Since having come home for the disgustingly long summer
holidays, I have been in culinary heaven. Oh! The joys of full cupboards! The luxury of having more in the fridge then
merely a lump of cheese with something odd growing on it and a half a mug of
soup pitifully covered by tin foil! The beauty of the absence of the odd smell
that usually ominously lurks by the freezer! And the distinct lack of
Sainsbury’s Basics ham, a staple of my diet in term time, 20 % actual meat and
80%.... everything else… Welcome to the student kitchen! I know you are
intrigued as to the wonderful and mysterious things that occur here.
Having been catered for our first year of university, where everything
was served with some form of deep fried potato, my houseys and I quite enjoy
cooking for ourselves. Generally in a house full of 20 year olds, you will find
that foodie habits split into various different zones. There’s the exotic one, the flattie that
branches out into all manner of exciting dishes who has a cupboard full of
herbs, spices and lentils. Oh, the lentils. Then there’s the traditional cook,
the one who cooks just like mama used to make it, specialising in spaghetti,
shepherds pie, risotto, the lot. These people are very handy to have around if
you are in desperate need of cheering up via large quantities of food. Another
key cog in the workings of the student kitchen is the freezer. Thank you,
freezer, for providing us in moments of dire need with pizzas, the
unidentifiable frozen meals in Tupperware boxes and most importantly, fish
fingers for the ultimate snack, a fish finger sandwich. Shun me if you will,
but I am unashamed to admit that said sandwich has made me very happy on more
than one occasion…
I think it is safe to say that my flatmates and I have all
bonded over food. The plain fact of the matter is that we all love it. We are
also proud inventors of the term ‘starvacious’
adj. meaning to be so very hungry
that a state of willingness to eat another human being is reached. In such
situations, to prevent an ethical and moral crisis, the kettle is put on, pasta
is boiled and mixed with large quantities of basil pesto and cheddar cheese.
Happy days. Our forays into communal cooking have been hilarious. At the end of the winter term we decided to cook a Christmas dinner with
everything we had left over in the fridge. We found ourselves sorting through
various elderly vegetables, including carrots that didn’t really look like
carrots anymore and potatoes that resembled a shrunken head. Nonetheless, aside
from forgetting to defrost the chicken, googling the symptoms of salmonella and
pitifully calling our mummies for advice, it was a resounding success.
Our shopping habits vary too. There is an Aldi very close by
to where we live, which I usually emerge from clutching all manner of random
assorted foodstuffs. I trail home, beaming, and burst into the house declaiming
‘Who KNEW an ENTIRE CHEESEBOARD could be purchased for UNDER £3?!” or “BEHOLD,
my delicious assorted jars of Tapas!
50p! 50P!” Of course I probably went in with the intention to buy a 45p loaf of
bread, but that is beside the point.
It seems that I cannot finish this without a note of the
culinary North-South divide. This manifests itself in various different ways at
Uni and I have found that I have particularly clashed with the food habits of
the North. For instance, a particular northerner of my acquaintance has an
OBSESSION with gravy. Gravy on chips. Gravy on pie. GRAVY ON MASH. It’s an
utter nightmare. What next? Gravy on toast? There’s me, trying to enjoy my long
awaited dinner – yet I am choking, DROWNING in the vast swathes of gravy that have
consumed my plate. I feel like an extra in Titanic,
my hand is waving pitifully and trying to cling on to something, ANYTHING,
until I cannot fight it any longer and am resigned to a life soaked in gravy. And
don’t even get me started on curry sauce…
(This post is dedicated to my lovely flatmates, with whom I have shared many culinary highs and lows xxx)
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