Affordable, simple recipes for cooking in hostels?

Hi,

Ive been staying in hostels for about the past 5 weeks and fancy doing
a little more than eating tinned soup and sliced bread. Unfortunetely
Im not really much of a cook but willing to give it a go. So this got
me thinking that there are probably lots of people on this group with
hostellin experience that could suggest some recipes for me to try.

Requirements:

- As mentioned, its got to be something I can cook in a hostel so that
AGA stove recipe might not very suited. So it would most likely be
fried, boiled etc This would be true for utensils too as that melon
baller might not be at hand either

- It would preferably be mostly made up of ingredients that I would
only need to buy the once. For example, an onion or pint of milk
instead of a jar of something that I only need a pinch of, nothing
worse than having to carry lots of left over ingredients that cost too
much to leave behind, but of course some things I understand are
essential

- Minimum preperation. I dont mind chopping/dicing/slicing up lots of
things prior to cooking them, in fact it saves lots of time in the
process but I mean not having to leave items soaking overnight and the
like.

Anyway, hope someone can inspire me. I pretty much like anything that
does move on my plate and (as far as I know) anything like nuts,
gluten, dairy etc would harm me. I have tried searching for recipes
but most things come with a 20 ingredient minimum so its hard to find
anything useful.

So to all you Jamie Olivers out there, nows your time to shine...

sorry, for my lousy english, i'm from germany and usually i don't write
recipes in english


two easy things to prepare in hostels kitchens:
- pancakes
- pasta / noodles


for one pancake (depending on pan's size):
- 100 g flour (doesn't need cooling, expires not too fast)
- 1 egg (doesn't need cooling, expire not too fast)
- 0,1 l milk (yes, needs cooling, but you may be thirsty the next morning?)
- salt
- oil, butter or something to put into the pan before cooking

1) mix flour, milk and eggs (without the shell!) with just a little bit
of salt.
2) stir everything, until no crumbly parts are visible any more.
3) heat up the pan to a medium temperature, add some oil / butter into
the pan
4) add enough of the dough into the pan, that the bottom is covered with
a 3 to 5 mm layer
5) wait.
6) you can peek under the layer, if it is dark enough. usually, if you
didn't heat up too much, the top of the pancake will start to become
"solid", that's the time when you have to flip the pancake.

if you want to do some nice experiments: add some bacon, cheese or apple
slices to the pancake.

if you buy a sixpack of eggs, you can make more pancakes. even on the
next day, when they are cold, they are very tasty! (in this case, 6eggs,
you have to multiply all ingredients with 6 - should be quite easy)






noodles:
- noodles
- tomato sauce
- salt, pepper
optional:
- vegetables of your choice (special offers at the supermarket?)
- meat of your choice (maybe you find one of the price-reduced minced
meat packages in your local supermarket?)

1) cut vegetables into small pieces
2) boil water (in a pot), add some salt
3) put noodles into the pot (need stay in boiling water for 5 to 10
minutes, depending on noodles)
4) fry the meat in the pan. use a fork or something else to crumble it
into small pieces. put some salt and pepper onto the meat while frying.
5) add the tomato sauce and the vegetables to the meat
5) test, if the noodles are soft enough for you
6) filtrate the noodles from the water
7) mix noodles with meat/vegetable-tomato sauce (eventually add some
more salt, but try before you add



bon appetit!

You'll find that many hostels around Australia will have cheap eat
nights - in fact Calypso backpackers in Cairns has an all you can eat
thing every night of the week for only $7 Australian. Sometimes it is
very much worth looking at the alternative of cooking it yourself,
because you can find that it is a lot cheaper than doing it yourself.

Oh, there's also a soup kitchen near Central Railway station in Sydney
(diagonal over the road from Sydney Central YHA). This is where you'll
find a lot of people down and out, and is either free or very cheap.

Dave
The Word Australia Travel Guide
www.thewordaustralia.com.au