Going from minority to adulthood by entering university brings someone face to face with various changes. Not only the way of living and place of residence alters, but in most cases, a person has to leave his parents’ house and live all alone in another place. Simply put, he has to take his life in his own hands and survive all by himself. One of the most important issues he needs to deal with is food.
So, you enter university, you find a house to live in, your parents clean it, they furnish it, your mother cooks food for you to have for about a month and they leave. Thus, your need for food is covered for some time, as you have supplies from your mum. When you first run out, you don’t get at all anxious. You’ve got some money, so you can order takeout. You become the master of takeouts, all restaurants and food stores call you by your first name, they’ve learned your orders by heart, the delivery boy tells you about his day every time he comes to your place. Everything is perfect. For just one month. Then you suddenly understand that you’ve wasted all of your money on takeouts. And you’re broke. Soon you realize: you have to cook.
Let’s be clear here. You cannot cook. At all. You can’t even tell the difference between a pan and a pot. Once you tried to cook pasta and eventually you ate it parboiled. Anyway, since you have no other option, you are going to have to try it. At first, it will be a bit hard, but no need to worry, you’ll learn. How difficult can it be?
You think it would be better to start with something precooked. This should be very simple, you just buy it, bake it and eat it. So, you go to the supermarket, you buy a cheese pie, you return to your house and bake it. You taste it. It’s burned on the edges and raw in the middle. Someone just won a cooking loser prize! Anyway, you eat what is edible, throw the rest of the pie and decide to cook something else. For the rest of the month, you just eat pasta. Not with cheese, some sauce or anything. Just pasta. At some point, you get sick of it. You want to taste something else. Something gourmet and fancy. But, since you don’t have that much of experience in cooking, you decide to begin with a salad. You’ve got tons of ideas: salad with tuna, with omelette, with beans –in order to please your parents, who keep telling you to eat legumes. And finally, out of these delicious recipes, you pick the tastiest one: salad with peanut butter dressing! At this point, all chefs quit their jobs and your parents have already called an ambulance to pick you up from your place and take you to the hospital to have a stomach pump. But you are tough and you keep trying to cook. And you end up, most of the times, eating sandwiches. The most traditional student meal.
To make a long story short, your student life as regards food will mostly be about takeouts, campus food and your attempts to cook at home. And, as the time goes by, things are going to get better and better. And at some point, sooner or later, you’ll manage to cook something if not tasty, at least edible! So, my little chef, don’t you get discouraged! Keep trying and you’ll make it!