Dorm Survival Foods: Part 1

Living in a dorm for my fourth year, I've learned to subsist on foods that can be either eaten immediately, or are easy to prepare. Other factors are shelf life, and of course expense. Most but not all of the foods I'm going to feature have been procured from the dollar store.

I'd like to start off with an old standby. Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, though any dollar store variant will suffice. I decided to choose this as the first entry into my college food collection because I still haven't been feeling all that well and it's been a little chilly outside as Fall is just starting to kick in. In both of those situations, nothing is better than a nice hot bowl of soup, and nothing is cheaper or simpler than chicken noodle. I'm a picky eater, and I'm not really fond of foods that are too complicated so I like to keep it simple.

The soup can be quickly and easily prepared in any microwave, just add water, and it really doesn't taste any different than if you cooked it on a stove top. My only real complaint is the sodium content though I'm not the kind of guy who drinks all of the broth so this rarely results in headaches. Like the old myth that it cures the common cold, I generally feel better after eating a bowl.

It can't really compete with non-condensed soups or the tastier and more exotic varieties of ramen noodles which we'll get to later in the semester, but when I'm feeling too sick to eat something complicated, it does the job well. For fifty cents a can at the dollar store it's also easy on the wallet. Unfortunately I rarely feel very full after eating it and usually have to supplement it with something else.

Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup gets a dorm-food rating of 7/10.