Arguably, I produce my best ideas when I’m dead broke. And so it was, that when I was 21 and didn’t have two nickels to rub together, I planned a spring break trip.

It was 1988 and my rent was overdue. My college roommates and I were scheduled to graduate in two months. We were interviewing to finally realize the careers we’d been studying four years to attain, but none of us had job offers yet.

Chris was from a wealthy Iowa family and had a credit card paid by her parents and a reliable car. Heidi was from a working-class family in rural Ohio, and like me, had to work part-time through college for spending money. Heidi and I also had cars, but they were the kind of junkers that could only be relied upon to get us to Kroger’s for midnight study snack runs and often left us stranded on the interstate when we drove home for the holidays.

For Heidi and me, the idea of going on a spring break trip was financially ludicrous, because our part-time jobs only produced enough funds for meager groceries, rent and cheap beers. Still — it was our senior year. Our last chance to really let our big, frizzy, permed hair down and have some fun before we’d be forced to become real-world adults.

We simply had to go on a spring break trip. The only question was, “How’re we gonna pay for it?”

It was time to get creative. In a newspaper ad, I found a small two-bedroom condo for rent in Marco Island, Fla., that might be affordable if we stuffed it with enough girls. So, I recruited my Kappa Delta sorority sisters, Mary and Andrea, to join Chris, Heidi and I on the trip. Chris agreed to drive us from our frigid Miami of Ohio campus apartment to sunny Florida, as long as we covered gas. I also had the bright idea for each girl to take one night to cook dinner for everyone.

Thanks to my penniless genius, we were ready to hit the road on our Senior Spring Break Trip! Twenty hours later, we were unpacking our bags at the condo complex in Marco Island, ready to hit the beaches and bars in our neon bathing suits, knock-off Vuarnet sunglasses and jellies sandals.

I can’t recall who provided dinner those first few days, but I offered to cook seafood on my designated night. When that day came, I drove with Heidi into town to shop for the necessary ingredients — buttery red potatoes, tender-crisp green beans, lemons, Old Bay seasoning, and three steaming pounds of fresh Gulf Coast shrimp. I couldn’t wait to impress my midwestern friends with my coastal cooking skills.

“Twelve dollars a pound?!” I whisper-screamed to Heidi at the seafood counter, “That’s gonna wipe me out!” I had no idea that shrimp was so expensive — my parents had always paid for it. But it was too late to back out. Once again, I got creative.

I vaguely remembered a faded, hand-drawn sign I’d seen in the scrub trees on the side of a lonely dirt road …

“This shrimp is so fresh!” my college girlfriends declared. It wasn’t until all the shrimp had been eaten and the dishes were cleared that I told them how, and where, I’d bought it.

The sign had read, “Bait Shrimp $2.50 a pound.” The weathered woman down the dirt road told me that she’d “fish the big-uns out” for me. She promised that they were “good eatin’,” which she knew from personal experience. From her rickety wooden dock, she scooped her wrinkled hand into the Gulf, plucking from a corral swarming with hundreds of live shrimp until she filled a bag.

“WE JUST ATE BAIT SHRIMP?!” my flabbergasted friends choked on their wine coolers.

“That’s nothing,” I told them, “Before I steamed them, I had to pinch the heads off while they were still alive.” My friends never forgave me for serving them bait for dinner, but we had a blast that week nonetheless.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but poverty is the creative college roommate who planned an awesome spring break trip.

Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com