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I agree – that’s how I cook rice too. However, it normally takes me half a dozen experiments with varying quantities of water every time I change brand or type of rice to get the right amount. That’s a bit hard work for a student.

“Also, leftover rice can be egg fried, which is teh win.”

But be quite careful with leftover rice – if it’s been sitting out for any length of time, leave it the hell alone, because there’s some really, really nasty, heat-resistant bacteria that can grow on it. Chill it fast.

I also cook rice that way but in a RICE COOKER!!! A Rice cooker is a really great appliance for the student (though I haven’t been a student for 15 years) because it is self-contained and can do numerous tasks — such as rice, steaming, long-term cookery like a crock pot and oh that sous-vide stuff you guys keep nattering on about!

To cook rice you will need:

an oven, a pot with that is happy on the hob and in the oven (eg, LeCreuset), and a kettle of boiling water.

Use 1 rice to 2 water. I use 1 cup Basmati rice to 2 cups boiling water for two people. Add a half-teaspoon of salt (this is really important; if you forget the salt the taste difference is dramatic) and some further flavourings if desired – bay leaf, cardamom, peppercorns, cloves…

Bring to the boil and pop into a preheated oven at 180C with the lid on, for 20 minutes. Perfect every time and nearly impossible to mess up. If you’re not ready to eat when the rice is done just turn off the oven and it’ll survive ages in there.

I don’t see how you can have a food blog and be so unenthused by food! Even as a student I was made a point of eating tasty exciting things.

Pasta is bland you say? Well, unadorned it might be. Much like an unadorned potato. But a lump of butter and a good scrape of parmesan on top, and it’s a meal in its own right. Or, bit more health conscious, a glug of tasty olive oil (like you’d put on salad rather than what you’d fry in) and a grate of black pepper- a feisty little number and not bland in the least.

I agree absolutely 100% with Dougal’s comment about cooking rice but then I did teach him that method so I suppose i would. I was about 15 before I learned that ‘the rest of the world’ cooked rice on the hob. I have been told that this is an energy inefficient way of cooking, to have to turn the whole oven on, but disagree on two counts: firstly, I’d say most of the things I eat with rice, apart from perhaps stir fry (now THAT’s a student staple!) go in the oven too, so you probably have it on anyway. Secondly, having the oven on heats the house, so unless you’re in the habit of having rice in high summer it is a nice alternative to switching a radiator on. Heat AND food, bonus!

With potatoes you forget MASH! We ate an awful lot of mash in fourth year. It can be varied easily, just like in the restaurants, by adding a generous spoonful of seedy mustard (hangs around in bars) or by slowly cooking a leek or an caramelising and onion whilst the potato boils and mixing the resultant soft glop through the taters.

As for bread. Yes, it is expensive from the shops. Particularly if you want bread that tastes of anything. Instead I suggest you ALL get yourself a copy of Dough by Richard Bertinet. The DVD means that you will honestly (I promise) make tasty edible bread from the first effort, and impressive, friend-wowing bread thereafter, and you will soon discover that flour and yeast work out far cheaper than bread. As a bonus, most of the recipes include detail on how to part freeze the loaves, so you can do a big batch as a genius hangover cure at the weekend and then bake at your leisure through the week.

And my biggest piece of advice to student cooks? Cook with your flatmates. Share the responsibility, and the cost. You will be more likely to cook interesting things if you aren’t having to come up with an idea every night of the week, and it WILL be cheaper per person to cook for four or five than for each of you to cook for one.

Helen,

Although I admit, I’m harder to convince than the other two on this whole molecular gastronomy thing, I’m still big into food done right.

With regard to use of staples, I actually use rice a whole lot these days. As a person who likes to cook casseroles, and other dishes with strongly flavoured sauce, I find it a good accompaniment. As a student I would avoid rice, due to the extra washing up, ’cos I was lazy.

Stir frys can be really nice, my sister’s a total master of them, but I’ve always found them very hard to get tasting just right, so I’m not going to advise them as a starter dish to someone who’s never cooked before.

This is a blog post for students, mainly male students with no cooking experience. The post has three aims:

1: To give people who feel totally unable and unwilling to cook a bit of confidence that they can live off something better and cheaper than just pasties and takeaways. Minimalist cookery is incredibly easy, and hopefully people who have mastered the basics will start to try increasingly complex stuff, as I did.

2: To have a laugh at the whole student eating thing. Yeah, I know, not every student’s that naff, but back when I was a student, I knew a lot who were.

3: To generate a bit of commentary from our viewers. People are giving excellent simple advice for beginners to make very cheap and basic stuff taste nice. Which is kinda the point.

Sigh, where were you guys when I was a student? I had to figure out a lot of this stuff the hard way.

One thing I basically survived off of was the Bag Of Frozen Mixed Veg. Generic brands were cheap and usually filled with things like broccoli stems and carrots, but one of those bags was an even dollar and could go for a few meals.

Of course, vegetables got very, very boring. I quickly learned that the local asian markets were godsends – I could pick up loads of curry pastes and various sauces and condiments for roughly half of what the local supermarket charged (and their selection of ramen noodles was far better as well). This kept me from going insane with culinary broedom, and is likely responsible for the fact that I’m now interested enough in food that I’m reading and posting comments to food blogs.

I had a roommate whose strategy was to go to the local bakery and buy what seemed like a gross of day-old bagels and bread for basically pennies, then make sandwich-meals out of those and the free condiments at the student cafeterias. It’s a miracle he didn’t contract scurvy or pellegra.