College Cooking with Celia

Easy Frozen Burgers

I’ve shared a few posts that are my go-to’s when I have zero time for dinner. This semester, I have a class that ends at 4:15 and then a 4 hour ochem lab at 6, so on Mondays I need something quick.

This recipe is super basic, but I wanted to share it anyway because it’s an excellent go-to when you have 15 minutes to cook but want something substantial and filling. Cue frozen burgers!

Frozen burgers are honestly the best. My roommate and I ALWAYS have a bag of them in the freezer because whenever you need to, just plop one in a pan, season with salt and pepper, and you’re good to go.

Depending on what I have on hand, I’ll top my burger with sautéed onions, avocado, tomatoes, spinach, etc. I’ll also sometimes sauté vegetables to go on the side, or make a little salad. It all just depends on what you have in your kitchen!

So make sure you always have frozen burgers on hand for the best 15 minute dinner!

Easy Frozen Burgers

Serves: 1

Cook time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

1 frozen burger patty (I like 85/15 meat to fat ratio)
Salt
Pepper
Garlic powder
Veggies of choice (spinach, tomatoes, onions, avocado)
Cheese of choice (sharp cheddar is my favorite)
1 bun (don’t have a bun? Eat it without!)
Ketchup, mustard, mayo etc.

Instructions

In a pan over medium heat, cook frozen burger about 5-7 minutes per side, or to desire doneness, seasoning both sides with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
Toast bun in a toaster over, toaster, or under a broiler.
Place cheese on top of burger after flipping.
Once burger is done and cheese is melted, assemble burger as preferred: add ketchup, mustard, mayo, top with vegetables of choice.

Note: Serve with anything you have on the side! A salad, sautéed vegetables, tater tots, the possibilities are endless.

Weekly Gratitude #4

A shortened week is always a good week in my book, so this week absolutely flew by. We’ve also had a ton of weird weather, from a high of 9 degrees on Monday to a high of 50 on Wednesday. It’s back to being cold again but this has definitely been a good week. Lots of ochem studying, but also celebrating my BFF/roommate’s birthday 🙂

I hope this week has been good to you, but if not, try and find the small good things anyway. And rest assured that next week can be better! Let me know below what you’re thankful for this week!

This week I’m thankful for:

Cozy sweaters and my radiator when it’s 9 degrees outside
Catching up with my BFF Carissa
A short week
The baked oatmeal I meal-prepped this week
The pulled pork I meal prepped this week
The homemade sesame chicken I made on Wednesday
A couple of good workouts
Snow
Celebrating my BFF/roomate Deena’s birthday with grilled cheese and cake
Getting all dressed up
Seeing In The Heights (my fave musical!!!) with Deena and Josh
Laughing a LOT as we adventured through the city before and after the show
Deep cleaning the apartment
Productive Saturday afternoons
Chocolate covered pretzels
Sunday brunch with my girl Shelby
Phone calls home

Slow Cooker Pulled Pork

One of the things I miss most about home is my parents’ cooking. Both my mom and my dad are excellent cooks (and bakers!) and I’m SO lucky I grew up getting to eat so many different things. But man do I miss my dads sausages with peppers and onions or sautéed mushrooms and my moms peanut butter cookies or spaghetti and meat sauce.

Before I moved into my apartment, as a birthday gift (since my birthday is in July) my mom gave me a recipe book full of all of our favorite family recipes as well as some of her easy go-to’s when she was in her 20s. It was the most thoughtful gift and now I can make her peanut butter cookies whenever I want 🙂 (although let’s be real they’re never as good when you make them yourself).

One of the recipes in this book is my mom’s pulled pork recipe. Since my roommate and I had kind of been in a food rut of eating the same things every week, I decided that I’d pick up a pork butt at the grocery store and we’d have pulled pork this week.

Now I feel like the phrase “homemade pulled pork” may be intimidating, but I promise it’s not! This was pretty much the easiest recipe ever because you make it in the slow cooker! All you do is season and brown the meat, cut off the twine that may be tied around it, and then stick it in the slow cooker with some stock. THE easiest meal prep.

