Review: Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks

Title: Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks: Create Extraordinary Dishes from the Ordinary Ingredients in Your College Meal Plan
Author: Priya Krishna
Format: egalley
Pub. Date: June 3rd 2014
Source: Netgalley & Storey Publishing

★★★

Three stars.

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I have to say that I was really excited to pick up Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks. I live on campus at my university, and the same fifteen scheduled meals get old very quickly. I was really hoping that this book would be my new favorite thing, but unfortunately, I am not in the percentage of students that can benefit much from this collection.

Almost all of the recipes that are included in this book require some sort of outside equipment, such as microwaves and panini presses. The dining halls at my school don't have any of this equipment, save for a waffle iron that we're explicitly not allowed to put anything in other than plain batter. In addition to the lack of equipment, I had issues with the ingredients used. Of course everything is subjective and easily enough substituted, but even so, my dining halls don't regularly have a lot of these items.

That being said, the smart, easy recipes in this book are all no-brainers and sound really delicious. If you live in a student apartment, or if you're even just new to living on your own, I think that this book is more geared towards you.

I would not recommend this book if your dining hall is anything like mine. However, if you live in student apartments or if your dining hall has more variety in ingredients and more usable equipment for its student customers, than I do think this book can seriously help you break away from the mundane food there. Thanks to Netgalley & Storey Publishing for my copy in exchange for my honest review.