Are you headed to college? Or are you starting to go on college tours? Here are some important questions to ask when you get there.
1. Do you have a separate kitchen? Sometimes a college may have gluten free options, but they are not educated on the cross contamination portion of the gluten free lifestyle. It is important to ask how they prepare the GF food and more preferably see it. I went to meet the kitchen staff before moving on campus. My undergraduate school told me they had a system where the utensils and pots and pans were color coordinated so things did not get contaminated. They had a designated section where the GF food was located, but they could not guarantee others did not use it. I later found this to be a major issue and experienced issues with cross contamination, so it is important to ask these sort of questions. 2. What do your options look like on a normal day? I wish I had asked or seen this before committing to a meal plan. If you can, ask regular students as well. My options were limited and I ended up barely eating at the dining hall my first semester. Do not be scared though, I have other friends who have experienced the opposite! 3. Can I opt out of a meal plan and if yes how so? Are there any dorms with kitchens I could get? My school asked me to get a note from my doctor saying I have celiac disease and can opt out of the campus meal plan. I believe if you do not have celiac you can also get a note from your doctor saying you are gluten intolerant or something of that sort. When I opted out of a meal plan though, it was important I had a kitchen to myself so it was clean and I was able to cook at any time. See if your campus has anything like this available, or a private kitchen for you (unless you do not mind sharing your kitchen). 4. What dining halls have gluten free options? Some schools have multiple dining halls, find out which ones do and do not have GF options, and what their hours are. This will be important for you to know when you're on specific parts of campus and need to eat. 5. Are there a lot of students that eat gluten free? This question is not vital, but sometimes it is nice to be able to see other GF people and talk to each other. I met several GF people and we would exchange snacks, make suggestions to our dining halls, and just vent about the food.
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So you've finally graduated high school and you're moving out of your parents house into the dorm life. Congratulations! Here’s what you should bring for your GF dorm…
Comment below if you think of anything else you would recommend!
I've been in school for three months for my third semester! Living on campus has been much better than last year. I have my own kitchen as you might recall me saying in an earlier blog. This way I do not need to go to the campus dining hall, Garlock Commons, to eat all my meals. There was a slim selection there that I did not trust so this way is 1,000 X better!
Some of you may be wondering, do you actually have time to cook in college? Yes! Most of my meals take 15 minutes to make, actually. If I want a fancier meal, I plan for taking more time. Otherwise, it takes no time at all, and its good, and its what I want. I make pasta with meat, or quesadillas, sandwiches, and I use a company called SunBasket (referral code: sunbasket.com/3free/Sabrina182452 ). I make many other things but these are some basics. Other times when I am especially not feeling it, I have my boyfriend steal me food out of Garlock and I eat there, but this doesn't happen often. What is my favorite thing to quickly make? Sandwiches. I can bring them with me to my 8am and eat them during my 11:30am break or at work at 2pm. They are portable, stay together, and are filling! Its important for me to always have sandwich ingredients in my fridge. I like to have either sliced chicken or sliced turkey, some lettuce- usually romaine, some tomatoes, and some type of cheese. I also usually use the Schar Artisan Multigrain Bread. If I'm feeling adventurous or have more time I'll add other things or switch it up. So far this is my routine in my dorm eating habits. Thanks for reading!! Have any more questions? Email me or comment below! I'll get back ASAP :)
If you do not know what home chef is, I go into more detail about it in my first home chef blog. Basically, I am shipped just the right amount of ingredients to make myself dinners!
This meal I made was Southwestern Shrimp Salad. This salad was pretty easy to make, and also pretty tasty. My only complaint is that I wish I had used less of the seasoning packet in the "dressing". I really liked it otherwise. The salad kept me full for awhile too, which is fantastic! I left out the onions this time around, lesson learned in the first meal, and I feel like that was a good choice on my part. That's one of my favorite things about this program, you can customize your food to how you like it. You can take out or add things you'd like! Comparing their dish and mine side by side, it doesn't look nearly as similar. Theirs looks a lot better! It was still tasty though and made a lot of food. **Side note- want the recipe? Get this post to 10 likes! I received my first shipment from Home Chef June 23rd. In the box was 3 meals, 3 recipes, a binder to hold the recipes, a coupon, some ice packs, and fruit. All of this cost about $70 a week. The fruit basket cost extra, and I don't know if I will get a binder and coupon with every package yet. Each meal gives me two full servings.
The first meal I decided to make was Chicken Queso. If you look at the pictures below, I think my meal turned out great, almost as good as their picture. It took me a little while longer than I thought it would because I had to cut up all of the vegetables. All in all though, it was cool to do and it turned out yummy. I'm not the type that can cook very well, bake- yes, cook- not so much. This made it easy for me to cook, and I had a whole meal left over for the next day! I was pretty proud of myself to see that I could make something like that, and it helped that all of the ingredients were right in my kitchen thanks to Home Chef. The food was good, there was so much that I couldn't finish it all. The sauce was really good and creamy, and I loved the tomatoes in it. I never would have thought to have done that. If I could go back and make it again, I would leave out the onions. I am not a huge raw onion fan and felt like I could taste them for days after. I suppose I should have known better. If you're interested in finding out more about the company, or want to try it out yourself, go to www.homechef.com ! **Side note- want the recipe? Get this post to 10 likes! Today I cooked an easy dinner at my apartment that I assume I will be making a lot. Super simple, super tasty.
