Avoiding "Fresher's Panic" Part 1: What you actually need in your kitchen

If the middle of August is the time for the “back to school” rush, then the middle of September is what I like to call “Fresher’s Panic”. With that in mind, the next few posts are dedicated to easing this potential panic.

The new wave of university students have got their results, they know which university they’re off to and what sort of accommodation they’re going into, and there’s a blissful fortnight where you look around and think, “the rest of my life is about to start.”

August has disappeared and is replaced by September. While everyone else has gone back to school you sit there, smugly awaiting the beginning of term. Town is yours again – you can go in the middle of the day, safe in the knowledge that the only people sitting in the park are going to be pensioners and other smug university students.

But then suddenly you’re into the second week of September. You haven’t even started sorting through the stuff you want to take to university – and then one day your mother comes into your room and announces that it’s Time To Make A List.

Consider this my lesson to you, future freshers: the list of things your mum thinks you’re likely to need at university bears little resemblance to what you are actually going to need at university. Especially in your kitchen.

Firstly, a disclaimer: if you’re going into catered halls and you’re pretty certain that on the days you’re not given food you’re just going to be having a microwave meal or you’ve already planned on making friends with someone in a self-catered hall who can provide you with food, you really won’t need any of the things I’m about to list. The kitchen you’ll have will be pretty Spartan. As long as you have a mug, a cup, a bowl, a plate, one knife, one fork and one spoon, you should be okay to sort yourself out if you’re not getting a meal provided.

But for those of you going into self-catered halls (or indeed a house share), you’ll need the following for your kitchen:

•  Plates: make sure you’ve got plenty so that if you haven’t done your washing up, you can still   eat off a plate rather than straight from the saucepan. 
• Bowls: Same again 
• Cutlery: Same again, particularly for teaspoons. Buy fifteen, twenty – hell, go all out and buy forty. I can almost guarantee that you’ll not come home at the end of the year with all of them.
• Mugs, glasses: As many as you think you can be bothered to wash up regularly. Pint glasses from pubs tended to appear as if by magic in my kitchen in first year – I’m not advocating this at all, but if one should make its way into your kitchen… Just think about how much money you’ll have spent in the pub by the end of the year. That’s all I’m saying.
• Saucepans and lids: You want a small saucepan for heating up things like baked beans; a medium one for making pasta; and maybe a larger one if you’re likely to make pasta for more than just you. 
• Frying pan: Get one with decent non-stick and you’ll be laughing. There are so many meals that you can make just by using your frying pan – invest in one where the non-stick doesn’t come off the first time you wash it. 
• Wooden spoons, fish slices: if you’ve got these you’re sorted.
• A baking tray: I wouldn’t have touched the one that lurked at the bottom of my oven in halls with a bargepole, let alone cook my dinner on it.
• A slow cooker: Honestly, you really should have one of these. You can get them quite reasonably. Mine cost a tenner, my friend got one for fifteen and Lakeland is currently offering a small one for about £20. They’re so, so worth it.
• Bottle opener and/or corkscrew: Obviously.
• If you’re that kind of person, storage containers. I used them for pasta, rice, coffee – but that’s just who I am. I hated having hundreds of packs of pasta cluttering up my (small) cupboard. At least this way, you can see exactly how much you’ve got left so you don’t end up leaving with half a kilo of assorted pasta shapes.
• Washing up sponge and liquid - and a scourer for when you decide to make pasta when drunk, forget about it and burn it. (Actually if this happens, just throw the pan out. You’ll never get cremated pasta off the bottom of a saucepan – believe me, I’ve tried.)

There are all sorts of other things that you’ll need for uni (bedding, for one), but as far as I’m concerned, these are the main things you’d want for in your kitchen if you’re in self-catered halls. Different people have different priorities – for instance, I had a steamer because my logic was if I could cook vegetables at the same time and in the same pan as my potatoes I’d be more likely to eat them because it didn’t take up much space; whereas one of my floormates seemed to rely on the tomato sauce in his spaghetti hoops for his five-a-day. I came away with a box absolutely laden with stuff for my kitchen that barely saw the light of day once I started uni – bag clips to keep things like bread fresh, an infuser for if I didn’t want to make tea straight in my mug, some fancy contraption to cut cling film. All that happened was that they lurked in that box for the entire year, gathering dust, because I was far too busy having fun and doing first year university student things to worry about using a cling film container with a concealed sharp edge to cut it neatly. And you will be, too.

I'm off to Snowdonia tomorrow morning and will be entirely without internet for a week, but on my return expect a post about the lovely bake-y, cake-y things I made for the holiday and the continuation of my anti-panic guide to moving to uni - starting with the first food shop.