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It’s at around this time of year that loads of people will be moving away from home for the first time to take up university studies. Now I remember when I started my university life, I didn’t know the first thing about cookery, and frankly didn’t care to learn (that came about 3 years later). I was, however, required to somehow keep myself alive during this period, on not much money.

There were lots of student cookbooks, (my parents duly bought me one), but all of these seemed to want you to do things like use more than one ingredient, use herbs, measure things properly, and other such annoying time consuming stuff.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be explaining some of the dos and don’ts of minimalist student cookery. The aim of this endeavour is to eat in a survivable way, very cheaply, with minimal effort, and without everything tasting minging.

1: Cooking, Washing up, and Student culinary life in general.

Do

Fry things on medium setting. Everything fries on medium setting. Other settings are for advanced users.

Cook things for as long as they say. There are lots of corners you can cut – like most of the ingredients – but you’ll just get ill if you undercook stuff.

The washing up. Washing up is a pain. You’ll never feel like doing it, but then, nor will anyone else. However, if no-one does the washing up there won’t be any plates to eat on. If you really neglect this, one of your flatmates might end hating you, or worse, drawing up a washing up rota. This should be avoided at all costs, as it makes you feel like you’re living in a facility.

Make sure you’ve got basic cookery supplies. These include salt, pepper, sugar, cooking oil, washing up liquid, and dishcloths. These all last ages.

Take out the bins. Seriously, it’s not hard. From the horrors I’ve seen, it’s really worth the effort, even if no-one else is doing it.

Don’t

Set fire to stuff you’re cooking. If you’re forgetful (as I am) use a mobile phone alarm or something to make sure you don’t cook it for too long. I seem to mainly burn vegetables, but even these leave your flat reeking of smoke for weeks.

Let the flat have too many pans, plates and cups. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ve got lots of pans, plates and cups, nobody washes up, and the task becomes a 2 hour epic. I once had a friend bring our flat a “gift” of 90 shiny new glasses. Before the month was out, every bloody surface was covered in unwashed glasses.

Leave stuff cooking and go out. This is a recipe for disaster, as you’re pretty likely to end up in the pub and forget about it.

Only eat takeaways. These are probably better than what you’ll normally be eating, but cost a fortune, and tend to make you fat. You don’t actually need to be able to cook to eat hot food.

Steal your flatmates’ stuff if you don’t absolutely know they’re fine with it. Depending on the flatmate, they’ll either hate you forever, move out without telling you, attempt to kill you, or a combination of the three.

Be too aggro to a new flatmate if they don’t do as much washing up as you do. Try to be reasonable, and if they still don’t do it – move out, they never will. I had a friend who fell foul of this one. He got so fed up with his flatmate not doing the washing up that he put the washing up in the flatmate’s bed when he was out. Upon returning from a party that night, he found all of the plates and cups smashed into pieces on his own bed, and a message reading: “if you ever do this again, I will fuck you up” stuck into his door with a knife. Suffice it to say, my friend moved out that week.

Well, that’s all I could think of for basic living. I’ll be back next week with some advice on how to cook meat with minimal effort and stave off scurvy.