Page 4
The Behrend Beacon
Students need a kitchen filled with basic foods
by Melinda Bargreen
The Seattle Time,,
Last week, we discussed how to out
fit a kitchen for that first apartment,
just in time for heading back to col
lege. This time, we're going to share a
few ideas about what to do with all that
new kitchen equipment, beyond re
heating leftover Pad Thai from the res
taurant around the corner.
No more dorm food!
Your newly liberated son or daugh
ter is moving into that long-coveted
apartment, and now he or she won't
have to eat steam-table "cream-of-
what," or mystery meat, or starch
bloated entrees anymore.
But what will they eat? Even if the
budget could stretch to daily fast-food
delights (and it probably can't), the
calorie and fat content of such a daily
diet will likely repel today's more
health-conscious youngsters.
Fortunately, there are lots of low
cost, easy, quick and healthful alterna
tives - and some even taste good. For
a quick list of what ought to be in the
first-apartment cupboards, refrigerator
and freezer before the first day of class,
see the end of this story.
If your fridge and your cupboards
are stocked, you always have plenty
of backup options even if you haven't
had time to get to the grocery store re-
cently.
Now, what do you do with the in
gredients'? Here are just a few of many
ideas.
OPTION 1
Pasta with sauce and accompani
ments. Boil water; cook pasta accord
ing to directions (the fresh kind is re
ally quick); drain pasta well. While
pasta is cooking, heat up any of the
pasta sauces in a saucepan on the stove.
While sauce is heating, saute sonic
fresh sliced vegetables, or some of the
frozen vegetables, in a frying pan on
the stove. If you want, add some left
overs - small pieces of the cooked meat
or fish you had the night before. Pour
sauce and vegetables (and meat or fish)
over the drained pasta in a big bowl.
Serve with a salad and bread (either
For college students,
technology goes everywhere
by Chris Cobbs
The Orlando Sentinel
Christmas comes just once a year -
unless you're heading back to sch(x)l with
a backpack full of the coolest digital toys,
uh. study aids.
Like punk fashion and body art, tech
nology goes everywhere these days, horn
classroom to lunch, library to after-hours
hangout. Whether it's taking notes. do
ing research on the Web, exchanging e
mail, or downloading music, the lineup
for the new school year has something
to offer students, teachers, even morn and
dad.
Go ahead, take a byte.
There's a laptop for nearly every bud
get and need, but none surpasses the
Compaq Presario 800 for sheer portabil
ity. The skinny, 3.5-pound Presario is
protected by a durable magnesium case,
which looks great too. The $1,899 laptop
has room inside for a spacious 20 GB
hard disk, but the DVD and floppy drives
are external add-ons.
By contrast, Gateway's Solo 12(X) is a
so-called three-spindle model - that is,
the hard drive, floppy and CD are all built
in. The Solo weighs nearly twice as much
as the Presario, but its $999 sticker price
is lighter on the wallet. The case features
rubbery grip panels to guard against drop
ping it.
At $999, the IBM I-series Think Pad
is an economical laptop with a generous
13-inch screen that's ideal for extended
work sessions. IBM also offers some
nifty storage accessories, such as the
$275 Micro Drive that holds 340 mega
bytes of data. The matchbook-sized drive
is roomy enough for hours of MP3s or
video and even works with digital cam
eras. For those with more modest stor
age needs, the 8 MB Memory Key holds
a semester of notes and term papers - and
doubles as a key chain.
For students who demand a powerful
system but don't want to bother with lug
ging a laptop, the Hewlett Packard Pa
vilion 9880 offers all the trimmings. For
$1,799, the Pavilion is loaded with a
speedy Pentium 4 processor, 80 GB hard
disk, DVD and CD burner. The HP 19-
fresh bread or that backup loaf from the
freezer. defrosted by removing bread
from the plastic hag and wrapping it in
aluminum foil in the oven on "warm"
or 150 degrees while your pasta is cook
ing).
OPTION 2
Chicken breasts with rice and veg
etables (or with potatoes and salad,
etc.). Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Start with fresh chicken breasts, or de
frost frozen ones in the refrigerator
overnight. (Never defrost meat, poul
try or fish by leaving it out on the
kitchen counter.)
Put a little nonfat sour cream in a
bowl: mix in a little dill and garlic salt
and pepper, and stir it up. Place the de
frosted chicken in a baking dish; spread
the sour cream topping on top; grate a
little cheese over it, if you want. Bake
30-45 minutes depending on the thick
ness of the breasts. The chicken is done
when an instant-read meat thermometer
placed in the thickest part reaches 170
degrees or you poke the breast with a
knife and the juices run clear.
