Health is wealth: learning to cook for one

Prior to starting university, you are likely to be bombarded with jokes surrounding the typical cliches about student cooking. Whether it's your parents jesting that “you’ll be living off pot noodles” or their concern that you may accidentally burn every meal you cook, generally these conversations are almost always negative. In order to disprove the stereotype, you have to learn how to efficiently and successfully cook for one. 

Learning to cook for one is an essential skill and can be a rewarding and fun process. Moreover, it is an act self-care as you prioritise your mental and physical well-being. Yet when the majority of recipes that flood our social media pages and fill every cookbook only accommodate a family of four, cooking can feel inaccessible.

Therefore, it is important to change your mindset! It’s vital for your own enjoyment that you begin to view cooking for yourself as an act of self-care instead of a chore that looms over your day. University means that you now have the freedom to cook whatever you fancy whenever you fancy without compromise or judgement. It’s an ideal situation, right?

Also, meal planning will literally save your life. There is nothing worse than coming home from your lectures with no idea what to eat for tea and miscellaneous ingredients left in your cupboards, which leads you to order your fourth takeaway of the week. In order to avoid this, you can plan ahead and create a schedule of the meals you want for the next week. This will also help you budget and reduce waste as it enables you to shop smarter.

Get mathematical! Don’t unnecessarily limit yourself to recipes meant for one person. Instead, begin adapting standard recipes by cutting them into half or in quarters, whatever suits you best. You can use your phone’s calculator to calculate the amount of each ingredient that would be needed to modify the meal accordingly. This means that you don’t have to dust off your GCSE maths skills!

As you begin experimenting with new recipes, you may find that you are cooking more than your desired portion size. As mentioned before, learning to cook for one is a process and it’s vital to be open to mistakes and always have a back-up plan. 

But the beauty of living in the 21^st century means that a lot of chefs and food-based content creators turn to social media to promote themselves and their new recipes. A brilliant example is Eleanor Wilkinson (@eleanorgwilkinson on TikTok and Instagram) who understands the challenge of cooking for one and uses her social media platforms to promote her series of recipes titled “One Pot, One Portion”. There are hundreds of content creators with similar motivations, alongside a variety of cookbooks designed for university students - Nosh Books by Joy May, for example. 

With this advice, in a few months you will be independently whipping up the most delicious meals, whilst proving your parents and fellow concerned family members wrong. Cooking for one is an act of self-care and the satisfaction you will feel once you have mastered this skill is unmatched. 

My final top tip would be to always have a packet of instant noodles in the cupboard just in case!