Cooking on a Budget

Cooking on a budget

With tuition fees to pay, books to buy and nightclubs to frequent, there often isn’t much left in the student purse for food shopping, so healthy eating slips down the priority list. Daunted by the prospect of having to cook for themselves, students often fall into the trap of surviving on junk food or ready meals that seem like a hunger-staving and convenient meal choice, yet cooking and eating healthy, well balanced meals needn’t be as difficult or as expensive as you’d imagine.
The key to cooking on a budget is shopping on a budget. The ingredients that you buy and where you buy them can really make the pennies stretch further.

A good start is to borrow or buy a decent student-focussed cookbook. Not only will this give you some great recipes to try, you will probably also find it full of helpful tips on the basics of cooking and shopping on a shoestring. In addition, flicking through the recipes will give you an idea of some of the staple ingredients you would be wise to stock up on. Salt, pepper, sugar, oil, butter, stock cubes, herbs and spices are store-cupboard essentials that can transform the plainest of meals into a tasty tea. To save money, you could establish a kitty with your new housemates to buy these communally useful items, or even decant from larger containers that your parents might have at home.

Of course, you can’t steal everything from your mum’s kitchen, so you will eventually have to do some shopping yourself. You’ll get much better value for money if you shop in a larger supermarket compared to the small convenience stores that you might find on campus or on the corner of the street. Larger chain stores are able to buy in bulk from their suppliers and so can pass more of the savings on to you, and they may also offer reward cards with which you can accrue points to save on future purchases.

Try to buy the store’s own brand products. Very often, there is no appreciable difference in quality between a branded product and a “value” product, save that of the no-frills packaging. Your baked beans will be just as tomatoey and your bread will still make great toast – just don’t burn it and no-one will ever know that it’s not Heinz on Hovis! The same applies for discount supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi versus the high end ones like Waitrose or Marks & Spencer – they sell the same types of products and they’re just as good, but because they don’t provide you with plastic bags or attractive shelving displays, they’re able to sell their wares much more cheaply.

Finally, buying in bulk can help to cut costs in the long run. Buy larger packs of staples like pasta, rice, and teabags and you will find that the cost per kilogram is much less. Also, planning your meals, writing a shopping list and then doing one big shop once a week rather than buying enough food for just one or two meals at a time will reduce your tendency to impulse buy and slash your expenditure. Cooking on a budget begins with being realistic and disciplined when you shop, but as long as you stick within your means, there’s no reason why you can’t treat yourself sometimes!

Lisa Martin