Little red potatoes will cook quickly
in the microwave, depending on how
many you put in: you must pierce each
small potato a couple of times with a
knife so they won't explode in the mi-
C 1 OVv alr e
Or: Put about one cup of soy sauce
in a howl with one teaspoon of ginger,
one teaspoon of crushed garlic and two
tablespoons of sugar. Mix well, and
pour over chicken breasts in the casse
role dish. (Let stand awhile so they soak
up the flavor; maybe one hour in the
refrigerator.) Bake as above, and you've
got chicken teriyaki.
Or: Take some of the chicken and
slice it in strips for a stir-fry with the
vegetables from the freezer (or fresh
vegetables, also cut in strips). Take out
the frying pan; add nonstick cooking
spray or a small amount of oil, and cook
chicken and vegetables with a couple .
of splashes of soy sauce. While these
are stir-frying. cook rice according to
package directions.
Or: Put about a cup (depending on
how many chicken breasts you're cook
ing) of the nonfat sour cream in a bowl:
inch monitor has room to display notes
and a report-in-progress. If the matching
speakers disrupt studies, plug in head
phones and you're prime for an all-righter.
Producing a really good-looking report
is a cinch with the HP 990 CSE inkjet
printer. It chums out sharp text at a laser
printer-like 17 pages per minute but re
ally comes into its own with color docu
ments.
The latest Palm Pilot knockoff features
a killer, high-resolution screen. The screen
is the same size as a standard Palm de
vice. hut the IlandEra 330 model can
show i font sizes, all razor-sharp, com
pared with Palm's 3 fuzzier fonts. This
$349 personal digital assistant improves
on the Palm lineup by providing two stor
age slots that can hold up to 1 GB of data.
The Hand Era runs for a month or more
on four AAA batteries. It also makes a
great note-taker when used with a por
table keyboard. There are several key
board models available, including a fold
up version that fits in a jeans pocket.
Whether you need homework help or
a date for the weekend, the Sanyo SCP
-6000 from Sprint PCS is a true light
weight. The $299 phone is less than a half
inch thick and weighs just 2.29 ounces.
Choose either a green or orange backlight
in low-light conditions. The phone, which
is also wireless Web-capable, comes with
a leather case. But who's going to cover
up its eye-catching metallic silver body?
A digital camera may not be standard
equipment tier academia, but it's great for
sending Mom and Dad pix of new cam
pus pals and favorite hangouts. The $279
HP Photo Smart 315 xi features a zoom
lens and built-in liquid crystal display for
viewing images as they're snapped.
If space is at a premium - and it usually
is in a dorm or apartment - a flat panel
monitor makes eminent sense. Alas, until
this year, it would have taxed most stu
dent budgets. But prices are way down,
so a display like the Samsung Sync Master
570 V can be had for $399. The 15-inch
monitor not only reduces desktop clutter,
its screen is bright and clear. If you still
get eyestrain, you've been surfing the Web
too long.
Friday, September 7, 2001
Yvette Camacho always has salad ingredients in her refrigerator.
add salt and pepper and about a tea
spoon of curry powder (to taste).
Spread this mixture over chicken
breasts in
casserole dish and hake as above
OPTION 3
Fish fillets with rice (or potatoes) and
salad (or vegetables, or both). Defrost
fish fillets carefully in microwave un
til they're no longer frozen but not
cooked. Spray a small skillet with non
stick spray (or rub with a small amount
of oil or butter).
Over medium heat, saute your fish
fillets with a splash of lemon juice, a
dash of salt and pepper, while you
steam the vegetables in a saucepan (or
Today's dorms: Modular or lofty?
Knight Kidder Newspapers
ANN ARBOR - The whine of
cordless drills and the smell of freshly
cut lumber pervaded the small sixth
floor room at Mary Markley Hall last
week as the crew of the Ace Deuce
Loft Co. built two single-bed lofts.
Down the hall, Rachel Porter of
Beverly Hills and Mary Beth Harris
of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., waited
anxiously with their parents for the
crew to finish. Their lofts were two
of hundreds constructed last week at
the University of Michigan and of
thousands built every year in college
dorms across the country.
Constructed mostly by students, the
lofts have become a fixture of mod
ern college life as computer-age stu
dents try to maximize space in small
dormitory rooms built during an era
when most students came to school
with a coffee pot and a few suitcases.
