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?

When I was a student (fresher in '96) I was distraught if my week's food shopping came to more than £10. I needed all my money for beer books.

IIRC there were price wars going on at the time between supermarkets on basic items, you could buy a loaf of cardboard bread for 15p and a tin of beans for 9p in Tesco.

Dinner would be pasta with basics tomato sauce, or super noodles, or beans on toast. I remember the novelty when a lad in the flat next door was bought a microwave, we all used to queue up with our spuds to bake in it (even though it made them soggy and horrible). Oh and cheese toasties made in one of my flatmates' Breville!

we used to nick the landlady's iron to make toasties

To be fair,most of these recipes were for several people. there wss one for £wo people costing £11 which seemed rather excessive. As they were classed as gourmet meals presumably they were for cooking for a group or entertaining. They seemed rather fidley and contained rather more ingredients than one would expect for an everyday meal.

I lived on bread and jam for nearly a year.

But is was "rough" bread and Bonne Maman jam.

I still eat owt

Sorry. Don't be alarmed. That is a Northern Joke.

:o spawnchorus.

I'm so glad to see the reaction here - I read it this morning and was thinking WTF? They are all bonkers. The commissioning editor is bonkers. DS1 left Uni knowing how to make a "DS1 special" - bread, layer of beans, bread, fried egg, bread, layer of beans and that was about it.

Stir fried cabbage and bacon was my staple diet as a student. I lived on the stuff.

What an eye-popping article. I wonder if we this is how the spawn of the writers of the Graun exist at uni? How did this guff get through to print??

To be fair, a friend of mine from school who went to a different uni in the same city as me was rather better than us at eating properly.

He lived in a SC flat with 6 other lads. They had a cooking rota which meant that each one of them cooked a meal for everyone once a week. They also had a washing up rota. Whichever one was cooking that night would shop for fresh ingredients on the way home from lectures. I remember going round one evening and they were all tucking into homemade broccoli quiche!

Said friend used to despair every time he came round to mine and saw a flat full of girls tucking into Super Noodles

I was very pleased when I discovered how cheap liver was.
One of my specials was lamb's liver with stir-fried broccoli and mushrooms in a pitta bread.

Then I discovered dirt cheap chicken liver in the bottom of the freezer cabinet at the supermarket - bingo!

Same here.

I realised things had changed when my DP's daughter came home after her finals and dumped her left-over avocados in the fridge!

when i was a student the problem wasn't just money but also cupboard space i had 1 single door cupboard to keep all my pans,plates and food in and then half a shelf in a fridge and 1/2 a drawer in a freezer.

Weeks menu went something like this

Sommerfield value cornflakes with milk (generally stolen from a flatmate as mine had also been nicked!)

lunch - took a round of cheese sandwiches and an apple

Dinner either pasta with a tin of toms on top or curry super noodles with 'fish' in breadcrumbs!!

the best cook book i had as a student was grub on a grant - still use it now.

Domesticsluttery- this wasn't Southampton by any chance? It sounds like my brother and his friends. Surely there can't be 2 sets of lads like this?

I ate reallly well as a student, hardly ever got takeaways, about 4 ready meals a year, and plenty of fresh fruit and veg every single day, meat or fish a few times a week, and I did it for what would be about 30 quid a week these days. Could have skimped on some stuff and saved more but I wanted to enjoy it and not spend too much time thinking about cooking and shopping. In fact, my diet (and the diet that we live on as a family) is not so different to what I ate as a student. And I don't remember any of my gang ever having to spend 22 quid to make a gorgeous curry.

My staple diet as a student was baked potatoes, cereals, toast and, if I was feeling really creative (ie. if I could be arsed), I'd rustle up a pasta dish.

In student halls though you had to supply your own kitchen equipment and crockery etc so meals always ended up being a 2 small saucepan meal at best as thats all you had. Not to mention that your grant was frittered away behind the SU bar on books

No it was Birmingham, he was a student at Aston (I was at Birmingham uni)

insanely expensive menus aside

it seems to be a point of pride to see who can live the grottiest/most squalid as a student here - if you aren't living on value beans and sleeping with woodlice you aren't a proper student

it is very different in my home country

i got loans to pay tuition and also worked my way through school, this was fairly standard

i was certainly no better off financially, in fact worse - dh for example was a pre-tuition fee student here in the uk

i didn't eat 'rich' but i ate well

i did not know anyone who lived in a hovel or only ate ramen noodles

it is an interesting cultural difference

although agree the menus were bonkers

i have set my form group the task of sharing tested recipes with price per dish once a week so that we can collate them and they can have something to take away with them when they flee fly the nest

I got the Student foodie supplement in the Guardian on Saturday and had a good old laugh, especially at the list of kitchen 'staples' which included stuff like wasabi and herbes de provence. I've only got that stuff now, and I'm a keen cook in my 40s! I did have a very enjoyable grumble to my husband about how my student landlord bought us a sack of spuds for Xmas one year and we had champ dinners throughout January for all our mates, but you had to bring your own masher as we had broken ours from overuse! :D I doubt if I ate a vegetable in three years, I used to live on Big Soup, cheese on toast and booze. We also used to toss a coin on whether to buy a half bag of coal or a bottle of cheap port to keep out the cold in winter, the post usually won. And you tell that to the youth of today, and they won't believe you!

I worked all through university, too. But I lived in London and was broke as hell. Everyone was. It's not a point of pride, it was a common, shared experience. Students were skint. That was the way it was.