Student who can't cook help

[cleo333]

My son is off to uni but cannot cook a thing , he's never been interested grrr

Can anyone think of any basic food recipes I could teach him then he can at least feed himself for a few days ?

Spaghetti bol
Chilli
Chicken curry.
Etc
All mine went with a basic knowledge of these sorts of hob top recipes and a supply of sauce jars and rice and pasta.
Cook a batch Sun eve. Freeze 3 portions and eat one. That does 4 days.
Main issue was DS1 kept forgetting to defrost stuff! He ate a lot of pizza, Smiles with chicken nuggets and posh baked beans on toast. (Beans, cheese and a can of tuna)
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He also used the (really quite good value) canteen for a decent lunch on campus.

Bolognese sauce - he can adapt it to make cottage pie/chilli/meatballs/lasagna etc.
Also teach him how to cook all different kinds of eggs.
There are lots of cookbooks aimed at students The Hungry Student Cookbookand I also love a book called ‘A Wolf in The Kitchen’. Good luck to both of you!A Wolf In The Kitchen: Easy Food For Hungry People

Will he be in self catered or catered?what facilities are there? It really depends on what he likes and wants to eat - maybe pasta, rice, eggs ,fish?

The Hungry Student Cookbook is good.

Honestly though, I'd just leave him to it. He's known that he's off for quite some tike and hasn't bothered to learn the basics yet, then perhaps hunger will motivate him

Omelette
Pancakes
Carbonara
Naan pizzas realfood.tesco.com/recipes/naan-bread-pizzas.html
Pesto pasta
Egg fried rice schoolofwok.co.uk/tips-and-recipes/egg-fried-rice
Quesadillas www.dontgobaconmyheart.co.uk/refried-bean-quesadillas/

And you might want to talk to him about his budget. DS was watching a reel the other day where a Student used Just Eat for all of his meals, every single one.

Don't know about your family but that's certainly not sustainable for ours.

The Sorted youtube channel have some good books but they also jave a really good Ap which has meal planning,shopping lists and step ny step recipes

https://sortedfood.com/sidekick/

My ds uses it and says he never jas food waste

Welll he has a few weeks to learn to cook!

Can he boil an egg, cook pasta, bake a potato, grill bacon? Even a few basics like that will save him time and money.

Just remember to tell him to put water in the egg pan. I had a flatmate who didn't .... the resulting explosion stank the flat out for days.

If he can read then he can cook so maybe just give him a list of recipes and send him with basic store cupboard ingredients.

Feed your Family for £20/week has some really cost effective, simple recipes and meal plans. The sister FB page is much more active/interactive and more frequently updated.

I taught DSs to make fajitas and basic bolognese. Once they'd learnt that, they could adapt both to make other meals by changing the meat or adding a can of chopped tomatoes or kidney beans & chilli.

They both learnt more whilst there and are competent cooks now.

How basic does it need to be? Can he heat beans? Cook pasta, rice? Boil an egg? Bake a potato? Do cheese on toast? Start with those if not.

Then a few basics that can be adapted is useful.

Simple tomato sauce with onion and garlic, l that you could add then bacon, other veg etc.

Basic omelette

Mince and tomato sauce - can be bolognese, or chilli, (lasagne if he's feeling adventurous!). Not a huge leap to get it to the base for a shepherd's pie

Really simple chicken curry from scratch

Washing and cleaning are not particularly interesting but its part of being an adult and not something he can opt out of or leave to his mum all the time.

Get him to cook a couple of times a week at home - the odd lunch or dinner. There are quite a few basic cookery books written for student budgets, one of those would do to start learning from at home. There are also young cooks on Instagram et al which he might like to try.

I'd get him a student cookbook and set him on practicing from that. I got my ds Nosh for students last year so he could spend sixth form getting to grips with thinking about the ingredients for dishes, how you can use things differently etc and he's really enjoyed it. Very straightforward, explains about food safety, and not assuming that batch cooking will still have the batches in the fridge when you come to eat them

This is what I'd do.

No use teaching him stuff he doesn't like/won't eat.

You've got a few weeks to get to grips with this.

What are his favourite meals?

Also worth going shopping with him a couple of times and him getting to grips with what he could buy. So, instant noodles, filled pasta, instant oats might be a good gateway to sorting proper food.

It's worth showing him things that can do more than one meal. Something he can have for tea one day and lunch the next?

This is why it needs to be something they start from primary school and they get more responsibility in secondary. By his age he should have been making at least one family meal a week. Mine started with the easy chicken pesto pasta with left over chicken so they didn't even need to cook that.

Although my son can cook from scratch and took a slow cooker to uni, he also took tins of things like M&S chicken curry, chilli, soup etc as an easy meal plus microwave pouch rice. Now is it his usual standard? No but it served a purpose. It was quick and warming when there were a lot of other students in the kitchen.

I would say get microwave rice pouches now so he can learn to heat those through and cook some pasta. He needs to learn what under cooked, al dente, cooked and over cooked pasta tastes like, so this can be learned in one sitting. For things like garlic tube of squeezy garlic is far easier than a garlic crusher etc. Scrambled eggs Lots of videos on Youtube and he can learn to cook what he eats. He has lots of time before uni starts and can be cooking every day.

Food safety and storing food safely is a huge thing to learn and most important. Ds had flatmates who would open a tin of beans, use half and leave the rest in the tin in the fridge usually until it grew mould.

Yes, filled pasta with a jar of sauce and pot noodle or similar. He needs to learn to cook the foods he will eat.

One of my DD's flatmates couldn't cook anything at all when he arrived and she said he just sort of stood there in the kitchen on the first night. One of the other ones was making a curry from scratch.

He went home on the first weekend and when he came back he could make a few different things.

^^This.
Luckily both of my DCs could make decent meals before leaving home because they’d been interested in cooking. It’s obviously more difficult when someone shows no interest whatsoever but I guess hunger will force them eventually!

Try the one pound meals - Miguel Barclay I think? Either book or social media, easy to follow even at beginner level, reasonably priced and tasty (although the portions won't be exactly a pound anymore because food is so expensive)

Leave him to it. He'll get sick of Pot Noodles and beans on toast soon enough.

Can you afford a couple of Hello Fresh type boxes? They're great step by step for learning how to cook certain dishes

when you say can't cook, do you mean literally NOTHING? Because if so, I'd be inclined to say suggestions of spaghetti bolognaise are already a step too far.

If you're starting from scratch, it's things like how to use the oven to heat up crumbed chicken/fish, oven chips etc. Or the basics of boiling or scrambling eggs (omelettes way too ambitious frankly for a total beginner). Perhaps how to make "fake" pizzas using pitta breads etc. How to bake a jacket potato.

Next step up might be fajitas or spaghetti bolognaise. A few basic pasta sauces. Maybe how to fry a steak/lamb chop/chicken breast.