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?

I cook loads now and I don't think those meals are too expensive if you're cooking for a few people. But my DH and I ate sausage sandwiches, beans on toast and pizza for three straight years. Sometimes for variation we had these weird frozen chicken balls with garlic sauce in them and a bag of Caesar salad. The iceberg lettuce in the salad was the only fruit and veg we saw for three years. That's how it's meant to be isn't it?

The whole problem, like so many problems related to Guardian articles in recent years, could be solved by halving their journalist's salaries. Then they would have a better chance of actually understanding the lives of the people they claim to represent.

Haven't read whole thread but I did read the article while sitting on the train on Tuesday morning and it was all I could do not to splutter over the sleeping bloke sitting next to me. £22! Have to say, though, I suspect those recipes weren't written specially for the article and were mostly just lifted from the chef's latest book. Unbelievably lazy journalism.

Haven't finished reading yet, but Riven you are prejudging. She will be fine. Me and me sibs went to Oxford from comprehensives. The rent (living in college for 2 years) was tiny. The food was subsidised. There are loads of odd funds here and there for odd things, if you find them. I didn't but I know plenty of people who did. You weren't allowed to work in term time then, don't know about now.

After finals, I mentioned to my tutor that I was doing voluntary work abroad. The next day I found a cheque made out to me for £500.

It has been said before but atm it is cheaper to go to Oxbridge because of the wealth of the colleges.

Does anyone know what happened to the cookbook containing 14 recipes every child should know? About 2 years ago.

The big Catholic Church in Oxford does a simple lunch every day for £1. (I think you might have to attend mass, but it is quite a weekday shortie.

I had Katherine Whitehorn's 'Cooking in a bedsit' iirc.

FaintlyMacabre I knew people like that at Southampton! (though we all lived in the red light district so not quite as salubrious as it sounds )

Of course, but she is in the bestest place. And as an Oxford graduate I can confirm that Cambridge is better.

Yeah, nice idea, but cut out any ingredient which costs over £1 per 500g.
Think that would be the creme fraiche, the wine and the mushrooms.
What's wrong with veggie curry and spicy chickpeas?
I used to eat beans with tinned tomatoes added two nights a week when I was a stude.

Should point out that I could cook perfectly well by the time I went to university I'd been cooking the family evening meal more often than not at home. But a 5p can of beans on two slices of cheap toast is a lot cheaper than even the most frugally-prepared "proper" meal (and not actually all that bad for you salt content is high, but overall beans tick most nutritional boxes). And we only had access to anything approaching a proper kitchen for one year out of the three -- apart from that it was a couple of gas rings shared between a lot of students.

I can remember the student newspaper did a (partly tongue-in-cheek) series of columns on cooking using an electric kettle and a sandwich toaster (e.g. you could cook pasta in the kettle and fry stuff up on the opened-out sandwich toaster to make a pasta sauce).

cory - most journalists (with obvious exceptions) don't get paid anwhere near what people think they get paid. supply and demand...there's always some youngster willing to do it for nothing.

professorlayton - I was thinking that about cooking facilities. I think a far more relevant/useful guide would be how to survive supplement canteen style food in Halls....interesting toasted sandwiches...going to the supermarket late on Sunday to get cheap fruit...how to cook using an electric frying pan (do they still exist? if they do I bet Halls ban them...boiling an egg in a kettle. Student cooking is just not the stuff of Jamie et al.

didn;t see your second paragraph...

If anyone has student children (or just would like to cook cheap things) I definitely recommend this site

I'm flattered by your assumption of how much we're paid, cory . Speaking as a journalist.

An Oxford-educated journalist, yet. A wholefoodylefty lentil-based Oxford-educated journalist.

Riven we still make lentil slop too.

Sidge I was at uni 88-92 too,happy days.The Grub on a Grant era

I think those days of being really poor and having to eat lentils and tinned butter beans do set you up for reality.

If students these days expect to eat posh nosh a la The Guardian at the poorest time of their lives I don't think it sets them up for real life very well.

I have to feed 5 of us on a small budget and I do think my poor lentil munching uni days help with that. One day said students maybe paying a stonking mortgage and feeding 3 kids on one salary too,expecting to cook with wine and creme fraiche when poor is a little unrealistic and not going to help with learning to keep to a budget.

I was at uni 96-99 at Glamorgan. I had an old beat up car which was only used for getting from my parent's house to my digs. It also came in useful when a friend had to be taken to hospital late one night. Some how I hadn't drunk anything that night and was able to take her.
Another friend worked in Pizza Hut in Cardiff and I had a deal that I would collect her after work in the small hours of the morning for payment in pizza.
We would also use my car to go on a house trip to Tesco which was out of town. The food was cheaper than the supermarket in town. We all usd to pile in and go and run round tesco and see how many bags of shopping we could get for £10.
In my second year our student house got condemned by Transco as the gas boiler was leaking. We all did a runner and stopped paying the rent. Mind you the house was falling down the hillside.

I survived for the summer on a bag of frozen spinach and a packet of rice. Glasgow 91-95. This supplement is an insult to real students.