The kitchen hardly held the two skinny college students silently staring at a wriggling bag on the counter. The water in the pot behind them finally came to a boil. ‘Are you sure you want to eat it? We already named it,’ Emerson College senior Kendra DeMoura said to her boyfriend, Boston University senior Chuck Gerrior. Gerrior reached into the bag he had been carrying around Boston all afternoon and pulled out a lobster. ‘I paid, like, $15 for this. I’m eating it.’
DeMoura held the lobster up in front of Gerrior’s face, and said in a high-pitched voice ‘Chucky, don’t eat me, I’m your friend Harold.’ They agreed to at least knock Harold out first. After they stroked his back for a minute, Harold went limp.
‘Now put it in the water, quickly,’ DeMoura said.
They found a website that said to put a lobster into a pot headfirst. The pot they used was the biggest they had, though, and Harold wouldn’t fit. DeMoura tried turning him upside down and right side up but nothing worked. A college apartment just isn’t big enough to keep a pot that will cook a two-and-a-half-pound lobster. Finally, they decided to throw the lobster in tail-first, and Gerrior threw the top on while Harold tried to climbed out of the pot and DeMoura watched in horror.
They then sat down to wait for the 15 minutes it takes a lobster to cook.
DeMoura and Gerrior are part of a growing number of students who are cooking their own meals, citing their parents as their main influences, but the Internet and television as their source for recipes and questions. People like Gerrior, who have lost their jobs in the recession, are finding it even more important to use the money they do make wisely. Dining plans are increasingly expensive and many college students opt to switch to cooking gourmet food for themselves at home rather than pay for an apartment dining plan that forces them to eat the often times greasy or unhealthy food in the dining hall. BU’s apartment dining plan costs $1,750 per year, and comes with 96 meals and 1,000 convenience points, averaging out to $7.81 per meal, up from $7.55 a meal last year.
What’s more, students can choose what they want to eat if they cook at home, instead of being dependent on a dining hall menu. Meals like lobster become possible for the adventurous student cook, even in a small kitchen.
BU junior Liz Peyton cooks for herself on a daily basis. Peyton said she decided to move into an apartment with a kitchen and drop her dining plan to eat healthier and cheaper. She spends about $35 on groceries per week, meaning she spends about $5 per day on food, or under $2 per meal. This comes out to a little more than $500 per semester.
Twenty-year-old Peyton has lived in her own apartment since September, and cooks all her own meals. Her favorite dinner last week was parmesan-crusted pork chops, she said. She is now trying to use a different ethnic chicken recipe every week, she said. Peyton, who said she loves to travel, said if she can ‘use regional ways of cooking meat to fill my travel void, it’ll be more interesting.’
Like many students who cook, Peyton draws her inspiration from a number of sources. Peyton said her cooking inspiration comes from her mom, who always cooked a unique complete dinner, even after coming home from a long commute.
Peyton said she started cooking when she was in ninth grade, already throwing dinner parties for her friends at that point.
‘Once I started mixing cooking with my social life, I got more into it because I love cooking for people,’ she said.
Peyton finds all of her recipes online, though she does have two New York Times cookbooks in her apartment, keepsakes from her mom that are rarely used.
BU senior Holly Davison on the other hand learned to cook from her own mother and the mother of the family she stayed with while abroad in Grenoble one summer.
‘I cooked with my French mother a lot while I was there. She was trying to fatten me up. This was my mom’s specialty though,’ she said, giving her Madeira Chicken another little pour of heavy cream, ‘I don’t usually use recipes, but if I do, they’re ones I find on the Food Network.’
Davison spends about $50 on groceries every two weeks. If she eats her regular two meals a day at home, she spends about $1.80 per meal. A dining hall meal is more than four times as much as cooking dinner at home
Most nights aren’t lobster nights, but even a truly gourmet meal such as Harold only cost DeMoura and Gerrior about $15, which is slightly less than a meal for two at the dining hall. And DeMoura and Gerrior agree that Harold was certainly more succulent than any dining hall meal.
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