Student recipes

...an attempt to remember exactly what I did eat when I was a student struggling to live on a grant. Them were the days when students actually got a grant. Anyhow, these recipes should help any students who visit these humble pages to make healthy, nutritious and cheap (well, actually just cheap) food.

Pickled Onion Sandwich

This dish has got to be my all time student favourite. Eating the result is a bit like experiencing life... it starts off full of expectation and hope, but nothing really happens until suddenly pow! a few moments of extraordinary pleasure. Then it's all quite boring, and you are left only with your memories, and a bit of an aftertaste. Enjoy.

1. Lay one of the slices of bread on a plate.
2. Put the pickled onion in the middle of it.
3. Put the other slice of bread on top of the other two ingredients, such as to construct a sandwich.
4. Squash the "sandwich" down and eat it. yum!

Toast

The quintessential student dish. What else is there to eat at midnight after coming back from the pub? What better way to take the boredom out of essay-writing or revision than to pop into the crumb-infested kitchen, stick some half-stale bread under the grill and await its conversion into lovely golden toast, ready to be smothered with margarine using the knife with the least mould on it?

Obviously the ways of making toast are far too numerous to list here, so I shall stick to the classic method. A chap I used to share a flat with swore that toast made in a toaster just wasn't the same as toast made under a grill. I'm inclined to agree with him. Where's the art in making toast using a toaster?

1. Turn the grill on (see manufacturer's instructions).
2. Place the slice or slices of bread on the grill-pan, under the grill.
3. It is imperative to keep watching the toast, and to rotate, flip, juxtapose and prod the toast in order to ensure its even grilling. This is a skill that can not be taught, and can only be learnt through experience. If at first you fail (perhaps setting the kitchen alight in the process, if you are extremely unlucky), you must keep trying until the art is at last mastered.
4. When both sides of the toast are evenly brown, remove it from the grill (remembering to turn the grill off).
5. Spread the cheap margarine over one side of the hot toast, ensuring as many toast crumbs as possible end up in the margarine tub. A good student margarine tub always contains more toast crumbs, peanut butter, and marmite than margarine. Note that the knife used is also important. Most students can make a margarine knife last a whole term without washing it. After use, it should be placed on the kitchen work surface without removing the excess margarine or toast crumbs, until the next time it is used.
6. It is possible to spread other substances on the toast prior to consumption, but such extravagance is beyond the scope of this document, and would indeed constitute something other than classical student toast.

Baked Beans

As anyone knows, the best beans are the ones with added salt and sugar, or, failing that, the ones on special offer at Kwik Save.

1. Open the can of beans with a can opener. (Note- the opener may display some corrosion, caused by being left in a puddle of scummy water on the kitchen table. Ignore this.)
2. Eat the beans from the can.

An interesting variation on this recipe is to heat the beans up before eating them, but this kind of gourmet cooking should only be attempted by experienced cooks.

Chips

Apparently, Americans think that chips are crisps. Gosh, aren't they stupid?

1. Visit the local chippie. (Most likely to happen on the way back from the pub, or alternatively as an excuse not to write that essay).
2. Ask for a bag of chips.
3. When it arrives, liberally sprinkle salt and vinegar on it.
4. Sprinkle some more vinegar on... they always water it down.
5. Bung some more on... it's free!!
6. Take chips home, hide in room so that flat-mates cannot nick one.
7. Eat chips from newspaper.

* More recipes will be added here as I remember them. *

Compiled by Andy Holten

© Andy Holten 1997