I boiled pasta, specifically Wegmans Gluten Free Penne. I fried up chicken breast in some extra virgin olive oil. Last, but not least, I added my Tomato Pesto sauce also made by Wegmans. Like I said, very easy! Not something I want to make everyday or anything, but the sauces are interchangeable and its fail proof. I'm not the best chef and have a small variety of things I can actually make. This means, anyone can make this meal! Even in a dorm room :) *Side note- cute paper plate, right? #CollegeProbs So Friday night at about 8 pm I awoke from a nap to realize I needed to eat dinner before I head off to work at 10 pm. I started to look around at my options and realized I didn't have many, but I did have a frozen steak.
I was following all of the instructions my mother was texting me, but what I didn't realize was that the stove burner was turned up pretty high when I was cooking. I started to make my steak and it got very smoky and I continued to get more and more concerned that I was going to set the fire alarm in my apartment off. I burnt one side of the steak and decided to cut off that part and try again. I was hard core struggling, you could say. I don't know why I thought I would get away with making this steak and not setting off the alarm. Obviously, the fire alarm started to go off at around 9 pm. The thing with fire alarms on campus is that, if one alarm goes off in a room, the entire building needs to be evacuated. Even if there's not actually a fire. Then campus security has to come and look at the fire alarm for some reason. And then the fire chief and a fire truck have to come. Every time the fire alarm goes off. No matter what. So you can imagine how embarrassed I was of this entire situation! I'm standing outside while all of my peers look around wondering "Who did it this time?" and then they all find out. Everyone was really nice about it and forgave me, but I still felt bad. The highlight of the whole situation was when the firemen came out of my apartment and complimented my steak. At around 9:30pm I said to myself, "screw it" and I sat down at my kitchen table and ate my steak that ruined my night. Why am I telling you all of this? So you know, s**t happens. You've got to go with it. Yes, it was embarrassing, but it could have happened to anyone. Just make sure to watch what heat level your burners are at, please. NonI attend Roberts Wesleyan College in Chili, NY. Going into my freshman year, my mother and I spoke to several people about how my diet was going to be handled. I was told the selection of gluten free food in the cafeteria would be great, just like what the other students would be eating. This was a lie.
They had a "Gluten Free Zone" in Garlock, the building we call our cafeteria. In the "Gluten Free Zone" was this: individually wrapped slices of bread (and they were very crumbly, could only survive after being toasted), the occasional bagged muffin, the occasional bagged cookie (both of which disappeared quickly because non-gluten free eaters wanted them too, obviously), two choices of cereal (corn chex and chocolate chex), sometimes there would be waffle mix, and lastly there was one meal choice that had one meat, one carb (usually), and one vegetable. I should mention that the meal we were given was generally not good. What did the other students have, you might be wondering. Everyday they had several types of pizza, pasta, French fries, hot dogs, hamburgers, a sandwich bar (we could also use the sandwich bar but it was cross contaminated no matter how much they prevented it), a salad bar (we could use this too, but it was not very big), pasta salads, a buffet that changed daily (we could eat here sometimes, but had to ask the staff about it), and lastly they also had the meal we had in the "Gluten Free Zone", but with gluten. The first semester was hard for me. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to handle my new eating situation, if I should make food for myself or suffer in Garlock, keeping in mind I had already been put on an expensive meal plan. I shed many tears over this situation. When you're going hungry and you're experiencing the stress of being a music student on top of that, you have some break downs here and there. None of my friends could understand, although I'm grateful for how supportive most of them were, regardless, I was alone. My second semester is when things started to turn around I guess you could say. I accepted the fact that this was my situation. I had sandwiches for many meals, and usually it was the same sandwich because of the lack of variety in the sandwich bar. I became friends with the woman working the sandwich bar even, she's an amazing lady. I also took hot dogs or hamburgers from the other kids' food bar. I'm sure this was cross contaminated, but I didn't have much choice. So where am I at right now? Now, I have been given an apartment by the school. The apartment is on campus and has a kitchen just for my roommates and I. I am very thankful for the school letting me have this apartment. I am currently working on campus over the summer, so I get to stay in the apartment for the summer as well. So far, so good! I'm making my own food, I'm getting rid of my meal plan, and I'm excited. Maybe I'll have a better experience this coming semester. And that is what I'll be writing about in this blog; how this ends up going for me, and I plan to be 100% honest about it. So please follow me in my journey of my sophomore year at college! |
AuthorSabrina DeVos, 22 Archives
August 2019
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