How to make the most of what you have

There's a specific kind of chaos that hits in the last few weeks of term. Exams are on, moving out is coming, and somehow you still have to eat. The last thing you want to do is go grocery shopping or stand in the kitchen for an hour. So you don't. You work with what's there. Here’s how you sort it:

Step One: Actually Look at What You Have 🔍

Before anything else, do a proper inventory. Open every cupboard, including the ones at the back you haven't touched since September. You will find things. In mine right now: noodle packets, an almost alarming number of seasonings, snacks I bought optimistically and never opened, a quarter bag of pasta, some bread, carrots and cucumber. 

Pull it all out! Have a mental idea of everything you have. It changes your options significantly.

Step Two: Triage – Cook, Share, Travel 📦

Not everything needs to be eaten by you. This is important. Sort it into three piles mentally: things you'll cook, things you'll share, things that travel.

Snacks are the easiest to redistribute. It's exam season, leave a bag of crisps in the common room or in the kitchen for your flatmates and it'll be gone in an hour.

Ingredients you genuinely won't cook before you leave (a full bag of dried chickpeas, a second jar of red pepper pesto) are better passed on to a flatmate or friend who'll actually use them.

Step Three: Check the Freezer 🧊

This is a separate audit entirely.

What's in there and what's its fate? Frozen vegetables, a heel of bread, that portion of something you made three weeks ago and forgot about, most of it needs to be eaten now. Use the frozen veg in a stir fry or throw it into rice. 

Step Four: The Exam Season Standard 📚

The bar right now is: edible, filling, easy to clean up after. That's it. Spice mix and rice is a meal. Instant noodles with an egg cracked in is a meal. The instant food you've been saving exists precisely for this moment. Use it without guilt. Or better yet, roast some vegetables! Take whatever's in the fridge, olive oil, salt, into the oven. It is genuinely a good meal with almost no effort.

Step Five: The One Egg Problem 🥚

Let's say you have one egg. Maybe some rice. Probably some soy sauce. This is a more common scenario than it should be and it's also fine. Fried rice with a fried egg on top. A flat omelette folded over whatever else is around. If you have any kind of broth or miso, crack the egg into that. The egg is almost always the answer when there's not much else. It makes things feel more like a meal than they have any right to. I am an egg loyalist. 

Step Six: The Recipes (The Actual Point) 🍳

A few things that work reliably with the staples:

Spiced rice is endlessly flexible. Base is just rice cooked with whatever seasoning you have, be it cumin, turmeric, a stock cube, a spice mix. Then you add things. A tin of tomatoes becomes a one pot. An egg stirred through at the end. Some frozen peas. It adapts.

Pasta with tinned tomatoes is what it is, and that's fine. Add garlic if you have it, chilli flakes, anything else going. It doesn't need to be complicated.

I use Supercook to help me brainstorm! (https://www.supercook.com/#/desktop)

A small tit-bit: Cook by Smell! 👃

I've been doing it recently and it has no business working as well as it does. Instead of following a recipe or even tasting as I go, I smell the ingredients together before I add them. Pick up the coriander powder, smell it next to the pasta sauce, decide if it makes sense. It sounds strange but it genuinely works. 

You’re nearly there. Eating through the kitchen at the end of term is oddly satisfying, kind of like a puzzle that happens to also keep you fed. And once the exams are done and the boxes are packed, at least you won't be leaving behind a cupboard full of guilt📦

You got this! 🫂