The student's guide to eating right on a budget

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Cooking meals in large portions and saving them for the next few days can be a huge time saver.

As a student, eating right can be a difficult prospect. Students have both little money to spend on healthy food, as well as little time to make home cooked meals. Many students find themselves buying frozen dinners or eating fast food, but not only are these options unhealthy, they also cost a lot more in the long run. So put down your plastic fork and ramen noodles and read up on some food tips to help you start the new year off right.

Store food properly

How long does bread last in the cupboard, fridge or freezer? Wait too long and you may have to throw out that loaf of bread and lose out on the possibility of delicious sandwiches.

No one likes to waste money and spending what little money you may have on food that you’re just going to throw away is painful.

According to Tracy Jones, the program coordinator for the Food and Nutrition Management program at Fanshawe, food begins to go bad fast due to three factors: oxygen, moisture and high fat content.

“You really don’t want these foods to be sitting in your fridge for longer than 10 days,” Jones said.

Wasted food can be avoided by learning how to properly care for the food you buy.

Jones added that plastic containers are not the best place to store your food because they lock in moisture, which can speed up the rate at which your food will expire, but with a lack of better alternatives they might have to do.

The real danger of not storing food properly is giving you food poisoning. Jones said a good rule of thumb is to follow the two hour window: a food item that should be refrigerated should not be warmer than four degrees for more than two hours; a food item that needs to be heated should be above 60 degrees. The area between this range is called the food danger zone.

If a food has acid, sugar or salt, the food item will last a lot longer than other foods.

Learning how to safely and properly store food will save you money that you would otherwise be throwing out, so take a few minutes to learn about how to properly handle your most common food purchases.

Plan

Planning your meals goes hand in hand with storing it properly in the first place. If you know cottage cheese only lasts for seven to 10 days in the fridge then you know you will have to use it within that time frame.

Jones said she plans her meals and does the majority of her cooking on Sunday. She said that by taking two or three hours out of your day, you can prepare an entire weeks’ worth of food.

Planning your meals out ahead of time can also help with budgeting. By planning your weekly diet you can avoid throwing money away on food you might not make in time and also avoid making rash decisions, like buying three bags of chips for $8.

Best before dates

We’ve all done it. We’ve all opened up our fridge and stared at our week old leftovers and thought, “Can I eat this without dying?” Depending on how hungry we were at that moment we may or may not have actually eaten it. But how do we know if food is actually safe to eat?

There are some websites available to answer these questions for us. Both EatByDate and StillTasty will help you decide whether or not you should eat that yogurt that has been in your fridge for two weeks or the bread that has been in your cupboard for a month.

Knowing whether or not food is safe to eat can be confusing, especially with tricky best before dates on packaging. Jones said best before dates don’t mean that food is unsafe to eat after, and that it is an estimate of when the food will no longer be at its prime.

If a product has not been opened and therefore exposed to oxygen it will last well past its suggested best before date.

“Best before dates are a suggestion,” Jones said. She said students should use their sense of smell and sight to judge whether or not a food item looks safe to eat.

“If you’re in doubt, throw it out.”

Learn a few basic recipes

For students who don’t know how to cook, the kitchen can be a scary place. Jones recommended students learn at least five basic recipes that they can cook on rotation. She also recommended that students cook meals in large quantities and freeze the leftovers for later. This way, students can cook once and eat multiple times.

“Just by learning a few basic cooking recipes and being able to use ingredients from scratch, its going to save you a ton of money, and those ingredients you purchase… can be used to make other products,” Jones said.

Jones suggested that students take a cooking class to get them a head start in the kitchen.

She also recommended learning how to make soups and salad dressings as a way to save some money as these products can be made for much less than the retail cost.

Fanshawe will be offering a Continuing Education cooking course that is open to all students for a fee. Some supermarkets offer cooking classes as well, so find the one that best suits your budget.

If a cooking class isn’t for you, there are many websites and blogs that not only have recipes, but they actually show you how to make it. For the kitchen illiterate, these websites are a godsend. Check out Tasty, Crock Pot Moms, Buzzfeed Food or anything else that tickles your taste buds.

Investing in learning some easy recipes can make cooking a lot more enjoyable, and you might even find yourself excited and interested in learning new recipes.

Cook with friends

Nothing says Forever Alone like cooking by yourself for the fifth night in a row. Spice up your meals and bring along some friends to the party.

One benefit of cooking with others is you can split the work while sharing your knowledge. Take turns cooking meals in large portions and share both the expense and the time that comes along with cooking. For example, you could make a large portion of lasagna that can be properly stored and then eaten over the next few days, or frozen so it can be eaten in the future. Then someone else could cook a large meal the next day, like a stew, and the same thing can be done with that meal as well.

Also, planning casual dinner parties may motivate you to prepare an impressive meal for your friends.

If you don’t have any friends these options might not work for you, but another option is to plan a Skype date with someone while you are cooking. Talking to someone else while you’re cooking, even your mom, will keep you occupied while you’re waiting for your water to boil.

Few things are better than a home cooked meal after a tough day, so make some smart decisions in 2016 and follow these tips to make it an everyday thing and not just something that happens when you go home.