The view from in here: Cooking and Food

Showing posts with label Cooking and Food. Show all posts

Breaking down the Barrier

People often tell me that they’re surprised I’ve lived as long as I have. I’m not sure if this a reference to the amount of exercise I do (none), the number of people I seem to offend (lots) or simply a dig at my diet (questionable at best).

The truth is I generally try to eat well. I’ll spend hours in my head planning out exquisite meals, full three course banquets that tick every nutritional box and should, in theory, make me a better person simply by eating them. I’ll settle, however, for a can of chicken soup and some toast made with bread that isn’t completely mouldy.

A big part of how well I eat comes from how much time I am willing to devote to my meals. While Jamie Oliver might be able to knock out a decent curry in thirty minutes and still have time to lecture people on the importance of eating well, I’m lucky if I’ve managed to find a clean fork after a half hour of rummaging. Finding clean crockery and cutlery is only a tiny amount of the time I use. I need to factor in time to allow things like potatoes to boil, to allow time for swearing when I realise I’ve forgotten to turn on the hob and boil the potatoes and finally time to allow for the amount of helpless weeping I’ll do when I scald my hand on boiling potato water. By the time I’ve cleared the potatoes off the floor, dried my tears and attended to my hand, my stomach is empty and I can hear the siren’s call of the tin opener.

Truth be told I am not really that bad a cook, though I have scalded my hand on hot potato water and developed a healthy respect for fire. I can make a variety of meals and I can make some of them quite well but still I find it hard to eat healthy. I’m certain much of it is laziness. I can make a pizza if I want one but I can also buy a frozen one for a fraction of the cost and that takes a fraction of the time. Factoring in the time washing up takes and you’re left choosing between something delicious that takes four or five hours and something that’s average and only takes twenty-five minutes.

So really, while the home-cooked meals can taste delicious and are much healthier, what it boils down to (get it?!) is that during exams and assignments I much prefer to eat the quick unhealthy food followed by a handful of multivitamins than take the long path. There is also the chance, however slight, that the multivitamins will react with the chemicals in the quick food and either kill me or grant me mutant powers.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and run my poor scalded hand under the cold tap.

posted under Cooking and Food, Health and Counselling, Jonathan Gurney, Murdoch Blogger, Murdoch University, murdochuni, Student Health | 6 Comments

Mid-Year Enrolments Part One A.K.A University Myth busters

Note: This was meant to go up yesterday but due to internet problems did not. This means the one scheduled for today will also go up today and the third article will go up tomorrow as planned.

It’s come to the stage of the year when Murdoch starts accepting the mid-year enrolments. A lot of students who take a break after high school find this to be the best time to get into student life. However it can still be a pretty intimidating time and you probably have a lot of worries and doubts. With that in mind Murdoch asked me to write three articles tackling the most common worries you guys face. If you have any questions about enrollment I advise you to check out Ask Murdoch.

“I’m not sure I can survive on a student budget”
If you want to survive at University and, by survive, I quite literally mean ‘not die’ then you need to have at least a vague idea of where you are spending money and why. While it can be fun to wake up in a tree in the middle of the Village with no recollection of the previous night and a completely tapped wallet it can also lead to problems when you cannot afford bus fare to get to work. I am hardly qualified to give budgeting advice but I can at least tell you the mistakes I have made and how you can avoid them or at least make new ones.

Creating a budget

It’s boring and time-consuming but it can be great to keep a record of how much money you have and where you plan on spending it. I’ve seen students use spreadsheets, complex pie charts and iPhone apps to keep track of their finances and these methods are great. A student can track exactly how much money they have and adjust the budgets to new circumstances. I usually scrawl my budget on a napkin from work but you don’t have to follow my example. Creating a budget is as easy as working out your income and then planning out how you need to spend it. So what kind of expenses are you looking at?

Books

University textbooks can be really expensive and there is no getting past that. If you are extremely lucky there will be a second-hand copy available of your book available in the guild shop for a fraction of the book-shop price. Murdoch University Book-Shop is many things but cheap is not one of them so you might find it helpful to buy books online for cheaper prices. If all else fails and you feel you can’t afford to purchase your books then there is always a chance the library will have a copy on reserve. This is less than ideal as you can’t take these books out but if you are desperate it can be a life-saver. Also, because this is very important, just because a book is listed as “Essential” doesn’t mean it is. Take the time to ask your tutor or lecturer if the text-book really is vital to passing the unit before you buy it. This can save you shelling out $100 on an expensive paper-weight.

Food

We all need to eat. Some of us, especially me, actually quite enjoy eating and want to do it every day. Thus a student budget can come as a nasty shock when we suddenly discover that we cannot afford the frozen pizza and wads of cookie dough that form an essential part of our food pyramid. It’s rather a bucket of cold water when you realise that all the health food is about the same price as the junk food but will only last about half the time in the fridge. I spend roughly 3 hours a month trying to work out what the lump at the back of the fridge shelf is and whether it is still safe to eat. However there have only been a few times where I have gone hungry. Everyone eats a different amount but it can still be a lot easier to make shared meals that everyone can eat and share the cost around. This way you can also have fancier meals than a solo budget might allow for.

