Ristorante

Wednesday. It’s middle of the week, I’m at school and looking forward to a semi-empty refrigerator at home. What’s a college student to do?

For the past year and a half, I’ve learned to live on less than $10 a day, give or take a couple of dollars. Even I am amazed by this, and a lot of people ask me how I do it. When I was growing up, all I had were eggs, soy sauce, and the staple of my diet; rice. My family raised me in poverty, and because everyone had work or school during the day, much of my childhood was spent alone with the doors and windows locked, leaving the duty of feeding me to… well, me! (Don’t worry, I wasn’t neglected for dinner.)

That was when my love for cooking started. At first, all I could do was fry eggs and eat it with some rice and soy sauce. The top of my head barely reached the stovetop when I was six, but the hunger empowered me. Over the next couple of years, I would learn to cut ingredients and combine them in different ways. By the time I was eight, I made fried rice, and by ten I could make a pretty good garlic ground beef tofu.

Of course by then, I was attending elementary and they provided a school lunch for me (which I found tasted absolutely horrible).

So back to the original question; how on earth do you live on less than $10 day? Luckily I also learned how to use a computer at a young age, and as technology would have it, provided me with a valuable job skill. When not going to school, I generate some income, and as I return to school I get some very basic things:

• A 50 lb. bag of rice ($15)
• A box of two dozen eggs ($5)
• Pork tenderloin (at ~$2 per lb.)
• Ground beef (at ~$2.50 per lb.)
• A 10 lb. box of ramen, udon or egg noodle ($10)
• 6 lb. of firm white tofu (at ~$0.80 per lb.)
• Various vegetables
• Various spices and sauces

All of this comes out to about $90, and will last me the entire 16 weeks of my school semester, although I do have to replenish my supply of meats and veggies every few weeks. I know this sounds incredibly boring to work with, but rest assured that my cooking repertoire isn’t limited only to the above staple foods that I eat (although you can make some pretty delicious things with them!). I’ll definitely be posting recipes of more exciting stuff later.

—JT