Crappy food you ate as a student

[ALemonyPea]

I was reminded today of the really cheap frozen shepherds pies I used to buy as a student. £1 for 6 of them from Tesco, served with frozen peas. Was an absolute feast circa 1998.

Or instant noodles with grated cheese. I like to have that every now and again, proper comfort food.

beans on toast
instant noodles
mashed potatoes with baked beans and cheese

9p value noodles, dry, from the packet....

I'm going to win this one! After a drunken night out my starving housemates came home to an empty fridge so made a curry using just two ingredients - curry powder and cat food.....

I don't think I really ate any weird combinations, that I remember anyway, although my end of a night out food was chips, cheese and curry sauce.

I did once live off one loaf of value bread and two tins of value baked beans for a fortnight. Was the only time in my adult like I've been below 9 stone 😂 obviously I could still afford alcohol though...

The day I discovered the 4p tins of Tesco value curry sauce was, still to this day, one of the most exciting of my life.

An entire £1 bisto Lasagne between two slices of bread and butter

An entire £1 fish pie between two slices of bread and butter

An entire £1 cottage pie between two slices of bread and butter

An entire £1 macaroni cheese between two slices of bread and butter

I don’t eat bread anymore

Bean feast- it was horrible no matter how you cooked it. We used to get it plain, from one of those weigh your own places.

Toast toppers, they were about 20p in the student shop and they all tastes the same
Oregano always reminds me of student days, as we'd often have pasta, tin of toms, handful of bean feast and lots and lots of oregano.
In the Pre-hipster late 80s avocadoes were not that popular so we used to get tons of them for next to nothing at closing time at the market. I always get a bit of a shock when I see the price of them now, in my mind they're 10 for a pound! (Though they are quite nice, not crappy food).

🤢MrPeevly

I do remember those raspberry ripple things from Kwiksave, they serve something similar at the school I work at.

Pasta with baked beans and cheese plenty of Lee and Perins and black pepper.
Could have done with some fresh veg but could have been worse!

I graduated in ‘88 and I still cannot contemplate eating the following...

Tinned tuna
Red Lentils
Kidney beans

Or any of the above mixed with pasta!
In my final year, I shared a house with someone who was engaged to an asparagus farmer. Once the season started , we had a huge box to get through every week for about 8 weeks . We couldn’t complain as it was expensive stuff but...but.. it took me until I was well into my 30s before I could eat it again

My campus bakery used to do a macaroni cheese pie. YUM!!

I did actually cook at uni but mostly existed on toast!

On campus spar used to sell Bulgarian red wine for £1.99 that was pretty much every night if my first year in halls sorted. We'd all end up with purple teeth!

Netto tinned irish stew with a side of toast. supernoodles with a side of toast. chips (spuds were cheap!!) with cheap sausages and fried eggs. and we used to club together for a sunday lunch. Chippy chips with curry sauce. egg fried rice. packets and packet of broken biscuits.

I forgot, when my husband was a student he used to cook tinned sausages in the kettle. He'd put the whole tin in.

I was a student in the 80s. I was brought up cooking proper meals and I'm afraid to sound stuffy but that is precisely how I carried on when I was a student. My housemates used to eat rubbish like Findus crispy pancakes and I would cook a proper meal from scratch. I was much happier later on when I moved in with a kindred spirit and we would cook roasts, and her speciality was a ginormous mixing bowl full of trifle for pud.

My one concession to scuzziness was I loved instant mashed potato and would eat it by the bucket load.

A tin of beans mixed with chopped onions, mushrooms, scrambled egg and cheese. On toast.

Dairylea sandwiches

Chilli flavoured beanfeast with bread

I lived in Perry Barr (Birmingham Poly), the Perry Barr Balti was excellent value at the end of an evening at the student union indie disco, huge garlic naan for 65p. Mushroom Balti for £2.

Koka curry noodles (still a fave)
Linda McCartney lasagna (if I was feeling sophisticated)
Tival hot dogs
Cereal for dinner
Cake for dinner
Doritos and houmous for dinner
Etc

First year lived on pasta and tinned tomatoes. Couldn't keep anything in the communal fridge or it would get stolen.

Lots of instant noodles of one variety or another.

Boyfriend and his mates lived in a flat above a corner shop and the owners gave them all the stale bread to eat so they had lots and lots and lots of toast. So when I ran out of money would go there and have toast.

Oh god, Beanfeast - lived on it. Also tinned cheese ravioli and sweetcorn. Washed down by Thunderbird. Even just typing that makes me feel queasy.

We used to eat Fray Bentos pie with smash, peas and gravy.

Noodles sometimes dry (!)
Beans and instant mash
Peas and pasta no sauce (things were really tough at times)
Anything I could get my hands on even if it was stale 🤢!!

Oh and cheesy pasta !!

Fresher 1996
On the whole ate quite well throughout.
pasta and pesto featured regularly .
Homemade pizza - bread with Tom purée and cheese.
Guy in my flat brought his own deep fat fryer with him to halls.
Also had a flatmate whose dad used to buy him two trays of plum tomatoes at the start of term. He used to eat them mixed with undercooked rice- like a watery risotto.
Happy days

We were over the road from a wholesale food suppliers, so we used to go and buy an enormous frozen bag of the cheapest burgers for next to nothing. God, they were awful - among the recognisable components were chunks of bacon rind.

The city the Uni was in had loads of curry houses that all catered to students, so we ate a lot of those. We always knew not to order the meat curry - "meat" could be anything. One of my housemates found a pigeon bone in his once. I do remember eating leftover curry from the night before for my breakfast - it had been left on the coffee table overnight and somebody had put a cigarette butt out in it, but, you know, waste not want not...!

Oh, and buying litre plastic bottles of (very) rough red wine from the shop on the corner. It would probably have doubled up as paintstripper - I've never had heartburn like it!

BBQ beef super noodles and waffles done in the toaster!

Bernard Matthews turkey drummers and chicken in breadcrumbs (think they had a catchy name too!)

I did eat quite well to be honest. But my favourite comfort food after a long day was just bulgur wheat cooked in vegetable stock I still love it. Or pasta with curry paste and grated cheese.

My mum was really against any packet foods so I went through a short-lived obsession with them. Especially different flavour sauce mixes.