But some Michigan colleges are
trying to nudge students away from
the tradition by equipping dorms with
modular furniture.
Lofts, usually about six feet high,
allow students a kind of two-story
room, with beds on the top level and
room for desks, couches and stereos
on the ground floor.
Greg Light, one of the four-man
crew from Ace Deuce, said he and
three other U-M sophomores formed
the company last spring, drawing on
Alcohol 101: Colleges, communities can reduce binge drinking
Knight Kidder/
'fribune News Service
Too many college students will toast
the new school year with a shot and a
beer, and then a few more.
Small wonder binge drinking is atop
concern of their parents, with 95 per
cent considering it a serious threat and
8$ percent partly blaming easy access
to alcohol on and around campus, as
an American Medical Association sur
vey shows.
prepare salad). Keep checking to make
sure the fish isn't sticking; if it is, add
a little liquid to the pan (a couple of
tablespoons of warm water). Cook fish
until it has turned opaque and flakes
easily; make a small slit in the center
of the fish to peek and make sure it
looks cooked through.
Or: The fish can be prepared with
any of the methods under Option 2,
including the teriyaki one.
INFINITE OTHER OPTIONS
You get the picture. Fortunately,
there are lots more pictures out there,
in the form of cookbooks. Even begin
ning cooks can follow a recipe with ex
cellent results. provided you remem-
experience building their own lofts as
freshmen.
The lofts are made of two-by-fours
and two-by-sixes with particle board
to hold the mattresses. A single loft
costs about $2OO, a double is $4OO.
Ace Deuce will build about 50 lofts
in two weeks, he said.
"They're not hard to do," said
Light, of Shelby Township, Mich.,
during a construction break. "We can
build them in about a half an hour and
there is about two hours of prep time
to cut the lumber off site.
"People do weird things on lofts,
but they are sturdy. We used to have a
nightly chin-up contest."
Lofts came under heavy scrutiny at
U-M in 1998 after freshman Courtney
Cantor, 18, of West Bloomfield Town
ship, Mich., died falling from her loft
and out her window at Markley. She
had been drinking at a fraternity party
earlier that night.
Her father, George Cantor, a Detroit
News columnist, sued U-M and the
man who constructed the loft, accus
ing both of negligence.
The suit was settled in January for
$lOO,OOO and the man who con
structed the loft was released from li
ability. At the time, Cantor said he
hoped U-M would do away with lofts.
Dolores Harris and Pam Porter
were painfully aware of Cantor's
death when they scrutinized the infor
mation supplied by loft vendors for
A rite of passage has become a major
health threat. Several alcohol-related
campus fatalities have occurred in recent
years, including a University of Mkthi
gari student who celebrated his 21st birth
day by downing 20 shots in 10 minutes.
Binge drinking hurts academic
achievement and makes students more
prone to sexual assault and other vio
lence, suicide and unprotected sex. Still,
nearly half of college students say they
binge drink, usually defined as downing
four or five drinks in an hour. Students
Guy Reschenthaler, wire page editor
ber two things: Read the recipe all the
way through first, to make sure you
have all the ingredients and that you
started preparing them early enough
(some sneaky recipes ask you to do
some steps the night before, which can
really throw you if you're starting to
cook dinner at 6 p.m.).
The second point is to follow the
recipe precisely. Later in life, you might
be like my sister-in-law Bev, a fabu
lous cook who never follows a recipe
exactly - but that's because she's so ex
perienced that she knows just how the
results will turn out.
If you haven't attained that level (and
most of us haven't), stick to the recipe,
at least the first time around. Don't
guess; really measure; and don't throw
in a little extra of anything until you
know what that extra half-cup of sugar
will do to your cake.
Still flummoxed? Here are some
great solutions for beginners.
- "The Healthy College Cookbook,"
Storey Books ($14.95 paperback), with
great advice, 200 easy recipes for just
about everything, and nutritional info,
too, including calories. (Don't worry:
That calorie count of 1,564 for "Fes
tive Flounder" on page 87 is the book's
only misprint. Whew - that'd be one
chubby flounder.)
- "Where's Mom Now That I Need
Her?" Aspen West Publications ($13.95
paperback), with a big recipe section
and lots of info on finding the best food
buys at the grocery store (did you know
pineapples are supposed to make "a
dull, solid sound when thumped"?).
- "The New Food Lover's Compan
ion," Barron's Guides, $14.95 paper
back, defines every culinary term and
explains every cooking method, every
food or drink you could think of - and
a lot you couldn't have imagined. Great
general reference.
