Crappy Cooking, Student Style

Even though I did not live away from my folks' place when I was a student, I feel that I have cooked for myself for long enough to talk about the way most students approach cooking as a last resort.

Identifying crappy cooking

In my book, cooking qualifies as crappy rather than merely bad or unpractised if it follows some of the following rules:

• It's all the one colour
• It's got less than three things in it
• It does not involve the use of a mixing bowl or a knife (except to tell whether the meat is cooked)
• It still resembles the animal from which it came
• There's an incredibly unbalanced food-to-condiment ratio during eating

Possible ingredients

Recipe ideas

mince-'n'-egg

cook your mince in a saucepan and crack an egg into it

meaty pasta chunks

1. prepare pan by rubbing liberally with oil, lard or the greasiest-looking substance in the area (margarine, floor polish, insurance salesmen).
2. add random condiments and spices to approx 2 kg of low-grade beef mince and gently stir through with hands
3. boil 1.45527 quarts of lightly salted water
4. add at least four different shapes of pasta to increase visual "gourmet-ness"
5. add chunks of beef to heated pan, stir rapidly for thirty seconds
6. when chunks have turned a healthy black on the outside, but a fresh-looking and tasty crimson in the centre, take off heat and strain congealed glob of pasta in bottom of saucepan
7. stir together and serve with (lots of) beer. Pray she hasn't any tastebuds.

Fried carrots and popcorn

Don't ask.

Bad shit

• Half a bottle of vodka, mixed in equal parts with extra-hot chilli sauce and coke. Bonus points if you can figure out who did this.