Healthy Student Dinners – Save Money & Impress!

Student dinners don’t need to consist of kebab, chips, pizza or beans all the time – with just a small bit of creativity and a supermarket, your dinners can be cheap, tasty, different and healthy – all at the same time!

I personally love to cook, but even if you don’t or can’t, this isn’t a problem – these 3 recipes are easy to follow, cheap to buy and tasty. With just a few ingredients from your local supermarket, you can create quick and healthy meals at university, whilst being able to save a few quid by freezing the surplus and using these portions for additional days.

Minced Beef, mashed potato & green beans

Shopping List:| 1 Pack of Mince, Potatoes, Onion, Mushrooms, 1 Oxo cube, mixed veg.

While this sounds pretty basic and boring, it’s totally not. The mince you can buy in large packs if you intend on feeding more than just yourself, or even if you want to freeze some to use later. The beef is cheap, fresh mince from the supermarket is a few quid, and you can buy bags of mixed frozen veg, or fresh veg at your discretion, depending on what you fancy. Potato’s are also something you can buy one big bag of and keep for a few weeks.

Once you have your ingredients, you just need to fry the beef, you don’t need to use oil, but if you crave a bit of flavour, drizzle some olive oil or vegetable oil in the pan before frying. When the mince is starting to brown, i’d recommend to break up a Beef Oxo cube over the meat to season it and add some extra flavour. To this, I usually fry up some onions and mushrooms to add to the mince to cook with the beef.

When you start cooking the beef, it’s a good idea to peel and start to boil a couple of potatoes, depending on how many you need, and setting the veg to boil too. These two usually take between 10-15 minutes, and the beef about 20 minutes to cook, so if you time it right, you can plate it all up pretty sharpish within 25 minutes from scratch.

This meal, once plated, has plenty of nutrients, loads of flavour and for around £7, you can create about 5 portions (depending on how much mince you get) – which can be frozen and microwaved when needed for an even quicker, tasty meal!

Roast Chicken

Shopping List:| 4 Chicken Breasts, Potatoes, Mixed veg, stuffing, gravy granules, yorkshire puds.

Roast chicken!??!? Yeah, you heard. It’s not hard, but it does make a big impression and is a great one to crack out on a sunday to impress your housemates or subdue a landlord. Simply buy a pack of 4 chicken breasts for around £5 and from there, you can get the extras. Stuffing costs under £1, potatoes you can get in big bags and veg you can get in big, pre prepared frozen bags too.

The trick here is to use chicken breasts instead of buying a whole chicken, which can be fiddly to prepare, take a while to cook and leaves you with a massive carcass at the end of it. Unless thats what your into.

Simply trim and season the chicken breasts with salt and herbs of your choice, put on a foil lined tray and whack in the oven for about 40 minutes. While these are in, you can be busy preparing the potatoes by peeling them and chopping into roast potato shapes, then boiling them.  The potatoes will take the longest to do, so get them boiled for about 40 minutes in advance so that when you start cooking the veg and chicken, you’re not gonna be delayed with the roasties.

When the potatoes are boiled, you can get them in a tray with some oil, season with some salt, and whack them in the oven to roast, this is a good time to get the chicken in the oven too. On a separate shelf, unless of course you’re a magician.

Set the veg of your choice to boil around now so that after the 40 or so minutes, it’s all ready to be drained and served. If you’re doing stuffing too, get this prepared and in the oven around the same time as the chicken. Pull it all out, plate it all up and impress with some instant gravy & 4 minute yorkshire puds. Perfecto.

Lasagne

Shopping List:| 1 Pack of Beef Mince, Onion, Mushrooms, 1 Jar Red sauce, 1 jar white sauce, lasagne sheets, cheese

We’re going italian for this one, and it’s simple & effective too. All you need is a jar of white dolmio sauce, a jar of red Dolmio sauce, mushrooms, onions, beef, cheese and lasagne pasta. In total, it will come to about £10, however, you’ll get about  5/6 portions out of it!

All you need to do is to fry the beef with the onion and mushrooms until the meat is nicely browned, then add the jar of red dolmio sauce. Get this simmering for about 10 minutes for all the flavours to come together, add some herbs if you’re feeling brave.

Then, get a large baking tray / dish, it needs to be relatively deep for the layers you’re about to construct. Here’s the order you need to do it in. Layer the base of the dish with a layer of red mince sauce, then on top of that put a layer of pasta sheets, on top of those sheets put a layer of dolmio white sauce. Then repeat, Red -> sheets -> white, as many times as you want, just remember to finish with white sauce on the top so you can sprinkle some cheese on.

Once this is made, bung it in the oven for around 40 minutes, the preparation wont take longer than 15 minutes, so you can have a 5 person lasagne made within an hour! With the rest you can freeze it for another day, or feed the housemates!

Well, there’s three ideas, some bigger than others. The main thing here is to remember to cook in bulk, you can always freeze the surplus to feed you later on in the week when you need a quick meal. Remember, this saves a hella lot of cash and you can watch what you eat too by making healthy choices.

More ideas to come soon.