Entertainment

All work and no play turns you into a pretty successful person academically but you tend to lose your sanity. So there should definitely be space on your budget for entertainment. The occasional night out with friends or new DVD won’t utterly ruin your budget provided you keep these in moderation. Drinking in Perth isn’t cheap and a good night out can set you back anywhere from $50 - $200. Back in the UK I was paying around £3 – 4 for a pint whereas in Perth it’s closer to $9 – 12 depending on which club or pub you pick. Pre-drinking is a good way to get around this as you can get about 4 litres of cask wine for roughly $12. You do need to budget additional health-care money if you go the cask-wine route.

Overall

Student budgets are tough. You scrimp, you save and often you suffer but it’s still possible to survive. Budgeting can also give you a wake-up call when you realise how much money you are spending on stuff you don’ t need. You also learn to do more with less. When you realise you can feed 6 people on half what it would cost to order fast-food then you are on the right track. If you really believe that you can’t afford University on your own dollar then perhaps you can look at some of the funding options available or see if you qualify for student loans. As always you can email me any questions you have or leave comments below and I will do my best to answer them.

posted under Cooking and Food, Health and Counselling, Murdoch University, murdochuni, Public Relations, Student Health, University Myth Busters | 4 Comments

Student Nutrition

Last night I was sitting in front of my computer, researching the hundreds of sources (well at least ten) than I need to be able to write my assignments. This isn’t that unusual, generally speaking I do use the computer to do most, if not all, my assignments. What was unusual was the open punnet of strawberries that I had absent-mindedly been grazing from.

I don’t wish for you to think that a magical punnet of strawberries had appeared and I was shocked by it, rather I was surprised to find that I was eating healthy food while doing an assignment. On average I have perhaps 10 assignments per semester. They vary from group project work to online quizzes to the essay that I am currently working on. For the most part I find the assignments to be easy or at least easy if I have been keeping up with the readings and attending lectures. This all changes when the assignment in question is an essay. I don’t know what it is, some people call it laziness and others call it procrastination but I genuinely find it difficult to work on these sorts of assignments unless it’s in one great block. I have friends who do a bit of work in week 1, a bit in week 2 and finish it in week 3. I feel very jealous of their pain-staking preparation but no matter how hard I try to emulate their good study practices inevitably I find my concentration slipping away until I end up on Wikipedia doing random searches and reading articles on super-volcanoes.

I don’t wish for you to think that I never get my assignments done or that the essays even require that much preparation. Generally speaking I have only had 2 extensions and I always make the greatest of efforts to meet my deadlines. I also say with no small amount of pride that I have never failed an assignment. But that does little to mitigate my great feeling of shame that I do not seem capable of planning anything in advance. Murdoch actually offers seminars and workshops on dealing with procrastination and managing your time but I’ve never found the time to attend any of them and I hesitate to skip lectures to make the time. Anyways that’s not really the purpose of this blog post; rather I would like to take this time to explain why I found the strawberries so shocking.

I try to eat a balanced diet. I cannot say with any truth that I have ever really succeeded at this as, no matter how much I tell my body that broccoli or spinach is good for it, I still buy my fair share of snack foods. Usually this is because of my unusual appetite while I’m writing assignments. I tend to enter a sort of fugue state where I ignore everything including the passage of time, anything my flatmates say to me and my need to eat. Of course this rather upsets my stomach that then begins to whine and bitch about the lack of sustenance, so I fetch a packet of chips or some chocolate or some such trash to placate it. However as the night grows long the fugue state grows worse. I begin to eat things that can hardly be described as food until eventually I am chewing my pen into nothingness. Eventually I will leave this state and stare in amazement at the devastation that has been visited upon my desk, empty chip packets, chocolate wrappers, pyramids of empty cans and a very forlorn pen that looks like rats got to it. Sadly I never really have time to properly lambast myself as the assignment is then due.

After submitting it however I vow to never eat junk food again. From then on it will only be dry crackers, healthy fruit, and a 5km run every morning. This vow will have been completely forgotten by the time I’m next visiting the supermarket and I see the great specials on chocolate (3 for 2).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that practicing good nutrition is hard if you tend to favour the crucible method of essay writing so for part of the semester you may be susceptible to a mild case of scurvy (this actually isn’t a joke I know a student who has suffered from this after he attempted to survive solely on mi goreng) but every now and then your brain will make the right choices for you and you’ll look down and find strawberries.

posted under Assignments, Cooking and Food, Murdoch University, murdochuni, Semester 2 2009 | 1 Comments