It’s difficult to tell, but this is pulled pork atop tater tots and cheese. AKA life changing

I will say, I’ve only used a slow cooker once before and now that I’ve made this pulled pork I am a slow cooker convert. There’s nothing better than dumping a bunch of things in a pot and letting it cook for 6 hours while you get on with life.

The recipe my mom wrote calls for 3 pounds of pork butt, which feeds 9-10. I intended to buy 1-2 pounds to feed us for the week but all they had at ALDI was 5 pounds… so now we have plenty of pulled pork in the freezer 🙂

Lemme know what some of your favorite slow cooker recipes are, I’m on the hunt now that I’ve seen how easy it makes meal prep!

Slow Cooker Pulled Pork

Ingredients

3 pounds boneless pork shoulder (butt)
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup chicken broth

Instructions

In a small bowl, combine chili powder, salt, and cayenne pepper. Rub mixture over all sides of meat, pressing to adhere
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, warm the oil. Add the pork and brown on all sides, 6-8 minutes. Transfer meat to the slow cooker.
Add broth to the skillet, scraping any browned bits. Add broth to slow cooker, cover, and cook until pork is very tender, 6-8 hours on low or 4-5 hours on high.
Once finished, shred and serve: on its own, with barbecue sauce, as a sandwich, in a taco, or on tater tots!

Tuna and Bean Salad

Some days I get home and I have a sum total of 20 minutes to eat dinner before I have to go off to club meetings or band rehearsals or study sessions. On days like this it’s tempting to just pick up takeout, but that gets expensive quickly and it rarely the healthiest option.

On these days, I have one recipe that’s my go to. It literally takes 5 minutes to make and it’s super healthy and super delicious. It’s my Tuna and Bean Salad. When I first moved into my apartment and was grocery shopping with my mom, she told me that this is something my dad made a lot and it’s great because it’s cheap, quick, and easy. As a busy college kid I was immediately on board, so thanks mom and dad 🙂

This is another recipe (there’s clearly a theme here) where you really just use what you have. I always have canned tuna in my pantry, which is my starting point. Usually I’ll use Cannelini beans, but the ALDI where I grocery shop didn’t have any, so I bought garbanzo beans instead. What you do past that is up to you! This is delicious with diced bell pepper or cucumber, and sometimes I even mix it with pasta, but this time around I decided to just put the beans and tuna over spinach.

However you decide to make this, it’s a wicked easy, filling, and delicious lunch or dinner that has very quickly become a go to.

Tuna and Bean Salad

Cook time: 5 minutes

Serves: 2 (perfect to bring for lunch the next day!)

Ingredients

1 can of solid white albacore tuna

1 can of beans, drained (Cannelini or garbanzo are best)

Olive oil

Salt

Garlic powder

Red pepper flakes

Spinach

Instructions

In a medium bowl, break up the tuna into small chunks with a fork
Add the can of beans (and any other diced vegetables you decide to add)
Drizzle with about 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil, or until moist
Season with plenty of salt and red pepper, and garlic powder (be careful with the garlic powder, it’s super potent so a little goes a long way).
Top spinach (or pasta or rice) with half the tuna mixture and serve

Weekly Gratitude #3

This post is goin up a little late today because I have been all over the place today and WOO this week was a long one. I’m so exhausted and I’ve never been more grateful for a 3 day weekend. It has been full of sleeping and catching up on work since I started my job in a research lab this week! Super exciting but definitely exhausting. We were also supposed to get a huge snow storm this weekend but all we got was rain 😦

This semester is definitely starting to feel overwhelming (ochem, ochem lab, research lab aide, stat, Italian, history of photography, concert band, pep band) but we’re making lists and taking deep breaths and getting stuff done and it’s all gonna be okay. And we’re focusing on the positive parts! Especially art from one of my fave artists on instagram, Morgan Harper Nichols (@morganharpernichols or her website morganharpernichols.com). Check her out, her pieces always seem to speak to exactly what I need to hear.

Anyways, enough rambling, here’s what I’ve been thankful for this week. Leave a comment letting me know what you’re thankful for this week, I’d love to chat!

