There is a particular kind of panic that lands a fortnight into your first flat, once the novelty of buying your own biscuits wears off and dinner becomes a problem you own. Most cooking advice for that moment assumes a spice rack, an oven that works and a food processor. These five are templates rather than recipes, and between them they cover most of the nights you will need to feed yourself.
Rice, And Why Yours Keeps Coming Out Wrong
The Absorption Method, Once
Long grain rice, one cup. Water, one and a half cups. That ratio is the whole trick, and it does not change when you scale it up for the flat.
Rinse the rice in a sieve until the water runs close to clear. Put it in the smallest pot you own with the water and a pinch of salt, bring it to the boil, then drop the heat as low as your element goes and put the lid on. Twelve minutes, then off the heat with the lid still on for another ten.
The lid is where people go wrong. Every check lets out the steam that was meant to cook the top layer, which is why the bottom burns while the top stays chalky.
What You Put On Top Is The Meal
Rice on its own is not dinner, which is where this usually falls over. You learn to cook it, look at the pot, and order a pizza anyway.
Treat it as the floor of the meal instead. A fried egg with a soft yolk and a splash of soy is a real dinner at eleven at night. So is a tin of tuna with frozen peas warmed through in the same pot. So is last night’s mince.
Per serve, rice costs close to nothing, and that is what makes everything else on this list affordable. Protein is the expensive part of dinner, and rice means you need less of it.
The Tomato Sauce That Replaces The Jar
Onion, Tin, Time
Chop an onion, however badly. Into a pot with a slug of oil on medium heat until it goes soft and slightly golden, which takes longer than you think – eight minutes, not two. Garlic for the last minute if you have it.
Then a tin of tomatoes, salt, and time. Twenty minutes at a lazy simmer, stirring when you remember, until it stops looking like tomato juice and starts looking like sauce.
That is the whole thing. It is the jar you have been buying, minus the sugar and most of the price, and it freezes flat in a bag so it stacks.
Pasta Is Not The Hard Part
Salt the water like you mean it. A decent pinch in a full pot, enough that it tastes of something, because that is the only chance the pasta gets to be seasoned from the inside.
Start tasting a couple of minutes before the packet says. You want it cooked through with a bit of resistance left in the middle.
Before you drain it, scoop out a mug of the water. Splashing some of that cloudy, starchy water into the sauce with the drained pasta is the difference between sauce sitting on top and sauce that actually clings.
Mince, And The Three Dinners Hiding In It
Brown It, Do Not Steam It
Grey mince and browned mince are the same product cooked with different amounts of patience.
Get the pan properly hot before the meat goes near it, spread the mince out, and leave it alone for a few minutes. Poking at it drops the temperature and floods the pan with liquid, and once there is liquid in there you are boiling, not browning. If your pan is small, do it in two goes.
What you want is crusty brown edges and a smell that fills the flat. From there it is the same onion and tin of tomatoes as before, or a tin of beans and some cumin.
Same Pot, Different Dinner
Cook a kilo of mince whenever you cook any, because the effort is identical and the payoff is not. One pot becomes:
– bolognese over pasta on the night you make it
– a chilli, once you have stirred through a tin of kidney beans
– a topping for baked potatoes or corn chips a couple of days later
– the bottom half of a pie, if you can be bothered mashing potatoes
Freeze whatever is left in single-serve containers rather than one giant block. A block has to be eaten all at once by whoever gets home first, and that person is rarely you.
The Cheap Pot That Gets Better On Day Three
Red Lentils Do The Work
Red lentils are the closest thing flat cooking has to a cheat code. They cost very little per kilo, they sit in the cupboard indefinitely, and they need no soaking – twenty-five minutes in liquid and they collapse into something thick enough to call a meal.
The template is an onion, a carrot if there is one, a couple of cups of lentils, stock or water, and a lid. Curry powder or cumin takes it towards a dhal. A tin of tomatoes and plenty of pepper takes it towards soup.
Neither version needs meat to be filling, which matters on the stretch of week where payday is Thursday and it is currently Tuesday.
Cooking Once For The Week
Batch cooking gets sold as a lifestyle. It is really just an admission that you will not feel like cooking on Wednesday.
The honest version is to make a big pot, eat it twice, and freeze the rest. Five nights of the same dhal will put you off dhal for a year, and then you are back on two-minute noodles.
Cool leftovers quickly and get them into the fridge rather than leaving the pot on the element overnight – New Zealand Food Safety’s guidance for home kitchens covers the timings properly, and a few days in the fridge is the rough working limit. Label the containers if more than one person in the flat cooks.
The Tray That Makes You Look Like You Can Cook
Whatever Is In The Drawer, One Tray
Ovens do the work that pots make you stand around for. Everything gets cut to roughly the same size, tipped onto a tray with oil and salt, and forgotten about for forty minutes at 200 degrees.
Kumara, potato, carrot, onion, pumpkin, whatever is going soft in the bottom drawer. Give them room, because a crowded tray steams instead of roasting. Same mistake as the mince.
Chicken thighs or drumsticks go straight on the same tray, skin side up. They cost less than breast, they are much harder to dry out, and the fat that renders off seasons everything underneath them.
Feeding The Flat Without A Roster
Cooking for five costs less per head than cooking for one, and the tray is the easiest way to prove it. Double the vegetables, add a second pack of thighs, and the price per person drops to something that looks like an error.
Formal flat cooking rosters almost always collapse by about week three. What tends to survive is looser – one night a week where whoever is home eats the same thing, and whoever cooked does not do the dishes.
You do not have to be good at this. You need five things you can make without thinking, and the rest of the flat needs to believe you will actually make them.
Nobody learns to cook from a list. You learn it by making the same five things badly enough times that they stop being decisions and start being habits. The flat you are in now is temporary. Being able to turn an onion, a tin and half a bag of rice into dinner is not.
3 Comments
The bit about not lifting the lid is the one that got me. Flatted for two years thinking our element was stuffed, turns out I was just checking the rice every ninety seconds like it was going to run off.
Do the red lentils work in a slow cooker? Our oven died in June and the landlord is still looking into it, so we are down to one fry pan and a slow cooker someone left behind.
Good list, though I would swap the pie for eggs. Nobody in a first flat is mashing potatoes on a Tuesday night. Agree on the mince, we do a big pot on Sunday and it turns into nachos by Wednesday without anyone noticing it is the same food.