Student cooking site a recipe for success

The stereotypical college diet consists of late-night pizza, various Ramen creations, and anything that involves the phrases "just add water" and "microwaveable." In most cases, it's easier after a long day of work and class to hit up Grub Hub or stop at Chipotle en route to your apartment.

It may be hard to see the light when restaurants all around the city are preparing perfect, inexpensive, and quick-fix meals right to your plate, but feasting daily on over-processed creations and saturated deep-fried treats can add up in calories and funds.

To fight college hunger pains and fix the fast-food fiasco taking over the 20-something's diet, DePaul Senior and Political Science major Katie VanderMolen has created a go-to blog, thecollegeculinarian.blogspot.com, as a reference for college students looking to make healthy, cheap and easy meals that not only look delicious but taste delicious, too.

"My food blog originated after my friends and I started trading recipes back and forth," said VanderMolen, "I began blogging at the beginning of my junior year as an easy way to update friends and family-it's also a pretty awesome procrastination resource for my college friends," she said.

VanderMolen said that after moving off of DePaul's campus and needing to get some "basic cooking skills" after eating a horrible meal, the blog was born.

"After eating an atrocious meal of tuna mixed with unsalted canned tomatoes, I was desperate," said VanderMolen, "my blog developed after the tuna-gag fest as a way of sharing recipes with friends and family," she said.

Not only does the blog offer pictures of VanderMolen's gourmet-looking creations but it also offers recipes in single-served portions, perfect for college students who don't want to waste the time making one meal for themselves that ends up serving seven.

"After I moved off campus I started to cook for myself a lot," said DePaul Junior Jackie Hoover, "A lot of these recipes look like things that I would like to try to make. The blog is pretty funny, too."

"Scaling recipes to serve a single busy student lessens the monotony."

These single-servings on recipes are healthy, as well.

"I definitely try to stay in a healthier realm. Finding out the Freshman 15 weight gain wasn't a myth helped influence that," said VanderMolen, "Many believe the shape of the college food pyramid to be Easy Mac, pizza, and Ramen, but those foods are better at making you more of a round shape, if you know what I mean."

Although VanderMolen said that she has gotten the hang of most recipes, her first dishes were less-than perfect.

"One of my first dishes was grilled chicken. I figured it'd be one mental step up from microwaving breaded chicken nuggets. I plugged in my George Foreman grill, threw on a completely frozen chicken breast, and hoped for the best," said VanderMolen, "Many curse words and phone calls to my mother later, I realized you need more than hope to cook chicken. Starting with thawing the chicken breast in advance."

Cooking blunders aside, VanderMolen said that there are perks to keeping a blog, even if most of her followers are strangers.

"A few of my friends are followers on my blog, but it's primarily people I do not know personally. I seem to have quite a few mid-twenties range followers. However, I've received emails from a lot of self-identified 'old people' as well," said VanderMolen,

"I just found out the other day you can see how many hits your website gets from different countries, and I've gotten a considerable amount from Spain and the UK. I'd like to think it's the still-single Prince Harry scoping out my collegiate cooking adventures, but that's probably a stretch."

Even if Prince Harry isn't necessarily reading her blog, VanderMolen said that finding new recipes is what keeps her motivated to keep cooking and sharing with the web community.

"The best part about keeping a blog going is always being on the hunt for unique recipes that are easy and affordable for college students to make," said VanderMolen, "I love working with ingredients I've never eaten before- life's too short to eat turkey on Wonder bread everyday."