This week I’m thankful for:

3 day weekends
Mid week snow
Learning cool things as a lab aide
Ochem labs that are actually cool and fun
Art that speaks to exactly what you need to hear
Friends that understand your brain
The cozy corner in my bedroom (it’s next to the radiator and super warm!)
Morning movie friend dates
Birthday dinner for my girl Alli
Homemade hot chocolate
Friends who FaceTime you to help you download software on your computer
Writing letters
My playlist of music by The Head and the Heart
Cozy sweaters
Binge watching Netflix
Making it to the gym 3 times this week
My super quirky History of Photography professor)
Sundays spent cooking lots of things

My Fave Easy Dinner: Sweet Potatoes

I absolutely love sweet potatoes. Not in sweet potato casserole with all the marshmallows and brown sugar, I like my sweet potatoes with lots of salt and savory spices. I’m a big fan of just improvising in the kitchen, and with some inspiration from a Buzzfeed article, I came up with this super easy recipe.

The best part about this recipe is how versatile it is. It’s vegetarian, but if you want to add meat you can! Or take out the egg and cheese to make it vegan! Or throw in other vegetables based on what you have in the kitchen. These are my favorite kinds of recipes because you can never get bored of them. Plus, this recipe makes two to three servings, which gives you lunch for the next day! We’re all about easy meal prep here.

You want your sweet potatoes to be diced pretty small so they cook quickly

Easy Sweet Potato Dinner Bowl

Cook time:

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

1 large or 2 small onions, diced

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 large or 2 small sweet potatoes, diced

1 15 ounce can of beans (black, kidney, or pinto are best)

Salt

Red pepper flakes

1/2 cup uncooked rice (I prefer brown)

2 eggs

Cheese of your choice (cheddar or Colby jack are my favorites), shredded

Instructions

Sweet Potato Bowl

In about 2 tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat, sauté the onion and garlic until translucent and soft, and season with about 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and red pepper flakes.
Add the diced sweet potato to the onion mixture with another 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and red pepper flakes, turn the heat down to medium, and cook the potatoes until they’re soft.
While the potatoes are cooking, cook 1/2 cup of uncooked rice according to the package directions
Once the sweet potatoes are soft, pour in the can of beans (undrained), add more salt to taste, and cook about 7 minutes until the mixture becomes thick.

Soft or Hard Boiled Eggs

Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil
Add in both eggs and cook to desired consistency (6 minutes for soft boiled, 8 minutes for hardboiled)
Transfer both eggs to a bowl of ice water to halt the cooking process and peel when ready to eat.

Serve rice with 1/3-1/2 of the sweet potato and bean mixture, top with one egg and as much shredded cheese as you’d like!

Improvisation: Sausage Pasta

One of my favorite things to do is improvise dinner based on what I have in the fridge. It’s liberating to not have to follow a recipe and do whatever I want, and this dinner I made the other day was SO good. Seriously.

I know most people don’t know where to start when it comes to improvising dinner, so I’m gonna share my thought process every time. Past that, it really just takes practice and learning what tastes good to you. I always look through my fridge and first find some protein source (meat, beans, tofu, egg, etc), figure out what vegetable I have, and then decide on some carb (rice, pasta, potatoes). Which these three categories you could make a rice bowl, an improvised pasta sauce, or eat chicken and potatoes like my easy chicken recipe from last week.

I promise, improvising dinner can be really easy, you just have to be a little creative! And use plenty of salt.

So this recipe I made last week was a total improvisation. My roommate and I had Italian sausages in the freezer that we wanted to cook, so I knew those would be my starting point. I also had some leftover plain pasta from the weekend, so that was step two. I decided to use a bell pepper, and onion, and some cherry tomatoes (they were starting to get soft so I figured I’d better cook them) to improvise a pasta sauce! With plenty of cheese at the end, it was amazing. And made enough for lunch the next day!

Feel free to make this recipe as is, or put whatever else you want in it! Any meat or vegetables work, and that’s the beauty of improvisation 🙂

Sausage Pasta

Cook time: about 30 minutes

Serves: 2

Ingredients

2 Italian sausages

1 bell pepper, diced

1 onion, diced

About 1- 1 1/2 cup of cherry tomatoes, halved

2 cloves of garlic, minced

Salt

Red pepper flakes

Pepper

About 1-1 1/2 cups of cooked pasta

Cheese, shredded (mozzarella, parmesan, etc)

Instructions

In a medium pan on medium low heat, in about 1 tablespoon of olive oil, cook the sausages until done, about 15 minutes. Make sure to turn periodically so all sides cook.
Remove the sausages from the pan and cut into chunks.
In the sausage pan, in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, cook the onions, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes and cooke until onions are translucent, peppers are soft, and tomatoes have burst.
Add the chunks of sausage and the pasta and cook until everything is combined and warmed through
Top with desired amount of cheese, and serve.

