You Can Eat Better Than You Think

After taking about a week to finally figure out how to get the oven to work (turns out it needed to be reset?), my flatmate and I had a try at a few cheap recipes he found online. For those of you who followed my blog last year you’ll remember him as being a fantastic cook! However, I helped with the majority of these dishes and, as someone who is rubbish at cooking, I found them surprisingly simple.

A little tip…
To make it cheaper, we shared the price between us both. This is something you should think about doing with your flatmates – plan some big meals together! I’ll give a few examples below, but most meals will be cheaper if you buy in bigger quantities and split the price. 

To make things easier for you all, I’ve started with a list of sites that we used to get ideas for some of our meals. Make sure you check out at least a couple of these, they’re really helpful!
– Sorted Food – these guys provide most of the recipes we use. Their you tube channel is better than their website in my opinion, so check out that as well!
– Jamie Oliver’s FoodTube – some very expensive recipes on here so watch out, but he brings on a lot of extra guests so this is a great way to find new chefs to follow.
– Gordon Ramsay’s personal channel on You Tube.
– Food Wishes – chef John is my favourite! Watch his videos and you will see why, he’s so lovely and his recipes are super easy to follow.
– Foodffs – a tumblr blogger who regularly shares lots of great recipes.

Now to the good part – the food! One of the first things we made was Eggs Benedict. Toast an English muffin, grill some ham, poach an egg and cover with hollandaise sauce. An easy way to poach eggs is to put cling film over a bowl, then add the egg, some oil and salt and pepper and twist the cling film to form a little closed bag around it. Be sure to cello tape it closed, and just put into a pan of boiling water for as long as you like your eggs done! The egg should slip straight out once you open it because of the oil.

Gordon Ramsay’s Eggs Benedict

One night we had some gorgeous salmon fillets in a white wine sauce that you can just google – there are lots of variations of it so choose one that fits your taste. With this we had some vegetables and one of my favourite things at the moment – dijon mustard mash. We got the idea from online (apologies, I can’t remember where) but it’s really easy and makes a simple side a lot more exciting. Boil your potatoes until they are ready to mash, add some butter, chives and dijon mustard to taste and mix it all up! I like lots of mustard in mine but it does tend to over power some things.

Our mini roast

This picture shows our try at a roast dinner. It’s missing a lot of things, I know, but my gosh it was yummy. We bought a whole chicken and used the breasts for this (read below to see what we did with the rest). I didn’t have an input on the roast potatoes but they were beyond incredible, and the carrot and asparagus was just left over veg that we used up to accompany it.

I’m having the mash again tonight – literally being cooked as I type! I must say this blog post is not helping my building hunger. Alongside it we’re having the rest of the chicken and using a chicken stock that we made from the carcass to make a chicken pot pie. I’m getting very impatient waiting for it!

Can Students Cook?

Today I find myself on the subject of food (maybe because as I write this I can smell dinner being cooked downstairs). I headed back to Norwich for few days this week, and spent a fair bit of my time helping to cook some really delicious meals and treats. My friends Jack and Ringo are fantastic cooks, and they are proof alone that students can cook great food on a budget.

Egg on a pizza, need I say more!

I think this pizza says it all really. We cooked (well, mostly Jack) pizzas from scratch using a few spare ingredients we all had sitting in our cupboards, and they were absolutely delicious! I would never have thought to add egg onto a pizza, but let me tell you it really works. The only issue we had was only being able to cook one pizza at a time due to there being no shelves in our microwave ovens, so we were fighting over who got which slices each time. The recipe we followed was from Jamie Oliver’s website. Definitely something to try with your flatmates if you get the chance. Sharing meals is not only a lot more fun to do, but also allows you to have cheaper meals with better quality!

For something more sweet, we made some blondies (white chocolate brownies) which did go a bit wrong because we put too much mix into a small tray and so the middle didn’t cook properly. In the end we got impatient and just cut the edges off and devoured them. Still incredibly yummy though; now we know better for next time. One morning we made some pancakes. They are so cheap and simple to make, and most people will enjoy them because they can decorate them to their taste!

I really recommend exploring some of your cooking abilities at university. If you are lucky, like me, you will find some people to help teach you. Or you can do what I do, and offer to do the washing up if they cook :). Its a great way to spend time together too, so you can’t really go wrong – even if the food does end up tasting horrible!