WTF! Anyone else horrified at this Guardian article about "student" food?

[MrsTittleMouse]

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/21/student-cooking-recipes

It all costs an absolute fortune! My DH has a good job, but we don't have enough grocery budget to cook half this stuff. What are they all on?

Whatever happened to 'Grub on a Grant' by Cas Clark? Anyone remember that particular tome? The 'desperate measures' meal was potatoes on a bed of rice - which I think I had a few times. Other than that, lots of lentil bakes. And Pot noodles, which are still my guilty pleasure ...

LOL, expat :)

@ MMe Blueberry.

I came home for a fortnight one summer the width of a pencil and proceded to eat everything in sight. I had no car then, so lived the healthy living riding a bus everywhere on a student pass and walking in 40 degree heat. Great for the tan, too, although now I have dreadful sun damage.

My dad quipped, 'What have you been doing with your allowance?'

1. My mother cut it off when I refused to spend the entire summer chez elle, the beginning of her machinations to get me to live near her which, in the course of 21 years, have all failed.

2. Slumming, I guess? :o

I can remember all of us pooling our resources.

$11 for a bottle of Malibu or for food shopping?

No contest!

My rule at university, was that if you didn't eat supper, you saved money, got drunk faster and managed to get some chips from some people at closing time outside the pub...

I think alcohol, ciggies and coffee were the basis of my diet in uni...

I'm a student - I won't be partaking.

BloodyHellTiggaxx

I've still got grub on a grant. (And use it!)

I lived a lot on variations of mince - spag bol, chili, lasagne and cottage pie!

I also ate lots of pasta with Cambells soup sauce or pesto. For extra nutritional value I used to stir in frozen veg (ie. peas and sweetcorn).

I still, despite a high paid job and waitrose habit, eat stuff like that regularly (although I've lost the cambells soup habit and tend to buy filled fresh pasta to go with the pesto).

Even now I would balk at 22quid for a curry. I did a dinner party recently and fed 8 people 3 courses for about 80 quid and no one complained (homemade tomato/ roasted pepper soup, salmon, cous cous and veg followed by pavlova).

I loved Cas Clarke. Her other book "Great Grub for Toddlers" was also excellent, lots of lovely family meals and none of this Cooking-meals-for-toddlers-only-and-cooking-another-meal-for-adults Annabel Karmel shite!

I think if my DS (PFB heading off this weekend) was faced with the food mentioned on this thread, he would be using all his money on train fares home each weekend. (We are close to his Uni, so only about £12 return with his rail card).

I think perhaps I have brought him up too well :)

If he is going to live on Pot Noodles, I hope he hooks up with a church so that parishioners can beef him up with hearty Sunday lunches. We live in a Uni town and do this for our church-students.

I've got the Cas Clarke Vegetarian Grub on a Grant and it is brilliant, lovely falafels and burgers and yes chickpea curry and no F-ing around :o

Did I miss something, or hasn't anyone remembered the joys of a bacon sandwich? .
It was the ultimate supper. I also sadly remember making it from bacon 'off-cuts' at the local shop. Whatever they were. Best not to think about it, really. Or the frozen 'meat' pies.

Did anyone else have a local overpriced corner shop, preying on the fact students were not organized enough to go to the supermarkets? Dick Turpin's Tuck Shop, we called ours. We only realized how overpriced it was when we caught the budget on TV and the uproar over the increase in price of cigarettes. We had been paying twice as much as that already

Oooh yes! Am I wearing rose-tinted spectacles, or did bacon used to be much cheaper, btw?

But yes: our halls did delicious crispy bacon, which became even more crisp as it was left out on the hot tray. Mmm ... lovely. White bread, ketchup.

Blueberry - good luck! . I was brought up to cook too - I cook do a good three-course meal before I'd done my GCSEs. Guess how much crap I ate in the first term ... happy days ...

Food is much more expensive now than when I was a student - I used to buy butter (I was brought up with it and can't stand marg) for 50p a block - now economy butter is £1.00. Economy bread is about twice what it used to be. Meat seems really expensive, though I had a veggie boyfriend then so didn't eat much of it.

I lost three stone in weight in my first term because I didn't have time to eat, and slept for about three hours a night. Hooray for undiagnosed illnesses. As a former fat kid, though, I was convinced I was fat as when I did eat, it was half a pizza, or some ice-cream, and I still had a wee tummy. I didn't even notice until someone pointed it out.

This thread is making me feel very nostalgic. I was a student in Sheffield in the early 90s and we also lived in damp hovels and lived on pasta and tinned tomatoes. But a lot of us had part time jobs in pubs and similar for extra cash for beers and weed (and the occasional E:).

