College Recipes?

Our college-age daughters love to make chili or red beans and rice. Those are cheap and filling, and you can keep them for several days. If you keep black beans and refries around, you can mix them and put them into gently warmed corn tortillas for another complete protein. Keep bags of frozen vegetables in the freezer if you can; they don't go bad and you can quickly stir them into chili or any kind of soup. Onions and garlic are cheap and start many stir fry options off.

Buy a few extra ice trays if you can, and if you make a simple soup, you can freeze it in those and then put the resulting soup-ice pieces into baggies for later eating.

Make spaghetti sauce and put single portions into small tupperwares and freeze those. Then you can pull one out of the freezer and by the time some whole-wheat spaghetti is ready, you can have it defrosted.

Almost everything can be frozen in smaller portions and stored. It's like making your own box meals, but cheaper, with less sodium, and no icky stuff you didn't want.

There's a frozen homemade breakfast burrito recipe floating around on the internet that my kids reported finding. They make about eight or twelve (however many tortillas come in a package), freeze them, and then pull them out to heat up at breakfast.

Good luck!

You can make all kinds of things that either keep for a week + in the refrigerator or are easily frozen. Foods with high moisture content freeze best, and meats are best frozen before they're cooked. If you have a bit of freezer space, I'd suggest looking at your local supermarket's weekly deals and getting your meats when they are on sale. A 1.5 pound tray of 93% ground beef gives you 6 meals worth of meat. Dried beans are much better nutritionally and more cost effective than canned beans--one regular size bag makes the equivalent of 6 cans of beans for the cost of about 2 cans. Store sales will be your best friend.

You could do meatloaf with macaroni and cheese and green beans. Get (separated, if you prefer) freezer safe containers, make everything (but cook only until just barely done, else you'll end up with dried out nasty food once you reheat) and portion it out into containers.

Turkey burgers (buns freeze well, just put the whole pack in a gallon size freezer bag and take out what you need as you need it, then microwave for about 30 seconds to thaw), lasagna, chili, 15 bean soup, enchiladas, spaghetti (you could even do pre-made containers, just cook your pasta to very al dente and add some of the pasta water to the sauce before you drain. Portion everything out in containers, and all you have to do is warm it up in the microwave.). Rice freezes decently, cook a bunch at one time, portion it into one serving sizes, put on a wax paper covered cookie sheet and flash-freeze (use your measuring cup to make mounds on the sheet, super easy) and then after 3-4 hours, put the frozen mounds in a ziplock bag.

I like to make salads so I buy the three packs of romaine lettuce, chop one up (so then you have 3 nights of salad!) chop up a bunch of veggies and throw a frozen chicken breast in the oven for 30 minutes or so. Right now I'm getting a bunch of tomatoes and cucumber in the garden and my husband wont eat either, so I chop 1 cucumber and 1 tomato and eat all of it with a head of romaine, half a chicken breast, and some dressing for dinner when it's just too hot to warm up the oven.

Get creative--if you have friends who eat similar to you but don't live with you, get together and make a bunch of meals and then split them all. That way you don't take up a ton of freezer space, spend a ton of money, or have 10 of the same thing.

Thanks for making this topic! Thank you to all who responded.
I'm also in college and I'm going to be sharing an apartment in the fall and I was wondering how I was going to afford to eat heathy food while at school and now I have some new ideas.