A guide to cooking at uni

Cooking at uni can be time-consuming, costly and inefficient. Especially for students who may be their first time living alone and consistently cooking for themselves on a budget, it can be a challenge. Therefore, this blog aims to give you inspiration for cooking at uni, as well as some tricks and tips.

Buy the basics

To get a good headstart for cooking at uni, you need to start with the basics. For instance, having the correct cooking utensils from the very beginning, investing in the right cooking utensils (you may even keep these for the rest of your life so it’s worth the investment) and investing in bulk buying your favourite seasonings and cupboard goods.

Communal cooking – flat come dine with me

Cooking together, for instance electing each of your housemates with a day to cook, is a great way to save money by bulk cooking, save time on individually cooking every day, and ensure that you have a few cooked meals throughout the week. You don’t need to do this every day of the week, just every so often. A fun way that we plan to do this in my flat is to have a flat ‘come dine with me’. For those who don’t know, Come Dine With Me is a popular Channel 4 tv show in the UK. It involves a group of strangers hosting a dinner party each night of the week, at the end, they vote for who hosted the best dinner party. By having flat ‘come dine with me’ we can save money, eat healthily and make it a fun way to get to know each other better by trying each other’s favourite foods.

Meal prep

For days when you do need to cook, a great way to benefit from bulk buying and save time is by meal-prepping your food. Setting time in your routine to prepare a couple of dishes for throughout the week is a perfect, low-effort way to cook for yourself at uni. It also makes it easier to save precious kitchen space with your housemates.

Student-friendly cookbooks

A big help for cooking for me is having a student-friendly cookbook with everything that I need to make cooking simple. For me, sometimes I get overwhelmed by the complex options of recipes to cook and often end up not cooking or doing something really simple. To stop this overwhelming, I have a vegetarian student cookbook which I can just open any page and there is a budget-friendly, easy-to-measure recipe. I use Nosh for students but there are endless options, depending on your preferences.

To conclude, this basic guide aimed to provide you with tips and tricks for cooking at uni, making it more fun and taking the effort out of cooking.