So you’ve survived Fresher’s week! Yayyy! Either’s it been the best week of your life or maybe you’ve spent most of it trying to sleep with your head under a pillow, earplugs in while listening to a bad rendition of an eighties song being caterwauled on your doorstep at four in the morning or next door through some very thin walls. Perhaps you’ve got up every night to answer the buzzer at some god-awful hour because no-one knows how to put it on silent, stepping over debris that has ended up all over the corridor. Either way it’s over, and now step over the chinese take out cartons and sticky cards because this is when it really starts.

So you open your assigned cupboard and you have a random selection of ingredients; possibly a packet of rice, some herbs, some ramen.

It may be things your parents bought for you that they thought you might need and you have no idea where to start.  The take-out menu beckons.

So why? Why bother cooking something from scratch?

Here are five reasons why:

1.  It much cheaper in the long term. If you buy ingredients in bulk like pasta, lentils or rice, all you need is something simple to make it good; pasta sauce, a tin of tomatoes or a tub of mixed herbs. You might go a few days without having to buy a meal if you have a well stocked cupboard.
2. It will taste so much better. Ready meals always have a bland taste and a grey appearance and if you cook your own meals, you can control what goes in and out and make it taste just how you like it. A bit of garlic and chipotle sauce go a long way to make something taste good.
3. It’s a million times healthier. There are no nasty preservatives or chemicals or hidden sugars. Besides, if you prep your meals in advance (there will be a future blog post on this), it can put in the oven or cooked on the day, making it like a sort of ready meal, but much healthier.
4. It’s a life skill. Like driving, swimming and making decent conversation, it’s something that needs to be learnt but it won’t cost you a grand or make you spend years doing breaststroke with a float.
5. It will improve your social life massively. Feeding people is one of the oldest types of human interaction; it something that brings people together and it universally accepted as a sign of human devotion to each other. We cooked a meal together once in my flat in halls and it’s probably the best and only good memory I have. We argued about how long to cook meatballs and pasta for, took turns washing up while listening to music and laughed and laughed about the flatmate we never saw and whether we should check if he’s still alive. Having people round for a meal or a batch of cakes or nachos and homemade mince, it’s the best, I repeat the best way to make new friends and get to know people. It breaks down boundaries and get’s people to open up.

Can you think of any other reasons why cooking from scratch is the way forward? Leave a comment and let me know what you think. In the meantime, what are you waiting for?