Cooking up a Storm

Your cupboards are empty and you are trying to find recipes involving mayonnaise and half a red pepper on Google. This means you must go to the nearest supermarket and fill up several plastic bags with food to load on yourself like a camel before trekking home. As if this wasn't stressful enough, now you actually have to cook for yourself. Once your cupboards and fridge shelf are gloriously filled, you are on the road to dedicating many Instagram posts to your food you deem to be gourmet but is only really a stir fry (the meal that got me through first year). Other key meals include Spag Bol or, indeed, anything where the key ingredient is pasta.

Just a salad but look how Instagrammable. 

If you do want to cook some healthy meals, you can delve into the realms of the famed Student Cookbook that you've definitely been given by well-wishing family friends. The main problem with this is that you will never have all of the ingredients needed to make even a vague copy of the pristine picture in the book. To avoid this, you'll have to go shopping with the meal you want to make in mind which means one thing: organisation. This is something we students are not world-renowned for so unless you have a deadline you haven't planned for and will therefore organise the 24 hours before that deadline like a military operation consisting of a savage fight for a library computer and surrounding vending machines. However, unless your student cookbook is from Waitrose, none of the recipes will require anything other than essentials (i.e. no Cumin or Tarragon) so what you've managed to buy that wasn't crisps and chocolate should create some sort of meal. Your cookbook will mainly consist of stir frying vegetables with miscellaneous, interchangeable meat and many noodle dishes. Sadly, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are or how well you stuck to the recipe, you will never be able to make the food look as good as the photo even with the best choice of Instagram filter. You will also be stuck with a flatmate who is more skilled than your parents in the kitchen which you will inevitably want to avoid unless they are offering to roast plenty of food for you with minimal charge. Then they are your best friend. It is likely that this all-knowledgeable flatmate will cook with vegetables and salad which automatically makes that internet-friendly. Even a salad garnish will make any meal look infinitely healthier and therefore more Instagrammable (apart from chicken nuggets/fish fingers and chips - I'm afraid that will never look healthy). My only problem with Instagram posts of food is the accompanying hashtags (e.g. #instafood, #instagood and even #instachicken and all other hashtags starting with 'insta'). I also have the problem of eating all of the meal in one mouthful if it was worthy of Instagram because it just looks so damn good before being able to take a photo.

Don't fret if you can only cook up beans/cheese on toast or a jacket potato, Instagrammable meals will come with time and by the 3rd semester, you'll think you're Nigella/Jamie but better because you're a student and therefore cooking on a budget. My flatmate recently discovered Marmite pasta when he had bare cupboards and it's not half bad. So stock up on pasta and noodles and get creative.