Megan Patterson
Staff Writer
The return to college: more drinking, less sleep and a serious decline in quality of eating. The memories of either home cooked goodness or cheap and exotic foreign dining are certainly buried under the Pot Noodles and Uncle Ben’s Express Rice we’ve been eating from our umpteen free freshers’ packs. Now that they’ve run out, it only gets worse – now we must actually fend for ourselves, reverting to noodles, beans, Dominos, the Chinese or, as the streams of students entering and leaving Spar indicate, to the trusty chicken fillet roll. Hell, seen as we’re a high class college and all that, we might even splurge on an M&S ready meal. Because, despite all our mother’s best attempts of sending us off with every trendy looking student ‘survival’ cookbook, cooking and student life don’t often coexist. In honour of this long lying tradition I thought I’d give a bit of thought to the best and the worst things I’ve seen in student kitchens.
I know many a student that at least tries at the beginning of a new term to right the wrongs of their culinary past and dives right in to what is sure to be a short lived healthy lifestyle, buying bags of any vegetable or fruit that is on offer. Best intentions they are, but the thing that I literally cannot stand in a student kitchens is mould-y, rotting fruit and veg. Remember that bag of onions you bought (and maybe even used one of), a month later and they’re now sitting in some undistinguishable brown juice. What’s that you see? Oh yeah, that bag of carrots, only 99c and they still look good. Actually until pulling them out of the fridge, you didn’t quite get the one at the bottom with the green and white frosting of mould on it. Fruit and veg are all very well in theory, but my word do they cause their fair share of trouble. Even if you do by some miracle get around to making some sort of concoction with them, you haven’t won the battle yet. In fact just last week it was this year’s maiden taking out of the compost black bin sack in my apartment, which resulted in some serious bin juice leakage all over our building’s hall and stairs. If the grimy colour isn’t enough, the smell is a nauseating amalgamation of dumpster, mould and pollution, stuff that would make an iron stomach champ quiver. It kind of felt like the earth might end a day or two earlier thanks to that little contribution.
It must be said that the sinks are the ones to approach with the most caution. Failed attempts burned or stuck to saucepans may be inoculating below a jenga tower of plates and dishes. The prize for this has to go to Halls kitchens in 1st year, when there’s this sense of naivity that someone’s mother will magically appear when things get really bad and wash up. When this doesn’t happen, there’s the denial of any of it being yours, which prolongs the eventual cleanup by at least another five days. Even under this lies worse beings in the food catch of the drain and on the ‘clean’ side after that thorough dip in luke-warm water there’s probably more bacteria fostering than in the chicken, before you cooked it.
I couldn’t leave the article though without giving some space to the actual cooking techniques of students. My personal favourite I just heard last week; A girl, upon discovering that just leaving pasta to soak off the hob in boiled water didn’t give the desired end result, she finally cracked how to cook it, or so she thought. Imagine her disappointment when she found out that putting the pasta in the kettle and then boiling it was not the standard or, I’m assuming, safest way to go about things. That kind of sums it up, some students are really just lacking the basics. Like a friend who can’t open a tin unless it has a pull tab. Or others who will just flat out refuse to cook unless there’s a ready-made sauce in their cupboard.
While all the above are entertaining examples, I don’t want to end this piece on a negative note about cooking. Even if you are one of the people who fit into the categories up there, there’s still hope and reason to get into food and cooking. There’s not much that’s better than being able to rustle up some food and sitting around a table with it, with some friends. Aside from being mightily impressive to most others, we’re always rushing around in college and sometimes I find that the only time I actually get to see some of my friends is in a seriously crammed pub/club/party and lets face it, once you’ve laid into the punch, or whatever spirit or crate of beer that was on special offer in the ‘offy’, combined with some thumping base of a band you’ve never heard of but feel you should have, normal conversation is out the window. Although it seems a shame that we need an excuse to get people together to just sit and talk, doing it through the medium of food is a win-win situation, at least in my opinion. For those who do think the kitchen is unknown territory, get someone who knows how to cook to host dinner and you’ll be amazed how many tips and recipes you pick by just watching them get the food ready. You can make your contribution by bringing the wine. And for those who think that Masterchef is the next stop in your culinary career, spread the knowledge and food around, you can inspire more people than you’d guess. You could save those who boil pasta in a kettle. Please.
