Monthly Archives: July 2012

Summer BBQ’s: Student Style

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With warm weather, and summer comes lots of BBQ’s and backyard parties. This summer I have attended a lot more BBQ’s then I previously had in summer’s before, simply since I am living away from home. Now me being both frugal AND a lover a food here are a few tips to make the next BBQ you attend awesome, cheap and the food you make tasty.

If you’re hosting;
  • Get friends to bring their own;
    • Food
    • Alcohol/drinks
  • Get everyone to split on bringing certain food items or necessary things for the BBQ
    • Smore’s supplies
    • Charcoal, Fluid etc.
    • Food that everyone is sharing ie. Chips and Dip, Lettuce etc.
    • Ice
  • Don’t use paper plates, despite what you think, throwing out plates every single BBQ will add up. Another bonus of being a student is the fact that your dishes aren’t the greatest, just use the same one’s you use when eating inside!
If you’re a guest;
  • Bring your own food, you get what you want and don’t feel guilty eating your friends food.
    • When grocery shopping during the week make a few food choices based on what’s good on the BBQ
      • Chicken/Beef/Pork Skewers
      • Steak/Burgers/Hot Dogs
      • Potatoes/Sweet Potatoes
      • Red Peppers/Various Veggies
    • Honestly everything tastes good on the BBQ
  • Bring your own alcohol, you can even be the one to bring a certain part of a blendable drink and get one of your friends to bring another ingredient. Plus if you don’t have a blender, one of your friends may have one! Sharing is awesome isn’t it?
  • Load up on BBQ foods when they are on sale; buns, hot dogs, burgers and keep them in the freezer.
Some awesome BBQ recipes
  • Most of these recipes were made by me fiddling around and throwing ingredients together. Therefor there aren’t exact measurements and cooking time instructions (BBQs do vary in temperature though so that kind of saves me there)
Spicy Franks Red Hot Chicken Breasts
  • 1 Chicken Breast (Boneless or with Bone, I remove skin usually to reduce fat)
  • Franks Red Hot Sauce (the amount you put on depends on how spicy you like things)
  • Seasoning Salt/Cajun Spices etc.
  • Sour Cream
Instructions; put chicken breast, franks red hot sauce, and various spices into a plastic bag. Shake around so chicken breast is completely covered. Grill on the BBQ until completely cooked. Once cooked, serve with a side of sour cream for dipping, it will cut the spice a bit too.
Goat Cheese Filled Chicken Breast
  • 1 Boneless Chicken Breast
  • 1/5 of a goat cheese packet
  • Seasoning Salt
  • Chopped Cherry Tomatoes/Finely chopped Spinach
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Toothpicks
Instructions: Lie Chicken breast on the largest flat portion. Take a knife and slice horizontally into the chicken breast from one of the sides (just like you would for a sandwich bun). Don’t cut all the way through. You have just cut the pocket where the goat cheese will be placed. Take goat cheese and place into a small bowl. Dice up cherry tomatoes, spinach or whatever you want to mix in with the goat cheese. Add a bit of salt and pepper to taste, and use a fork to mix the ingredients together. Take this mixture and place in the chicken breast pocket you previously cut, place this more in toward the back of the chicken breast, away from the edges. Once stuffed, take toothpicks and seal up the edges as best you can. Sprinkle seasoning salt on the outsides of the chicken breast for additional flavour. Place on the BBQ and flip halfway through to get both sides cooked. After its finished being cooked remove toothpicks and enjoy.
Awesome Tin Foil Packet Sweet Potatoes
  • 1 Sweet Potato
  • Cinnamon
  • Cooking Oil (Canola/Olive)
  • Tin Foil
Instructions: Chop sweet potatoes into bite size chunks (they do shrink slightly when cooked). Tear off a large enough piece of tin foil to wrap and seal around the sweet potato pieces. Lay sweet potato chunks in the middle of the tin foil (shiny side out), sprinkle cinnamon on sweet potato and drizzle with oil. Seal up and form the tin foil into a packet surrounding the sweet poatotes. Throw on the grill and check every so often to make sure nothing burns (make sure to seal the packet back up once you finish checking). Sweet potatoes will be ready when the pieces are soft. If cooking with meat, put this on the BBQ first, it takes longer to cook than meat.
Tin Foil Veggies
  • 3 Different veggies; Example: Tomatoes, Snow peas, Peppers
  • Oil
  • Salt/Pepper or Soy Sauce
  • Garlic clove
  • Tin Foil
Instructions; Cut vegetables into bit sized pieces. tear a large enough piece of tin foil to completely surround vegetables in a packet. Place vegetables in the middle of the tin foil sheet (shiny side out), drizzle with oil and soy sauce/salt/pepper whichever you prefer (you can also add red pepper flakes or anything else). Chop up the garlic glove into about 8 pieces and place within the veggies in the packet. Seal up tin foil packet and then place on BBQ. This will take a bit less time then the chicken, and a lot less time than potatoes.
 
