Hello!

Even the thought of writing this blog post has got me very excited, I’ve become a proper foodie person now.

Since early March my wonderful boyfriend Lucas and I have gotten more into cooking – we make a list of what meals we’re going to make every day and we go to Asda on a Monday to buy what we need and it’s a good way of saving money as probably being a lot more healthy than we would be if we weren’t cooking!

I’m not entirely sure what sparked it – maybe because we were trying to eat together and ready meals just weren’t working very well or maybe it was my sudden craving to cook (that was mostly baking cravings before Christmas). But we’re cooking now and I actually get excited about it!

 

As you can tell from my instagram at the time – I was really happy with the food we were making! I got really into taking photos of what I was eating because I was proud of what I was making!

The cooking isn’t a health thing – I don’t really know if what we are eating is healthy but from trying to make a couple of healthy dishes in the past, we’ve actually found it’s way more expensive to be healthy so we’ve stuck with what we know which is how to make some not-particularly-unhealthy-ish meals on a budget and not any super healthy meals that cost more.

That’s another blog post entirely!

When we first started cooking it was a lot of the same meals – cream of mushroom pasta bake, spaghetti and meatballs, garlic chicken and potato cubies – but we started doing one new meal a week and whilst we don’t always stick to it, we try to cook every night we’re in. We have some dishes that are easier than others and if we know we’ve got a long day ahead we’ll put an easy dish at the end of it.

But we’ve expanded! The featured photo is of (what we call) our pizza pasta and we can make a good toad in the hole, we make our own burgers and I’m getting really good at mash to go with fish! We experimented with a potato salad, we made some really good wraps last month and I’ve got a tab open on my phone with 80-something buzzfeed recipes that I’m going to peruse while I’m away with my mum and sister next week and pick some new recipes for us to try!

Something we’ve found particularly fun (or I’ve found particularly fun, at least) is following the recipe step by step the first time we make it but then, as we go along, learning it and adapting it to make it our own recipe, tailored to our own tastes. I really like learning new things and being able to make such nice food for ourselves is really satisfactory!

We’ve starting writing our favourite recipes down in a recipe book my mum bought us at Easter – she bought us a set of beautiful colourful sharpies and we’re going to get a bunch of photos printed to stick in too. We’re hoping that it’ll last us years and it’ll be something to look back on when we’re old and grey, thinking of the crappy kitchen in university halls that we met in.

From a money point of view, we generally spend about £20-£30 a week on food and this includes mostly meat products, potatoes, basics like eggs and milk, a lot of cheese and that sounds like a lot of carbs.

But for example this week, all we bought was button mushrooms, bacon, milk and eggs (and some painkillers but that’s not relevant). On a week where we’re stocking up on meat products (we’ve got chicken, fish, beef mince and frozen sausages in the freezer right now) it’ll be a bit more but generally we buy in bulk or look out for offers and make the most of frozen products. Or make the most of a parent visiting, that’s fun too.

Going to uni is about learning to balance what is necessary and what we want but at the end of the first year we think (hope) we’ve just about got the hang of it!

Thank you for reading (and questions, particularly about cooking at uni, please leave them in the comments!),

Sophie xx

 

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