I am now into my forth week at university, and come today I’ve now been in my new flat for a whole month; don’t know where the times gone. This week has also been the first week that I’ve been using my student finance money, to keep me fed and to buy anything that I need.
Due to problems with filling out forms, student finance losing forms, us sending out replacement forms, student finance losing the forms again and other such annoyances, I only received my living and rent money at the end of last week. I won’t say how much money I have to live off of each week, but realistically it should be enough to buy in food from somewhere like Sainsbury’s or Aldi, to pay off my phone bill each month and also have a little bit left over to get a few drinks with friends, or have a take away once and a while or things like that. Weirdly, I’ve actually been looking forward to getting this money through and having a kind of limit each month, to me it feels more like how I think adult life after school will feel like. When you’re out working you’ll get a certain amount each month, you’ll use some of it to pay bills, housing, etc…, and then the rest is for you to live off of. Will hopefully be good practice for when that time comes.
Each night this week, I’ve had the problem of, what to have for tea? The few weeks previous when it came to this time I've usually popped down to Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s local and grabbed something quick and easy so that it wouldn’t take too long or be much effort. However now that I am on this budget, I feel as though I should plan out what I’m going to have, so that I can either bulk buy and save money or buy certain things that I can use over two three days and again save on money, not having to buy lots of different things. Up until now though, this hasn’t happen, instead I’ve gone in to the supermarket and each day decided in the store what I wanted to have. Now I know that this isn’t exactly the cheapest option, and I probably won’t be able to keep doing it for long, but I’m still getting used to how things work.
The other massive problem that I’m also facing when it comes to food, are the portion sizes. Unless you’re buying ready meals, you can’t buy meals for one. I am being good, in the respect that I buy the separate ingredients for a meal, instead of it already prepared, but you have to buy like a big bag of potatoes, or 5 chicken thighs. I wonder who decides how many things should be in a packet, why 5 chicken thighs and not 4, surely the traditional family size is 4 people, why not 6 instead? Hmm food for thought i guess.
In addition to this problem, I’m also finding my serving portions quite large too, again because I’m used to cooking for a larger number of people. I’m still not able to judge right how much I'm going to need, for example earlier on I couldn't really judge how much rice would come out of the pan once it was cooked, and so I was left with almost another plate full of rice in the pan. Needless to say I am now starting to get a bit sick of rice, and also pasta. I need to start coming up with other ideas.
I don’t know if I’ve said yet, but at home I often bake, making large Victoria sponge type cakes, usually coffee cakes and over the last few weeks I’ve had regular urges to want to bake something instead of going out to buy cakes, but don’t have any of the ingredients or equipment that I’d need. It still feels very weird, that when you’re at home you know that you already have pans, bowls, cake tins, scales, everything all there ready to use, but after 4 weeks I’m still finding things like a sieve that I haven’t yet bought and so your limited in what you can do, until you can go out and get it. Cake tins aren’t necessarily a high priority at the moment and since I’m now on my student budget, I think they can wait for a while. I’m sure I’ll get round to buying everything in eventually though.
Think that’s enough about cooking for the moment, have already had my dinner for tonight but I’m starting to feel hungry again. Might pop off down to the shops quickly to get some desert or perhaps might try cook up another one of my grilled bagels, as they don’t, for some reason seem to be able to fit in the toaster.
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