Crunch Burrito
Skill Level: Easy
Special Equipment: Microwave
Ingredients: Flour tortilla, canned refried beans, Fritos/Doritos/Tortilla Chips
Instructions: Search EVERYWHERE for a frickin’ can opener. No one has one? How can we not have a can opener? What is this, Russia? How about the kitchenette in the lounge – not there either? No can opener but like 30 pairs of chopsticks? GROAN. NERTS! Start knocking on doors. Ask Holly, the responsible den mother type on your floor. She totally has one. Open can with some difficulty and spread beans on tortilla with back of the one spoon you own because the front/scoopy part of it is a little dirty. Heat in microwave on the Popcorn setting because that is what you always do, but be sure to stop before the full Popcorn cycle is over. Crush and LIBERALLY sprinkle chips over hot beans. Roll up and eat alone while sitting on a plastic crate, waiting for Limewire to start working again.

Fruit Roll Up Man
Skill Level: Medium
Special Equipment: Artistic flair
Ingredients: Fruit Roll-Ups, unwrapped, in assorted flavors
Instructions: Tear sheets of Fruit Roll-Ups into long strips and twist them around each other, refrigerated bread stick dough style. Make a colorful stick figure out of the twisted up strips. Talk to him a little bit so you feel like you are having a sophisticated meal with a friend. Be like “please pass the Camembert, Francois!!!” Think about giving him some long, strawberry-kiwi hair. Braid it.

Flower Pots
Skill Level: Easy
Special Equipment: Container of any kind
Ingredients: Two CHOCOLATE Snack Packs (Vanilla will do in a pinch), Oreos (or Hydrox if you are really pinching pennies)
Instructions: Make a terrible, terrible mug in ceramics class. Make it so your teacher wonders how it is that you have gone this long without being able to properly center the clay on your wheel. Make it so that no human hand could ever fit its fingers through the handle, but make it so heavy that even if a hand could fit through it, it would get cramped and gnarled from the sheer weight of this beast of a drinking vessel. Dump out the pencils you keep in it and tap in the two packages of pudding. Top with several crushed handfuls of the cookies so it looks like there is dirt on top of the pudding and the godawful mug looks like a quirky little flower pot. That’s why you call this snack flower pots.

Taco Bag
Skill Level: Medium
Special Equipment:Vending machine
Ingredients: Big Grab bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, can of chili
Instructions: Remove all fear and stigma surrounding canned chili. It’s really kind of good. No, it really is. Go find Holly again to get the flingin’ flangin’ can opener. Heat chili to basically remove the taste of aluminum but DO NOT MAKE IT HOT. Again, halfway through a cycle of Popcorn setting is a pretty good rule of thumb. When chili ranks just above tepid, slice open bag of Doritos lengthwise with an X-ACTO knife (design or technical school), letter opener (liberal arts college), or keys on your lanyard (state university), and pour over chips. Eat from the bag with plastic fork while you wander the halls, looking for someone who might have quarters for laundry (Holly again).

Bottom of the Barrel
Skill Level: Non-existent
Special Equipment: Fingers
Ingredients: About ½ an inch of anything that you can barely get out of the jar. Queso dip, peanut butter, roommate’s homemade spaghetti sauce, jam, frosting
Instructions: Sigh deeply because ol’ One Spoon is now dirty front to back due to your bean spreading. Dive in. Make disgusting noises while you “eat” your “food”. Loathe self. Try on every scent of roommate’s perfume.

Spaghetti Sandwich
Skill Level: Medium
Special Equipment: Snackster!
Ingredients: Roommate’s family recipe spaghetti sauce that they make and can once a year so you have ten or more jars of it in your room, white bread (preferably stolen from the cafeteria), absolutely any kind of cheese including Kraft singles.
Instructions: Spoon mix of sauce and cheese into the middle of one piece of bread and lay it down in the Snackster. Place the other piece of bread on top. Sit as near to the outlet as you possibly can while Snackster is heating (and miraculously sealing together!) your sauce creation. Eat sauce straight from jar. In 6 minutes Snackster will let you know your trashy version of an Italian Dunker is done. Share with your roommate who introduced you to spaghetti sandwiches in the first place.

Garnish Salad
Skill Level: Advanced
Special Equipment: Access to bar server’s station or relationship with server/bartender
Ingredients: Olives, maraschino cherries, limes, pickles, celery, lemons, pretzels, hazelnuts (only if you go to school in like New Hampshire or something), oranges.
Instructions: Oh man. BE SNEAKY. Be so stealth. Be so much more stealth than you think you are being because if you have gotten to this point you are most definitely drunk. Maybe belly up to the bar and play a round of Photohunt. Test the waters by plucking one olive and see if anyone notices. THE MEAN BEARDED BARTENDER THEY CALL SOMETHING DIMINUTIVE LIKE “PUMPKIN” SAW YOU. ABORT MISSION. Ask one of your more fearless friends who is wearing all black because she just got done with her shift to go up and pretend to be an employee, grab a cup, and fill it with all the garnishes she can handle. Put hand over top of cup and shake to toss. Enjoy, smugly, like you earned it.

OPP – (Other People’s Pizza)
Skill Level: Advanced
Special Equipment: Timing
Ingredients: One swallow of pride
Instructions: Wait until it’s late enough at night/early enough in the morning that late-night pizza boxes are discarded ON TOP of garbage cans (or just outside doors) but the possible one slice or half slice inside is not all crusty and hard. Venture to floors other than your own when executing OPP – floors where maybe no one knows you.

– Emily Weiss