KEEP ON HAND
Rice
Dried pasta
Jar of pasta sauce
Cereal
Peanut butter
Canned tuna
their daughters' lofts
"I asked about wood, sturdiness,
weight, load, assembly and safety fea
tures," said Harris, of Bloomfield
Hills. "The Cantor situation was on
my mind."
Light said Ace Deuce was also
aware of Cantor's death when the
company created its design. They
added a window safety rail to prevent
similar accidents. However, Ace
Deuce guarantees its lofts for only two
weeks from the date of construction,
and states in its warranty that it won't
be responsible for any injury, damage
or death as a result of the use of the
loft.
Alan Levy, U-M director of hous
ing public affairs, said U-M has
avoided dictating construction stan
dards for lofts because it doesn't want
to be held liable for the design, but it
does issue guidelines to students. U-
M does not inspect lofts after con
struction.
In Michigan, housing officials at
Michigan State, Central Michigan and
Ferris State universities also allow
students to construct lofts, but, unlike
U-M, they dictate strict construction
guidelines and inspect the lofts after
ward.
Joan Schmidt, president of the As
sociation of College and University
Housing Officers International, a pro
fessional organization based in Co
lumbus, Ohio, said lofts are popular
most likely to binge are white, under 24
and residents of a fraternity or sorority.
The share of frequent binge drinkers is
rising to nearly 1 in 4
students.
More needs to be done on campus, in
communities, and at home. The ease with
which underage drinkers can get alco
hol must change, as must the social
norms that make binge drinking cool,
espechdly among young white males.
Colleges can eliminate alcohol-indus
,o sponsorships of athletics, ban alco-
behrcolls@aol.com
Pepper
Whichever spices you think you'll
use: cinnamon, nutmeg, dill, garlic salt,
ginger, curry powder, etc.
Baking powder
Baking soda
Vanilla extract
Soy sauce
Balsamic vinegar
Oil (olive or canola or both)
Can of nonfat evaporated milk (for
when you run out of fresh milk)
Can of mushrooms
Canned soups/stews
Microwave popcorn
Aluminum foil
Plastic wrap
Ziplock bags
Nonstick cooking spray (such as
Pam)
Salad dressing
Ketchup
Mayonnaise
Mustard
Jam/jelly
Be sure to refrigerate those last five
items after opening.
FOR THE REFRIGERATOR:
Butter or margarine
Cheese (can choose low-fat variet
ies)
Milk (ditto)
Eggs
Nonfat sour cream
Lettuce
Tomatoes
Fresh seasonal vegetables/fruit
Small jar of crushed garlic
Refrigerated pasta toppings, such as
pesto sauce or Alfredo sauce (in little
tubs)
Sack of little red (or white) potatoes
Bag of carrots (pre-peeled ones are
Couple of onions
FOR THE FREEZER:
Package of fresh pasta
Chicken breasts wrapped in freezer
wrap and dated
Fish fillets, 'wrapped and dated
Loaf of bread (for when you run out)
Package of frozen assorted veg
etables
Frozen dinners for emergencies
in dorms that were built shortly after
World War 11.
"Scrutiny of lofts varies by univer
sity," said Schmidt, who is also the
associate director of residence life at
Central Michigan. "I would be very
nervous if I did not have someone on
staff take a look at the loft."
Schmidt said nationally, colleges
are moving to modular furniture that
can he configured to replace old fur
niture and do away with lofts as they
renovate residence halls. The modu
lar furniture gives officials control
over design and quality and the stan
dard design allows easy movement
between halls.
Abigail Forbes, assistant director of
housing at Grand Valley State Univer
sity near Grand Rapids, Mich., said
officials there outlawed lofts eight
years ago because of concerns about
quality and safety.
At the time of Cantor's death, U-M
had replaced furniture in about one
third of its 15 residence halls with
modular oak furniture built by Brill
Manufacturing Co. in Ludington,
Mich.
The modular furniture allows stu
dents to create lofts and other furni
ture configurations without using
bolts and screws. The furniture,
known as Building Block furniture,
is put together with long steel pins.
hol sales at athletic events, increase
alcohol-free social events on campus,
and encourage tavern owners to end
cheap-drink specials for students.
Communities can control high-density
alcohol outlets around campuses. Tav
ern owners can make sure drunk pa
trons aren't served and ID carding is
thorough.
Finally, students should see - from
their peers - that there's nothing cool
about getting sloppy drunk and acting
the fool.