Halls' Kitchen: A Guide to Cooking

The student diet gets a bad rap – and it's true that food is not exactly a priority when you've got important drinking to do. But you needn't eat badly; cooking can actually be fun, and cheap if you do it right. Here are a few recipes using those ubiquitous student staples: Supernoodles, baked beans and Spam, made into meals that won't give you the boke. Hopefully.

Chinese Supernoodles soup

 

No matter what flavour a packet of Supernoodles promises you, it all tastes like soft plastic. Put it to better use as a base ingredient for something that tastes like, y'know, food. 

Ingredients:

Sunflower oil
One chicken breast
Half a litre of chicken stock (or water)
Tablespoon cornflour mixed with a little stock or water (optional)
One pack of Supernoodles (any flavour, they all taste about the same)
Half a tin of sweetcorn (use the other half for something arts and crafts based)
One egg, beaten like a ginger stepchild
A few spring onions, chopped
Soy sauce

Cut the chicken into strips, or cubes, or alphabet shapes. Heat a little oil in a saucepan, and fry the chicken for a few minutes. Add the stock (or water) and cornflour (if using). Stir and bring to the boil, then add your Supernoodles, that weird little sachet and the sweetcorn. Simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked. Then reduce the heat to almost nothing, stir in the egg, some spring onions and soy sauce to taste.

Boston Baked Beans

This is the kind of recipe that would appear in an overpriced Jamie Oliver book, with some smug introduction telling you all about his life-changing travels round America, full of irritating Jamie words like 'humdinger' and 'wicked'. 

Ingredients

Two cans of baked beans (Preferably organic and really expensive)
One packet smoked bacon (Preferably from a really rare pig)
Small bottle of chilli sauce
One large onion, chopped
About 200g (two cups) of soft brown sugar
Breadcrumbs
Cheese, grated (your favourite cheese. Me, I like Serbian Pule, made from Balkan Donkey milk)

Heat your oven up to about 175 degrees. Heat a frying pan and throw your bacon in. Fry it up until crisp, then crumble it with your beans, chilli sauce (to taste), onion and sugar into a large ovenproof dish. Shove it in your oven for about 45 minutes, or until it's nice and thick and all the flavours have combined. Top it with your cheese and breadcrumbs and bake for another 15 minutes, or until it's gone all crispy and cheesy. Publicly declare your support for Barack Obama, even though you know nothing about American politics. Enjoy.

Spicy Spam kebabs

If you've ever seen that Monty Python sketch, you'll know that Spam is not much of a delicacy. It is, however, far cheaper than buying lamb, pork or chicken. A clever trick, and this goes for all cheap meat, is to mask the flavour of it with herbs and spices. If you have a disposable BBQ handy, then even better. 

Ingredients

Four bamboo skewers, soaked in water for at least half an hour
A tablespoon of olive oil
A teaspoon each of the following:
Allspice; dried thyme; nutmeg; ginger; cumin
A red chilli, finely chopped
A mixture of red, green and yellow peppers, and a red onion chopped into chunks
A can of Spam
Salt and pepper

Chop the spam into the same sized chunks as the peppers and onion, then combine all the ingredients (apart from the skewers) into a big bowl and sit in the fridge for a couple of hours to marinate. Fire up the BBQ, or grill if it's raining (which it definitely will be) then heat your grill up to a high heat. Thread your Spam, peppers and onion alternately onto the skewers. Cook for 8-10 minutes, until the peppers are a bit charred. Serve with some kind of salad and some yoghurt. Can't taste any of the Spam, promise.