Student Homemaker

This is a philosophy I truly subscribe to.  However, for a student, your freezer can also be a false friend.

Naturally, the best thing about being a student with access to a freezer is making use of all the cheap and/or convenient frozen food available at the supermarket.
Love your Sunday roast (like I do) but don’t want to cook it for just you?  There’s a ready platter for you to shove in the oven and wait till its done.
Fish fingers, chicken nuggets, pizza, chips are all student staples available cheaply in the frozen isle.
Don’t forget the frozen vegetables, too - grab a handful to cook up for an easy extra one of your five a day.  My favourite is frozen mini corn on the cobs.
And of course, after a hard day’s study, just cooking up a handful nuggets, handful chips and handful veg all from the freezer is a welcome convenience.

Students - beware!  This weekend, our freezer decided to misbehave…
One of the elements stopped working, and the others over-compensated.  The two top drawers were iced shut.  Certain bagged food items turned out to be filled with ice - half my chips, my frozen spinach… - and were only fit for the bin.
What’s more - on getting the necessary drawer open, the freezer refused to close properly.  That means it was slowly going to part defrost itself, with it full of our food items.
The only thing that could be done was to clear out the top drawers into cold boxes while we slowly chipped the ice off the elements.  Tiring work - all while worried about the state of our food and that of our flatmates at the end of it all.

Also, one thing BP and I have done with the freezer is to freeze extra portions of things - our own chicken nuggets, my meatloaf, my quiche, my meat pasta sauce - to have home-made ready meals for when we may need them.  And also, freeze our raw meat so it doesn’t spoil.
The only thing is that now we’ve hit a large wall.  We’ve accumulated our fair share of the freezer full of such items, and we now have only 4 study weeks and a further 4 exam weeks to eat everything out of the freezer.  And we have no list of what’s in there.
So, all my menu plans are going to flex around bringing a more or less random two portions of food out of the freezer for BP and I to eat, until there is barely anything left in the freezer.

Students - your freezer is a great help to you.  Use it wisely - stock up with a combination of ready meals, frozen items, meats and home-frozen leftovers.  Then you can spend many nights dipping in for a tasty meal.  Just keep an eye on your freezer’s workings - an report a malfunction to your landlord asap.  Keep a reasonable turnover going in your freezer, and you won’t be caught with a load of things still in there right before term.