing studying you need to do... I didn't really start cooking meals for myself until I moved off campus Junior year.

I never understood the average 20 yr old American's capacity to despise dorm food. I loved that shit and I lived in one of the worst rated dorms at my school. Massive salad bar, warm bread, deli bar, pasta station, grill/fryer (burgers, veggie burgers, chicken, fries) , fresh juices, cereal, steamed rice, stir fry station, soups, ice cream, fruit, and desserts EVERY TIME? AYCE and you don't wash a single plate. We had rotations of tamales, fried chicken, pizza, baked fish, tri tip, curry, etc. and I know shit has advanced 10x since 1999. Breakfast had a real waffle station and an omelette man as a bonus. Spend time studying, not cooking.

I guess pebblegrain and I are roughly the same age - and I feel that there's this almost separate generation of people about 5-10 years younger than us, who have basically lived with the internet, cell phones, compact disc and DVD, etc, all of their lives - I notice a lot of those kids are entitled as fuck, they live in la-la land about rights and material goods compared to the way I knew my generation to be just 10 years ago.
It is true that tuition at schools has doubled just around the time the aforementioned group entered college, because people of my age definitely had cheap tuition - I remember UT at Austin was like $1900/academic year or something. My school was only $4500 a year.
Still, kids who were of my age, where the internet and stuff was just breaking into mainstream usage, Napster was huge and still free, etc, etc, there were a ton of kids in my dorm who were going to school, expecting to pay for it with part time jobs; if they had cars, they were beaters, if they had TV's and stuff in their rooms they were buying the 13" CRTs and a little $50 fridge, etc. We didn't have air conditioning in our dorm rooms, had to share a gang shower, the whole building was disgusting and we expected that since we were basically paying like $250/month rent.

I went up to my school like 5 years ago and there's kids in the dorms parking Maserati Quattroportes and Range Rovers out in the big remote parking fields - what in the fuck? I'm pretty sure if I went up into those dorms the kids probably have flat panels and shit hung on the walls, everything Bed Bath and Beyond, potpourri and shit. They live in my old dorm but they installed A/C a couple years later, renovated everything, and they were still the 'cheap' dorms because of the internal layout, can't get around the common bathrooms without tearing the whole building down - they're not the hotel-like suite dorms that everybody lives in now with their like 5 fuck buddies and a disgusting shared bathroom where you all sit in there and eat snacks and talk about your feelings while some corny white girl in pajamas and a headband drops a deuce.

Honestly, recalling all of this, I realize that food was probably my least concern when I was living in the dorms, and I was just happy to have a meal prepared for me on most days. I was definitely worried about catching athlete's foot from the carpets or showers, dodging all the puke, IT throttling my internet, coming to the reality that girls poop, trying to stay on the good side of people so I could get their notes, etc.

bwaha we had coed bathrooms, I remember the first time I heard a chick take a massive dump

The snarky attitude towards food already existed when I was in school, I remember. You know, when two bros walk up to the service line and point at food and snicker "man this food sucks, bro". What exactly are two bros used to eating at home which is better? Steaks every night? Green bean casserole and caesar salad? (I'll make a new thread for this topic: What do white people eat at home?)

Another thing that changed during the time I was in school was the "acceptability" of working part-time in a non-cool job. I worked in cafeteria cleanup just for the money (there was a relatively high student minimum wage), and while other students did similarly when I was a frosh, this dropped off hugely by the time I graduated. The only part-time work classmates were doing was fake hipster bullshit like barista, bartender, or clothing clerk, and completely leaving menial labor to local non-students.

Anyway, for the OP, here's another thing to think about. I couldn't cook for shit until I was like 2-3 years out of college. All I could make in college was pasta, steak, scrambled eggs, and boiled rice. The food you can make at your age in your dorm is likely pure shit. If you are trying to save money you might as well combine eating out + breakfast cereal.

Yeah I noticed this as well. There was definitely that point in the '90s where if you were a cool white guy or a tappable single white non-corn female, you'd work at a good record shop. By the time the internet murdered the record business it turned into baristas and trying to work at the Apple store and shit, but at that point there was definitely this shift where kids got jobs and suddenly thought they were professional students and deserved both $3,000 a month in salary as well as a break from their studies, since they were 'busy' - this was about the end of my college career. I went to school on a full ride so I had time to sit around and observe pretty much all of this, and I definitely agree that working in dining services or something like that became way low-tier - it got to the point that all the American kids tried really hard to get Library and campus office work-study jobs, and the cafeterias were all staffed by international students.

i'm halfway between the two groups...

Hahah work study as far as I've noticed was alway easy peasy.. well, for the people who applied in the right areas.
In fact these people who qualified were given preferential hiring by a long shot that were given preferential hiring as admitted inadvertently by 3 of 4 my former campus bosses..

I still believe most campus jobs are > most off campus.

Find ones that have perks likes interacting with college kids or those that allow you to make your own hours for the work. Makes the going much less stressful since most wages are flat near minimum (at least from my experiences).

The again those experiences life internships and early hands on job opportunities in areas you might work in the future will be more productive since you're gaining experience..

Don't let a campus job keep you from that if your field requires it. Will work out better in long run earnings.