AfterTek

College students lhave very busy lives. They juggle full-time school with part-time or full-time work making it very hard for them to do much of anything else. So what do students do when it comes to eating?

Most don’t like to live on ramen and water. Megan Carle sums up the dilemma of college cooking as follows: “Very little equipment, very little cooking experience and very little money.”

With consideration for each difficulty, she and her sister, Jill, both students at Arizona State University, tried out recipes adapted to their lifestyle. The result, College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends (Ten Speed Press, $19.95), is a must-pack, along with the fry pan and the blender, for those going back to college or starting this year.\

“Cooking at college is way different from cooking at home. There are so many who don’t know how to cook,” said Jill, 21, who together with Megan will discuss college life at Tempe’s Changing Hands Bookstore on Tuesday. Jill will be a senior in the fall, studying history and political science, while Megan, 23, will embark on her master’s degree in linguistics and French.

They have traveled internationally, worked in restaurants and acquired tastes for foreign dishes. The two also co-wrote Teens Cook and Teens Cook Dessert, published in 2004 and 2006. Teens Cook sold more than 65,000 copies. In their latest endeavor, the Chandler sisters urge the student to stay away from the Ramen noodles and macaroni-and-cheese aisles and make a foray into the vegetable, fish and meat areas of the grocery store.

They also discourage eating out. “In the time that you get into a car and drive to a restaurant, you can make a pretty decent meal,” Megan said. “Cooking is cheaper than eating at McDonald’s.” Their recipes range for those picking up a saucepan for the first time (tuna noodle casserole, tortilla soup and tomato-basil pasta) to those who have wielded a spatula in their mom’s kitchen (lasagna, Moroccan chicken stew with couscous, and crab cakes with roasted red-pepper sauce ).

Every kitchen should have dried chicken bouillon, white-wine vinegar and fresh garlic, they contend, while other things to think about are chili powder, olive oil and nutmeg. Baking essentials in their book include cinnamon and brown sugar. Each recipe leads with a useful and conversational note by Jill or Megan. Sections on throwing a toga, tapas, Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest and ’80s parties feature easy-to-make dishes.

Mom Judi Carle, who tested the recipes and has played a part in each of the books, was impressed with the ideas presented in this book. The sisters advocate using chicken bouillon instead of chicken broth, which was hard to carry up stairs, and using spice blends instead of individual spices. “The things that they thought of never crossed my mind,” Judi said. She said her daughters were “always in the kitchen from the time they were little. They always liked it.”

For Megan, the best part of compiling the books is the shared camaraderie with her family. “We might have a few arguments, but we always have a really great time together,” she said. As for some quick words of cooking advice to a new college student: “Don’t get discouraged. Even if it burns, start over,” Megan said.