Olka stands with her cookbook "Cook Like a Tiger" / Photo by Katie VandenHeuvel
Towson University offers students 15 different locations to eat on campus. Each location offers an array of meal options for students looking to use up their meal plans. However, for students not interested in on-campus dining locations, it becomes difficult to prepare a range of foods each week in their kitchens and not make the same dishes over and over.
This is where cookbooks come in handy. Regardless if the cookbook was prepared by your grandmother or a professional chef, they were designed with only one thing in mind; cooking.
However, not every cookbook is designed with students in mind and none of them are designed with Towson Students in mind, except “Cooking Like a Tiger written by Olka Forster.
“I spent my entire freshman year eating on-campus, especially at The Glen. Not only did I gain a lot of weight, but I had no energy from the foods I was eating. So when I came back my sophomore year I was determined to cook more in the kitchen in my dorm room,” said Forster. “I copied down a few recipes of my mothers and bought the Rachel Ray cookbook ‘365: No Repeats–A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners’ I thought I would be set.”
Forster than realized she wasn’t using most of the recipes in the books she had bought. “I wasn’t making things like Spring Chicken with Leeks and Peas, and when I was talking about it with friends we decided it would be fun to make our own cookbook,” Forster said.
With the help of her Resident Assistant (RA), Forster was able to get her entire floor to give in their favorite recipes and bind them together into a simple folder that they kept in the floor’s kitchen for the rest of the semester.
“Olka had such a creative idea; it was interesting to see one of my residents have a simple thought and make it into something we all benefited from,” RA Beth Keane said. “I would constantly look through the book when I got bored of eating at Susq or P-tux all the time.”
Author of “Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today’s College Student” Jean Patterson explained that it’s difficult to write cookbooks for College students who want them to be specific because each college has a different food and kitchen situation.
“Some colleges don’t offer students who live in dorms with kitchens to use, which means they are left to use a hot-plate or a microwave. Some colleges have great kitchens to use but the students have limited availability to good produce or inexpensive groceries,” Patterson explained.
“What Olka did is becoming really popular for students to do, who would know better about what your school has to offer than a student?” Patterson asked.
The book reveals a list of supermarkets in the area, a list of items available from the Community Center desk downstairs (Forster’s had a bunch of pots and pans for residents to check out), food items that can be found on-campus and a range of recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Though “Cooking Like a Tiger” was a hit among the other residents in her building Forster claims she doesn’t see a future in writing for her, that it was more of a fun “one time only” thing.
Forster said, “I’m no Emril or Rachel Ray, but I do know my way around a tiny dorm room kitchen—which is good enough for me.”