Weekly Gratitude #2

This week was my first week back at school after break, so it’s been long and tiring, but also exciting as we start new classes and have a little more time for fun before homework and tests pile up. And we had snow! Which always makes me extraordinarily happy.

This week I’m grateful for:

Chocolate croissants from Starbucks
Reading books
Snow
Cold weather
New classes
Quirky professors
Going to the gym
Warm sweaters and socks and all the cozy things
Basketball games where we actually win!
Nachos
Band concerts
Life chats
Pizza parties
Deep cleaning the apartment
Days spent relaxing and watching movies
Dark chocolate chip pancakes with peanut butter

Easy Breakfast Taco

I love breakfast. I very strongly believe that there is no problem that can’t be solved by breakfast food. One of my favorite easy breakfasts to make, especially during the school year, is this simple breakfast taco.

The beauty of the breakfast taco is its ease and its versatility. Most recently, I made my breakfast taco with avocado, tomatoes, egg, and cheese. But you can add anything you want! Breakfast meats, potatoes, beans, peppers, onions; it all depends on what you have in your fridge.

Below is the recipe for the tacos I made most recently, but feel free to add or take away anything! And let me know below what your go-to breakfast is at the moment!

Easy Breakfast Taco

Cook time: About 15 minutes

Serves: 1-2 (I usually only eat one but it depends on your appetite in the morning)

Ingredients

1/4 avocado

2 eggs

1/2 cup cheese, shredded (cheddar or Colby jack are ideal)

2 small corn or flour tortillas

6 cherry tomatoes, halved

Butter

Instructions

In about one tablespoon butter, crack both eggs, season with salt and pepper, and cook on medium heat to desired doneness (I prefer over medium).
While the eggs are cooking, sprinkle 1/4 cup cheese on each tortilla and microwave about 40 seconds to melt.
Slice the avocado into 6 segments.
Place 3 slices of avocado and 6 tomato halves on each cheesy tortilla, and season with salt and pepper.
Place one egg on each tortilla and serve.

Easy Weeknight Chicken

Chicken is one of my favorite easy dinners, especially during the week. Between classes and research and band practices it can be really difficult to find the time to make things at home, cue spending too much money on takeout (or mooching off of freshmen with meal plans). And we can try to meal prep but sometimes you just run out of time. Which is exactly when I make a dish like this.

When I go grocery shopping, flash frozen chicken tenderloins are my go to. They’re small and frozen individually, so you can just keep a bag of them in the freezer. And you can cook them while they’re still frozen in about 15 minutes! Plus you can really easily double this recipe to make lunch for the next day, a win-win.

This past week I made this exact dinner, but you can make the chicken with pasta or rice, and with any vegetable you like. And I’m sure this chicken will resurface with other recipes later on, but here’s what I made most recently!

Easy Weeknight Chicken

Cook time: about 20 minutes

Serves: 1 (or double really easily!)

Ingredients

2 individually frozen chicken tenderloins (the unbreaded ones)

Chicken grilling seasoning (this stuff is great because it’s easy and versatile, but you can also use salt and pepper and any other spices you have on hand)

1/2 a large potato, diced

1/2 a red bell pepper

Instructions

In a pan over medium heat, sauté the chicken tenderloins in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Season the top side with the chicken seasoning (or whatever spices you want to use)
Add the diced potatoes to the pan and season with the chicken seasoning and about a teaspoon each of salt and pepper.
After about 7 minutes, flip the chicken over and season the other side.
Cook chicken until cooked through (about 7 more minutes) and stir the potatoes, allowing them to cook until soft and slightly browned.
Slice the half a red pepper (I love them raw, what’s easier than that?)
Serve the chicken and potatoes and peppers!