I left Uni with less debt than I have now!

I'm glad I was a student before the time of laptops, mobiles and Facebook.

We would have 'dinner parties' or big get togethers for a roast on a Sunday where we would all contribute bits of food. Good times.

My DS is going to have a similar experience as there is no way I'm prepared to bank roll a luxury student lifestyle, not that we'd ever have the spare cash. Any spare cash I might have when he's left home will be spent on me:)

I have Grub on a Grant - it's a fab book!

I was at uni 1989-1992 and remember spending very little on food. A posh meal for us was Findus Crispy pancakes

But then we could have a great night out on a fiver - a pound to get in to the Student Union Bop, a pound for a pint of snakebite and black (times three) and a pound for a tray of curry chips on the way home. Aaah happy days!

I gave up reading the Guardian years ago because of this kind of nonsense (after I had thrown many copies across the kitchen in despair far too many times!)

They like to think they're so right on but they quite comically don't have a clue! I think they should ask a bunch of Mum's to write next years student recipe book, if anyone knows how to cook on a tight budget it's us! :-)

Too right, Pirate.

The thing is, cooking on a budget is really not hard. Most of the people on this thread appear to have learned it while pissed/stoned/frantically trying to shag anything that moved. So it can't require a lot of concentration.

By the way, I cannot express how much I love the way this thread makes me feel like a grumpy old codger who had a real university experience ... I'm 25 and still studying, so probably you should all be shooting me as an enemy spy.

OMG someone else mentioned 'Grub on a Grant' ...a literary legend!

I wanted 'Grub on a grant' but couldn't afford to buy it.

/four yorkshireman/

Sorry haven't read all the posts, so sorry if I'm repeating someone. Has anyone noticed the 200ml oil in Tom Aikens' curry. That's nearly half a pint!!! No wonder he tells them to remove the excess fat later on...

I also though and at the pricing of the recipes in this supplement. I also thought that the writers seem to have lost touch with student finances, flair and facilities. V sad as it could've been a really helpful/relevant set of recipes. Perhaps they should get some actual home cooks (like us lot!) who have to carefully manage budgets and cook as part of a tight schedule, in a postage stamp sized normal sized kitchen, with a normal amount of gadgets and pans, etc instead of a bunch of chefs who collectively are beginning to make the whole nation think that we can throw ingredients together to create an adequate, healthy and tasty meal. I had to smile at the suggestion that for the curry, you whizz the ingreadients together - WITH WHAT?! My flatmate's entire kitchen kit consisted of a wok and a fork...!! I think I had a masher and a small vegetable knife, and the 'student foodie' amongst us had a garlic press... What hope.....?! MPD

CAN'T

I lived in a part of town where there were loads of great Indian food markets and a seconds bread shop, where all the day old stuff from the smarter parts of town were sold. I think it was 10p for a loaf of bread - people used to queue around the block. My flatmates and I used to put six quid each a week in a kitty for food and this included breakfasts (although my brekkie was usually a ciggie on the bus and a mars bar) and cleaning stuff (minimal expenditure). However, at the ripe old age of 40, I will be cooking these recipes for my family, although I am convinced that they need not cost this much.

I mostly cooked perfectly nice food as a student, and my friends and I had a regular weekly foodie night (I've still go the cookbook they bought me as a present) and might well have eaten dishes like those, although they had to be veggie, so a bit cheaper I guess. My mum taught me how to cook the basics, and when dh and I moved in together I cooked most nights meals not that different to what I'd cook now. We had a budget of 35 pounds a week for food. My friends who didn't fall out with each other too much tended to cook communally too.

We did live in a terrible dump, but I suspect we had more disposable cash than many working people. Most students were (and probably are) just stupid with managing their money, drinking and eating out at the beginning of term or whenever their cheques came through and then living on bread and water toward the end. Lots of my friends spent a great deal of time with the really unpleasant bank manager in our town begging for increases to their overdrafts. The difference with debt then was that it was fairly immediately repayable, and as I graduated in the early 90's there were very few jobs around. So it was perhaps more scary.

I the spirit of the four Yorkshiremen I shared a flat at uni in the 70s. One of girl's parents' gave her some powdered egg; left over from the war, I think, rationing days, anyway.

It made perfectly OK, if slightly fishy, scrambled eggs. Just close your eyes and think of kedgeree. :o

This is so funny. DH was just saying yesterday 'Bloody hell, have you seen these student recipes? What happened to processed burgers?' and my response was 'They should use Grub on a Grant'. The Guardian does seem to be getting more and more removed from reality.