Cooking in college sucks.

You make the same cheap food over and over — mac and cheese, pizza, popcorn, and of course, ramen noodles. The college-student diet gets old faster than a mail-order Russian bride (I’m just guessing here) and consists of practically nothing but carbs. What’s a poor kid who’s already selling her or his soul to the banker in order to pay rent to do?

Unfortunately, not a lot. But still, who wouldn’t want to change things up a bit? I could write about the awesome Asian food market on Gilbert Street that sells all kinds of exotic spices and tasty noodles. I could write about the ease of making homemade pizza with pesto sauce. I could even write about the 37 ways I have discovered to prepare squash.

At least, that was my initial thought process when I sat down to write the proposal for a recipe column. But after several days of mulling it over, I realized my vision was quite impractical. No college student is actually going to go out and buy a vegetable or exert any extra effort to prepare healthy, quasi-gourmet meals — we literally just don’t have the time, energy, or money.

Dejected and questioning every decision I ever made, I set myself back to square one. I’ve been cooking all my life. I used to read my mom’s cookbooks for hours. I was a head baker and pastry preparation assistant (I came up with the job title) at a coffee shop for three years. At a low point, I even began to TiVo the Food Network. How could I be so easily defeated by a simple weekly article for a college newspaper?

Then it struck me: If I couldn’t change students’ mealtime habits, maybe I could at least add a bit of variety to the mundane foods everyone already buys. And that is the purpose of “Dine on a Dime.”

It’s not my intention to change the way you cook and eat. My service is simply to provide you with ways to spice up the ordinary food you already have and to do it in the simplest terms possible.

Sometimes, these terms may seem ridiculously simple, but remember — someone out there may have never made a batch of JELL-O themselves yet. And speaking of JELL-O …

For this inaugural column, I want to talk about a very traditional treat. A treat that is All-American, that there’s always room for (like one more Jäger bomb), and that is always easy. (In fact, far too many college kids forget how easy JELL-O can be to make — the hardest part is finding a microwave-safe measuring cup. Coincidentally, the ceramic coffee cups at the Hillcrest Market hold almost exactly one cup … not that I am suggesting anything.)

But in all seriousness, what could be better for late-night hunger than hydrolyzed collagen derived from animal skin, bones and intestines? Fancy, Crazy, Super Awesome JELL-O.