Winter warmers

By Ryan Hook

It’s that time of the year again when darkness falls before you’ve even finished uni for the day, the ice cream man has disappeared into hibernation, and getting out of bed every morning into a freezing cold room becomes one of life’s most arduous challenges.

It’s pretty clear that winter has arrived in Bristol and with it, the need to eat warmer food than ice cream and beans straight out of the tin.

Of course, with assignments and placements already using up most of students’ time, it’s often difficult to find the time to actually cook food. Because standing there watching potatoes slowly and monotonously boil is, after all, time that could be better spent playing on the Xbox, or going to Sainsbury’s to buy alcohol, or doing uni work…obviously.

A good way to solve this problem is by sharing out cooking duty between you and your flatmates. As a house with seven people, this is pretty easy for us as one person cooks each day, meaning that for the price of one seven-person meal (usually about £10) you get 6 more meals, one every

evening. And on top of that there’s the fact that you don’t have to waste time cooking every day.

Another advantage of this is that, if the person cooking cleans up on their day, the flat is always relatively clean. Definitely something that should have been tried in first year, during which our flat resembled the aftermath of a catastrophic food fight.

In terms of which foods to buy during winter; it’s always handy to have tins of tomatoes, beans, and soups to survive on throughout the day before the evening meal. Freezing bread is also a good option, as most people won’t go through an entire loaf by the time it takes said loaf to go stale.

And if anyone is lucky enough to know somebody with a car (or lives in Fishponds), then Tesco usually has a packed refrigerated reduced section in the evenings, although a lot of people already know about this so it does sometimes resemble a market stall with shouts of “Two pizzas, please!” coming from the assortment of bargain hunters that congregate there.

Sometimes there are literally £3.50 pizzas going for around 30p which can be frozen and eaten any time, perfect for students. Of course for those that prefer to cook for themselves, a slow cooker is always a good idea, and can be left throughout the day at uni, as well as being relatively cheap (for example, ours dates from around 1970 and still works fine)