Tin Foil Spiced Potatoes
  • 1 Potato
  • Salt/Pepper/Seasoning Salt/Cajun Seasoning etc. (this is where you add the spiciness if you want it)
  • Oil
  • Tin Foil
Instructions: Cut potato in half length-wise. Cut into multiple slivers lengthwise as well. Place on a sheet of tinfoil (shiny side out) and drizzle oil, and sprinkle with seasoning salt and other spices. Fold up tinfoil into a packet and place on grill. Cook until potato wedges are soft. If cooking with meat, put this on the BBQ first, it takes longer to cook than meat.
BBQ Roasted Pepper’s
  • Whole Red/Green/Orange/Yellow Pepper
Instructions: You don’t even need to cut the pepper. Simply wash/rinse and then place on the grill. Leave on until the skin is burnt and then remove. Let cool and then peel skin off and remove seeds/stem etc. The pepper should be completely cooked and not crunchy at all. For those that don’t want to peel the pepper. Cut into rings/remove stem and seeds and place on the BBQ that way.
If you attempted any of these. Look at you go..your a BBQ pro.
And then if you don’t want to do any prep. Check out M&M Meat shops. They have some awesome stuff and you can literally just throw it on the BBQ.Image Source BBQ Photo

Anyone have any other tasty and easy BBQ recipes?

How to Make the Most of Your Summer

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This blog post is a bit of an overlap of various topics I have covered in the past. The goal is to get students thinking about what they have already done, or plan to do so that you can make the most of your summer. It’s important to not waste your summer away, which I have done so many times it makes me truly angry with myself. No one’s here to judge anyways, you personally are the only individual that can determine whether or not you made the most of your summer from a personal development stand point. But here are a few things to consider, and a few ways that you can still do before you head back to school.

1. Have you achieved the goals you set out at the beginning of the summer? Did you learn a few new skills at work? Did you get a volunteer position that you really wanted?

  • If you still haven’t achieved the goals you set out, this is the midway point (well a little bit past but who’s counting). Sit down with your manager/supervisor at work and see what you can do to achieve your goals. If you were unable to land that volunteer position that you really wanted, e-mail them back and follow up, see if there are any opportunities during the school year that you can do on a part-time basis.
  • Be persistent, and take initiative, that’s the only way you can achieve your goals.
2. Have you updated your resume?
  • While your still working you have a much clearer idea on the tasks that you completed and skills you learned while working or volunteering or the ones you learned from non-university/college courses. Make sure to start adding/editing your resume now when all of this is still fresh in your mind.
3. Make sure to gather samples of your work.
  • Have you worked on some really interesting projects this summer? Make sure to get copies of these and keep them, put them in a portfolio, scan them etc. These will come in handy the next time you apply for a job (which may be next summer).
4. Have you travelled enough?
  • This summer has been super packed for me personally, I feel like I have gone on a tour of Ontario. Aside from all the serious stuff I normally talk about, make sure you make some awesome memories this summer so at least you have something great to remember while your soul is being destroyed at school….
5. Still want to learn something awesome? A language? How to use Photoshop?
  • One of the goals I set out at the beginning of summer was to further develop some of soft skills which may be hard to learn on the job etc. There are a bunch of courses available online often for free that can help you out this category. You can view a few of many websites out there that can help you learn new things in the Cheap Students Learning section. One of my goals is to get a lot better at using the Adobe suite of programs, I’m still working away..
  • Another excellent thing to do is to just READ. I know it sounds super lame, but start getting your mind  working again, school will be a lot less of a shock to the system.
    • Top 25 Books for Business
    • Or you could just go with Oprah’s personal favourites..
6. Have you saved up enough money?
  • Unfortunately this is the least fun thing to ask yourself, but it’s true. Have you planned out how much you will need for the next school year? Will you have enough to make it through? Some things to consider.
    • Rent
    • Food
    • Tuition
    • “Entertainment”-partying, alcohol, movies, dinners etc.
    • What money will you get from loans, OSAP, scholarships etc.?
  • If you already find yourself in the red based on the income you have earned this summer, make sure to save every penny you can from now until school starts. Maybe trying and take on another part-time now that can transition into the fall semester in order to keep you afloat or check out scholarship websites, start applying and see what you can do to get some extra funding. By thinking about this now it will be a lot less stressful when you suddenly can’t afford food for a week during the school year, close to exams. School is already hard enough.
Images Lake Jump
What do you plan to do this summer?