What did you eat when you were a student?

[Sunnytoday01]

I’m going back to the ‘80s but my diet was rubbish and I couldn’t cook. I used to eat a lot of toast and a hot meal would be Richmond sausages, smash potato and mushy peas or baked beans. My housemates and I would eat a cheese and tomato oven pizza occasionally. I even liked a pot noodle 🤣

I eat completely differently now but I can’t believe how awful my diet was and I didn’t seem to mind!

I worked in McDonalds so I had a food allowance for every hour worked. My usual order was a fish fillet, vanilla milkshake and small fries.

Lol!

All I kept at home was bread, butter, instant coffee and milk (also from McDonalds)
A bar of chocolate every single day walking in for lectures and maybe an apple.
Alcohol was the remainder of my diet!

😂

These are brilliant

I’ve always loved cooking. We deliberately didn’t drink a huge amount of booze so we had money for proper food.

No one went hungry or was malnourished in my house.

I have vague memories of frying things random together.
I had a lot of stomach ache as a student.

I was a 90s student. A lot of pasta with cheese sauce, veggies and bacon - there was a bacon butcher near me that sold the scrappy bits from the rasher machine at 10p/lb and often it was great meat just not neat rashers. Or spag Bol.

Rice with chicken sweet’n’sour from a jar or chicken curries cooked from scratch.

An occasional lamb chop and potatoes (usually after I’d been home for a weekend and mum went to local butcher for me). Or omelette with mushrooms, bacon and cheese.

And an occasional knorr pastaria Parmesan or carbonara packet.

Not the worst student diet, fair amount of things I cooked properly, reasonable amount of veg, but shocking lack of fish and could have done a lot better on veg and variety.

Oh, also a lot of tuna and sweetcorn - in fried rice dishes mainly.

This is London, 1971-73. I knew how to cook. Initially I was in a bedsit with a kettle, toaster and a tiny Baby Belling cooker (hotplate and tiny electric oven) and no fridge. Milk and butter were kept under porous terracotta covers sitting in saucers of water (evaporation keeps them surprisingly cool). I had cereal, milk and fruit for breakfast, lunch from our tiny canteen at college, usually scrambled egg or cheese on toast, then most evenings I had a cooked meal, I would cook a one-pot tiny casserole in the little oven most nights. Dessert was fresh fruit. Fridays I treated myself to a takeaway, usually spare ribs and rice, Sunday morning I used to buy a couple of cakes from a lovely patisserie and the Sunday papers, then go and sit in the park and read my papers and eat my cakes, along with a flask of instant coffee.
When I moved in with fiance, we were in a 1-bed flat, top floor of a 3-storey Victorian house, so had a small but full-size kitchen with a fridge!!!! We shopped at Sainsbury's on a Friday night for basics, and bought fresh meat, fish, veg and fruit from the North End Road market. At the end of the day you could pick up bargains like slightly bruised and squashed fruit and vegetables for pennies. I used to make 3 main dishes at the weekend, each enough for 2 meals (stuff like stew or bolognese, fish pie, macaroni cheese, chicken casserole) which went in the fridge for reheating through the week, plus fresh veg, and we went out for a meal once a week. There was a restaurant called The Pot where you could sit at long tables and get a heaping plateful of whatever cheap and cheerful dish was cooked that day, (think paella, veg curry, pasta in sauce) plus a glass of paint-stripper wine for £1. Our grocery budget for 2 of us was £20 a week and I often had money left over to subsidise eating out, or to afford entertaining friends for dinner. I probably ate better then than now!!!

Lots of sandwiches. Eggs and beans on toast. Super noodles! Salads and pasta. Occasionally one of those disgusting microwavable burgers when hungover. Lots of cider!