Always nice to reflect back on the first day of the rest of our lives, isn’t it? You have your whole life ahead of you, you can’t wait to run off and embrace the independence of college and leave all of those small-minded people behind back home. You remember, the irritants of high school that you couldn’t wait to prove wrong at whatever it was you were planning to do with your life going forward? Yeah, we were all there.
That is, until you got out on your own and realized that cooked meals didn’t grow on trees. There is no such thing as self-cleaning laundry and the fridge didn’t just re-stock itself. Raise your hand if you came crashing back down to earth during your first couple of weeks of college. It happens.
I can’t say this is what happened to George Hirsch, Junior (not that he would admit anyway) but he did enjoy eating well. So he did something about it.
George is from Hilton Head Island, attended and has since graduated from the University of Georgia and is now part of the front office staff at The Barclay’s Center in New York City. There he works with the Brooklyn Nets of the NBA and the NHL’s New York Islanders.
Before he took a bite out of “The Apple,” however, he was bitten by a bug himself. While he was in college, he wound up through happenstance as the his dorm rooms cook. The next thing you know, George and his mom Carrie had developed roughly 100 recipes.
“My mom and I came up with the idea together. I was in school already. I liked to cook, but I quickly realized that most of my classmates didn’t” George says. “It was at that point that we started testing recipes.” Toss in dad’s talents as a photographer and you wind up with all of the makings of finished product.
All of that may sound easy, or even fun, but give it some thought for a second. How many college students want to spend any amount of their visits back home testing and developing recipes? Not too many. Still, that’s exactly what George did. “It actually took us about four years to fine tune it and get the final product produced.” he says.
The book is called the College Man’s Cookbook. It’s a collection of about 100 recipes divided into 10 different chapters. The chapters range from (of course) game watching food for a small group, to the kinds of meals you can prepare for a date in your dorm room. All of the recipes are ‘dorm friendly.’ That was actually a big part of why they decided to put this book together. “Living with 5 college aged males, there was never a shortage of mouths to feed and get feedback from.” George says “So I spent most of college throwing stuff together to see what they’d like. Those are some of the recipes we’ve printed. Making sure they were do-able for every level of cook.”
There are no huge marketing efforts, no plans to land on the New York Times Best Seller list any time soon, but there is a hope people will grab a copy for $20 and stick it in a box along with all of the other stuff that will get packed up this summer for the road trip to higher learning. If this one takes off, there are plans for a follow up. More on that another time.
On the flip side, I grabbed myself a copy and gave it to my high school aged daughter to give her a head start on fending for herself once the day arrives that dad isn’t around to make sure she eats it and likes it. It works both ways you know.
You can order a copy of The College Man’s Cookbook by clicking here.
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Jesse
