Are you making plans to move to the college dorm and start the next phase of your life? The key to figuring out how to cook in a dorm room starts with knowing what the school allows and what they provide. If the dorm won't let you have any portable cooking appliances your options are very limited. If you have a shared kitchen with a stove your options are unlimited. Chances are, the real situation will lie somewhere between these two extremes.

Dorm room cooking has been a matter of inventive methods of desperate students for years. Whether boiling water in an electric hot pot to make ramen noodles, or ironing a cheese sandwich inside two pieces of foil, hungry college kids will find a way to satisfy their craving or find a new way to consume a missed meal. With dining plans escalating in cost and financial aid decreasing, students are needing to find ways to cut costs. Eating out gets expensive. Eating sandwiches and bowls of cereal gets boring. The cure for this problem is to find out how to cook in the dorm room and adapt to the allowances

When preparing to move to the dorm, a few things to look for are storage space for food, how much refrigerator space is available, is there stove access, does the room have a microwave or can one be brought in, and are portable appliances like griddles and crockpots allowed. Getting these questions answered early on allows you to buy the right equipment from the beginning.

The best possible option would be for the dorm to have a kitchen, even if it is shared. This option would ideally allow for stove top and oven cooking and would have refrigerator space. This is not the most likely option but there are dorms offering shared kitchen arrangements. To cook in a dorm room with a shared kitchen option means planning a schedule on who gets to cook when or enjoying community meals where everyone chips in on the cost and on the cooking. If you are making a dorm room meal just for yourself be sure to scale back your cooking style to support your new cooking for one life style. With a stove option, your cooking possibilities are only restricted by your budget.

If the microwave is your only option, your dorm room cooking may be restricted in some aspects but it does not have to mean giving up making meals. Many meals can be made in a microwave. Hot breakfast cereals like oatmeal and grits can be made in the microwave. For lunch soups, chilis, hot sandwiches, meatballs and other commercially packaged microwave meals can be cooked. For dinner, Success (and other similar brands) rice make rice which cooks in the microwave and many canned vegetables can be steamed in their bags. A microwave-only situation is not the complete best dorm cooking situation but the options for reducing the cost of food consumption are greater when a microwave is available. http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art33020.asp

Aside from the coffee pot and blender, if the dorm room allows portable appliances, a number of food items can be cooked. A crockpot provices many options for cooking meals in the dorm room. A bag of frozen meatballs, two cans of cream soup and some time will allow meatballs and rice with gravy, or meatball subs with no action beyond dumping the meatballs and soup in the crock before turning it on. A George Foreman grill can cook burgers, sausage, sandwiches, fish, and other items which can be heated up in a flat compressed environment. An actual griddle makes pancakes a possibility but since the heated surface could cause a fire some schools do not allow them. Sandwich makers, Panini makers, hot pots, rice cookers and popcorn poppers round out the list of appliances which make cooking in the dorm room possible.