Life&Style Got style? Contact us at lifeandstyle@theotherpress.ca & College Cooking Sweet and Savoury Burrito By Joel MacKenzie, Contributor Rice and ketchup for lunch again? Post-secondary dining doesn't have to be about eating trash, spending a lot of money, or sacrificing health. With a bit of work, you can create healthy, unique, satisfying food for cheap. College Cooking provides recipes, ideas, and healthy eating information to help you do just that. Mayan Burrito This Mayan Burrito recipe is taken from Vegetarian Cooking For Dummies (2001). It puts a twist on typical burritos by substituting meat with the sweet and savoury flavours of black beans, sweet potatoes and yogurt. The latter can be replaced with soft tofu to make the dish vegan (as it is in the version below); try mixing soft tofu with a little bit of lemon juice and/ or vinegar to resemble the sourness found in regular yogurt. Sweet potatoes are awesomely healthy vegetables. They’re high in fibre, vitamins A and C, have no fat, and have a lower glycemic index rating than regular potatoes, meaning their sugar is absorbed into the blood stream slower, providing sustained energy. To cook raw ones, wash them, cut them into small chunks, and steam them for anywhere upwards of five minutes. Of course, in this recipe, you could also use canned sweet potatoes (if you’re not cool). To save money on this recipe, try cooking your own dried black beans. Wash them to pick out any rocks or twigs, soak them over night in plenty of water (they will expand), and boil them in fresh water, using about two times as much water as beans, for half an hour to two (old beans will take longer), or until tender on the inside (not dry). Also try making your own salsa. One particularly easy kind is pico di gallo. Make it by dicing and mixing a few tomatoes, a jalapeno pepper, and medium red / white onion, with one finely chopped clove of garlic, some cilantro and a bit of lime juice. It’s easy, way cheaper than regular salsa, and as natural and fresh as you make it. The following prices were taken from Safeway. The black beans were Safeway brand (540 ml), the salsa was Safeway brand (1.95 L), the can of medium olives was Safeway brand (398 ml), the tofu was Sunrise (300 g), and the whole grain tortilla shells were Eating Right (10 nine-inch tortillas). Ingredients: A little less than % cup canned black beans, drained and rinsed $0.44 % cup (about half of one) cubed sweet potatoes $0.37 1 nine-inch flour tortilla $0.37 1 small Hass avocado $0.50 1 cup chopped romaine lettuce $0.08 1 diced tomato $0.18 4 green onion $0.04 2 tbsp. (about 40 grams) soft tofu $0.27 1 black olive $0.02 1 cup salsa $0.54 Total price: $2.81 Directions: 1. Heat the black beans in a small saucepan over low heat until steaming hot. 2. Steam the sweet potatoes until tender. Mash with a potato masher or fork, and stir until smooth. 3. Lay each tortilla flat on a dinner plate. Spoon the beans and potatoes onto the centre of the tortilla. 4. Fold one end of the tortilla towards the middle, then fold the sides towards the middle. Leave the burrito on the plate with the end of the fold tucked underneath so the burrito doesn’t unroll on your plate. 5. Top the burrito with other ingredients. 6. Eat. 7. Compare flavour/ price to other burritos you’ve had and openly laugh in self-satisfaction. 10 How to graduate from college Coffee and sunscreen and stuff By Sharon Miki, Assistant Editor Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘99, if I could offer you only one tp for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. - Baz Luhrmann adies and gentlemen of the class Le 2012, if I could offer you only one tip for the future, coffee would be it. Friends will fade, lovers will leave you, money will slide from your fingers like sand through a sieve, but coffee will always keep you awake. And, from my experience, even if you're friendless, single, and broke—there is so much living to do and so little time, that you’re not going to want to sleep through it. It’s April, and it’s coming to the end of another school year. For many of you, this probably means shoving a pile of textbooks into corners of your homes and shutting off your brains for a much- needed reprieve from the seemingly endless barrage of assignments you’ve faced all year. For me, this is true to an extent—but this April also marks the end of my academic career. I’mno mathematician (arts majors, you know how it is), but through my calculations, I’ve spent 20 years in school. Two bloody decades. I have many fancy, embossed pieces of paper to show for it: a kindergarten completion certificate, a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree, and a diploma in professional writing (well, I will in a few months). With my student debt turning me into more of a cliché than a toddler in a tiara, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to officially graduate from the student life and dedicate myself to money making like an adult would do. Fuck. Still, through all of this high-quality papyrus collecting, I’ve come to learn a few things, off the curriculum, that seem important to remind everyone of at this time. Even when life is bad, life is good. Sure, things are more often than not worse than we'd want them to be. According to most news reports, the world is falling to shit. According to my mother, we should all stock up on gold before the impending apocalypse. Indeed, during my time as a student at Douglas College, I've seen enough failure, heartbreak, and death to fill an e-book. However, what I think is most important to take from this (what I think you have to take from this, if you want to stay sane), is that despite all the bad things that happen to us, really great things manage to occur too. People that we love die. This is the worst. But new mini-people still come into our lives and throw up on our shoulders and wear onesies and smell like heaven and Christmas (I mean babies, not boyfriends)—this is the best. If you’ve made it past your first semester, you probably already know that sooner or later your heart will shatter in complicated and surprisingly disappointing ways, like a Faberge egg that you thought was really expensive but turned out to be filled with cheap yet milky chocolate; the fallout won’t be as bad in the way you thought it would be, but it will still be messy and you'll be tempted to lick the sugar off the floor with the dirt. Don’t. Or do, but remember that now that you’ve done that, something really rad and funny will likely occur in the near future. It just will. It’s science. Hardly anything really matters. This is really important to remember, especially if you'll be back to the books come fall. After approximately three- zillion exams, I’ve come the horrifying realization that it’s all pretty derivative. I mean, sure, you should study and learn and achieve so that you can do what you want to with your life. But after spending a long time catastrophizing every mid- term and them always ending up more or less the same way (done), I’ve learned that time passes and these things will not kill you. It’s too easy to get caught up with things that are, in the big picture, trivial. If you must worry, worry about spending your precious time with interesting people, milking every last drop of goodness from each situation, and acquiring more coffee. If you’re reading this, you probably went to college and can forevermore start sentences with “back when I was in college...” If anything, this is something that no everyone gets to do. So check that experience off on your life list and tally ho on further. In conclusion, I’ve studied for a long time. I’ve learned some things; I have a lot to learn. To my fellow graduates: sleep if you must, but every now and then sip an espresso-based drink past bedtime—try to stay up because that’s when you’re most likely to run into a 67-year-old ex- gangster turned hypnotherapist that will climb a mountain with you and watch the sun rise to light the blue-tinged glass windows of the skyscraping offices of people who are bursting with stories of their family and friends and explorations. Or, you know, see a really good movie or something. It’s up to you. I wish you all beauty and adventure and love and loss, because that’s life. And I hope that even when I’m not around to try to tell you how to do it, you live it. Also, wear sunscreen.