Hooray, another Guest Blog post! This time it’s from an inspiring young man – take it away, Seb!

A BIT ABOUT SEB

‘Hi, my name is Seb Holmes and I am currently a third year Journalism student at Kingston University. Prior to becoming an undergraduate I worked as a chef in kitchens around Oxfordshire, where I grew up. Cheffing aside, I have just loved food since I can remember; I have always wanted to know how things are made before they get put on my plate.

In this blog I aim to share my story with fellow students, to show them how my flat mates and I manage to eat amazing food every day, for less than the price of a pint!

With this background in cooking I was shocked to see what some students are willing to spend their money on for dinner. I’ve heard people complain about the price of food, when they are spending £40 a week on microwave meals. It just didn’t make sense to me how this is possible. How can such an educated sector of society waste so much money unnecessarily? In an effort to stop this madness, and to save my flat mates some money I offered to cook for us all if we chipped in the money. Since then, we’ve continued to do this and a microwave meal has not been seen in our house for a few years now!
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As you’ve seen in the ‘Masterchef Comes to Salford‘ video, 2011 winner Tim Anderson shows how to make two student classics (but a more classy version!) of beans on toast and a kebab. Here’s the recipes so you can make them yourself!

RECIPE #1: TOAST ON BEANS

Serves 6
Ingredients:
• 1 can butter beans
• 1 can chickpeas
• 1 can canneliini or borlotti beans
• 1 can peeled plum tomatoes
• handful fresh cherry tomatoes
• 1 onion
• 1 clove garlic
• a few leaves fresh basil
• salt
• pepper
• 20g very hard cheese
• ½ loaf very good bread
• olive oil
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The brains behind GLORIOUS! Foods’ delicious range of soups, sauces, dips and stews, senior development chef Simon Gamble knows a thing or two about cooking. Classically trained in London, Simon has worked in some of London’s top hotels including the Piccadilly and the Chesterfield in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, where he became top sauce maker. He helped launch GLORIOUS! in 2008 and has been cooking up some of the most delicious recipes on the supermarket shelves ever since. Here he shares his advice on student cooking…

SIMON’S ADVICE FOR STUDENTS

I didn’t go to university myself but my daughter is currently studying at Northumbria so I am very familiar with the difficulty that students can experience fending for themselves for the first time. She shares with six other people and they all tend to cook for each other which is a good thing when it comes to sharing the workload and not wasting ingredients.

My advice has always been – don’t be too over ambitious when you are just starting out and just have fun. Learn and practice three or four key recipes. If your friends and housemates do the same, before you know it you’ve got a whole repertoire of dishes that you can all make and share with each other.
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