Store Cupboard Saviours

Long before I started university, my sister had already tried her best to teach me the things she had learnt about feeding yourself independently. I remember that she swore by a cook called Jack Monroe, talked me through batch cooking and budgeting in extreme detail and making money go a little further. Then she very sweetly bequeathed me her copy of A Girl Called Jack.

This book has been at the core of my cooking since the first day of university, and it really has highlighted the things that my sister and I were taught by our parents. There is quite a level of bias when I say that Jack Monroe’s writing and work has changed how I approach food. I encourage and recommend all my friends to read their work and I always go back to their website and books for recipes and food wisdom.

As much as I might wax lyrical about the power of food and its mythical longevity in art, literature, and culture, the money and means we have impacts the food that may be accessible to us. For students, money is tight. We all know this. So how can we make sure that we are able to feed ourselves, keep track of our money, and look after ourselves?

Know what you have, know what you need. (And also check out Jack Monroe’s excellent website for specifics.

If you have some oil, some onions, some tinned tomatoes and some pasta, you’ve got a meal. If you have rice, some frozen meat, some veg, some onions, you’ve got a meal. If you have lentils, some onions, some spices and maybe some bread, believe it or not, you’ve got a meal.

Working with your store cupboard can really help you out, and knowing that you can whip a meal together from what you have squirrelled away is strangely empowering.

Some of my personal store cupboard essentials

• Onions (near enough everything I make starts with an onion and some garlic)

• Tinned tomatoes

• Oil

• Dried spices

• Dried herbs

• Tinned veg (there is every possibility that I have inadvertently been keeping tinned chickpeas in business)

• Flour

• Sugar

• Baking powder

• Pasta

• Rice

This is not an exhaustive or prescriptive list, by any means! Take a look at the things you like to cook or want to cook and see if you can identify ingredients which crop up often. From there, build your own list and enjoy it. This is where there are some little similarities between university and cooking: You can be given an idea of what the basics of an argument or discourse might be, but it is not until you play around with it and explore it that you can begin to develop your own argument and your own voice.

So much of cooking (and academic writing) is having the confidence to throw things together, to substitute, and to be okay with making mistakes.

Oh the pots I have ruined by over-enthusiastically trying to make a curry or even popcorn! The meals I have made from scratch with all the dedication and love in the world, only to then throw away because they were horrifyingly bad. The cake I tried to make for a celebration, which ended up being both raw and totally, totally burnt. It remains my housemates’ favourite baking story: watching me invert the cake tin to allow the cake to cool, only for the middle to fall out and spill all over the counter and the floor.

All of this is alright, all of this is part of the journey.

For recipes, click here.

For information from the uni about budgeting, click here.

For the English Community site, click here.

Resources mentioned

Monroe, Jack. A Girl Called Jack: 100 delicious budget recipes. London: Michael Joseph, 2014.

#ljmuenglish #cookingwithbooks #budgettips #students #recipes