Cookin’ for College Students

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The project for SUU that I chose included me putting together a cookbook. I put together recipes that I have used in my college experience and also found new ones through friends and the internet. With these in my possession, I then went on to test a few of them and took pictures. After getting all of my supplies together, I took them to a cookbook creator website, which got me to put everything into a template provided through the company Cookbookcreate.

The inspiration for this project came from my love of food. I love to cook and I wanted to step away from my major and get creative. I wanted to prove that making/cooking meals in college is easy. You can truly lose 15 lbs. your freshman year instead of gaining. I was also inspired to do this because I wanted to test my management skills and see if I could actually stick to a plan. From my Google doc. in which I recorded my journal came this, “They all seem to be somewhat diverse and this will help me with the cookbook portion when it comes time. I might be able to make a cookbook just based on the input that I have gotten.” This is in regards to when I was inspired because my friends were actually getting back to me.

One of the biggest challenges that came was my time management. I had a plan set up in my proposal and final plan but it came crashing down once I started get more involved in my summer job and taking the other time to just enjoy my summer. I still got it done, which was a major plus but it took a lot. From my journal of June 19th: I am trying to keep up but then I told myself that I basically have all summer so that is a negative for the whole plan completion and the time-frame I set myself up with.” I wanted to be done so bad but life got in the way and I did not stop it for a couple weeks at a time.

My project has benefited my roommates who have seen a few of the recipes and love how simple they are. A couple of them literally only have three ingredients. This project has also benefited my family because it showed them that I can complete things within a summer. I am truly grateful for my family’s support and willingness to try the things that I made. In the cookbook, I have little messages on each page that starts a new section and one of those reads something like it may look gross but I promise it’s delicious! This has been the most motivational line for me and it worked on my family and friends.

My cookbook benefited me because I proved to myself that I could get it done within a summer, which I knew would take a lot of effort. I also feel that I benefited from getting some really good lunches and dinners from this project when I was testing recipes. Another thing that was good for me, thanks to this project, came from that I got to work on my photography skills. I may have used my parents’ smart phones to take the pictures but they still turned out kind of professional. Then comes my favorite part of this project: the title of the cookbook. I decided to name it the “Not so Professional Cookbook” because I believe in being an amateur. One last quote from my journal where I felt like I benefited came from July 5th: “Put the recipes in a numerical order and got the ones ready that I wanted to take picture of. Getting closer to getting this done and ready to be so.” I got some gain in my organization skills and this made things so much easier.