With the quarter coming into full swing now and being stuck at the library for hours in a day, it’s been a little challenging finding food to keep the pit in my stomach from growling at my neighbors during class. It’s hard enough having to read about a hundred pages a day, so sometimes I have to resort to leftovers.
As college students, I’m sure all of you are familiar with the concept of leftovers. For some, it might even constitute more of your diet than food you actually make on the spot. In college my dad would make a giant pot of pasta at the beginning of the week and eat it through to the next week, and then make the same pot of pasta again, and repeating that throughout the year. That’s not a great balanced diet in my opinion.
So with all my lack of time and short resources, I headed into my kitchen this week with a heavy heart and ravenous appetite, but emerged with a crowning jewel of a dinner: fried rice.
It may not sound so spectacular, but when you’re hungry, it really doesn’t matter as long as there’s a lot of it. Rice is definitely one of those foods where you can make a lot out of a little, and in fact it can last for days. All I did was make copious amounts of brown rice on Sunday, and I’ve been using it since to fry and mix with scrambled eggs, peas and carrots. And then I drown it in too much soy sauce.
It’s a really big cost-saver, but be careful if you’re not a runner, because I’ve done a lot of unnecessary carbo-loading off of it lately. As long as you spread out your dinner over multiple days, rice can be really good for you, especially with the added ingredients.
Peas and carrots are good to fulfill your daily veggie intake, and scrambled eggs have a lot of protein packed into them. You can also add other vegetables like celery or onions to increase the flavor. Honestly, I just fried the rice in garlic-olive oil and it added all the punch I needed to complete the range of flavors I was craving.
Rice itself is also good because it contains little fat and a lot of fiber. It also has no sodium, but I almost left that part out because it depends on how much soy sauce you slosh on top, and for me it’s more than a little.
I can wait a few more weeks to lose my winter break weight, right?
