Category Archives: Suite Life

Living With a Room Mate

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Having successfully survived the year without killing my room mate (or being killed by her :P), I feel like now would be a good time to reflect upon what it’s like to live with a room mate.

I think it’s important to say that Christie and I don’t share a room, so I can’t comment on what it’s like to have that kind of room mate, but we do share a kitchen, living room, and bathroom.

Christie and I have gotten along very well over the past eight months, which I attribute to two main factors: a) we were good friends before moving in together, and b) we have similar personalities.

Both of us are pretty quiet people, so noise has never been an issue. She likes to shower in the morning, I like to shower at night. We’re both good at having open lines of communication so that things which could potentially turn into problems are dealt with before it gets to that point.

Living with another person has also made me learn about myself: I never new how neat I was until I was sharing a space with another person. Christie is… not as neat as I am, but she’s been doing a really good job of being as neat as she can manage, and I’m doing a good job of letting it go if things aren’t always as pristine as they could be. Originally, we had a cleaning policy of “clean up the mess right after you make it,” but that didn’t always happen, so we made up a simple cleaning schedule, which meant one of us cleaned the counters and the other cleaned the floors on alternating weeks. We both found that a schedule was a good motivator for cleaning.

One thing I loved about having a good friend for a room mate was that if I ever wanted to talk to someone, I could just stick my head out my bedroom door, and then I could go back to studying. I loved the impromptu trips to Menchie’s or outings for Mexican food, evenings spent baking, and afternoons spent lying around and talking. I loved having a place that actually felt like home (the dorms never quite did that for me), and I loved having someone who was waiting for me to get home and caring where I was.

Overall, it’s been a great year and I’m very excited for the next one!

A Year of Cooking

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After successfully not starving for a year, I thought I’d talk a little bit about my experience with cooking during my first year with a kitchen of my own.

Item number one: startup. I don’t have exact numbers of how much I spent or the exact items I bought, but I can give you a few ballparks. You’re probably going to spend a couple hundred dollars in “startup cost,” filling up your cupboards with staples like flour, sugar, butter, rice, pasta, salt, cooking oils (things you’ll use in a lot of recipes), and some ingredients for your first few weeks of cooking.

Item number two: maintenance cost, aka how much you’ll spend continuously throughout the year. I mean, food doesn’t last forever, so you gotta keep spending. I’ll be honest: my first term was pretty cheap for me because my parents bought me a LOT of food before they left me here. However, here are a few things I’ve noted:

  • Lots of things might seem expensive when you buy them, but if they last a long time then it’s money you’ll be saving later.
  • Sales are the greatest things! Save On Foods even has an app so you can hunt through their flyers. Expensive items such as cheese become a lot more affordable when sale time rolls around.
  • Eating out/buying coffee or snacks is not an all-the-time thing. Sure, it’s convenient, but spending $4 on a latte every day is gonna kill you (financially). A lesson learned the hard way by many. Pack a lunch and save your dollars.
  • Buying brand name is not necessary. Every little bit adds up on grocery bills, so if the no-name is cheaper and the quality is practically the same, save yourself a few bucks and get the store brand. Do this on a lot of items, and the savings add up.

Item number three: actually cooking. There are a basically four ways which I acquire food: easy/instant meal, frozen food, more involved cooking meal, and eating out. As I said before, eating out is a once-in-a-while thing, as it’s very expensive and usually not very healthy. Stuff you can put together really fast without much thought is really great, you just have to make sure you’re eating healthy as well. Quesadillas, hot dogs, scrambled eggs, frozen pizza, and pasta with tomato sauce are all yummy and fast, but it’s important to get some kind of green in there as well. (Canada’s Food Guide recommends you eat at least one dark green and one orange vegetable per day, plus two more other fruits or vegetables.) I also find that easy and fast meals can get pretty old pretty fast.

This brings me to more involved cooking and frozen food. The two go hand in hand. Pre-cooking, one of my favourite things to do, involves putting aside an hour or two on a weekend to make a bigger meal which will last all week. Usually this results in healthier meals, more variety, saves time during the week when you’re busy, and a lot of the time costs less than buying individual meals. Or if you don’t want to eat all of it in the same week (or if it won’t keep in the fridge), you freeze that bad boy and it’s ready to go.

Some of my favourite pre-cooked meals include: risotto, tacos, casseroles of many varieties, and stir fries. Next year I plan to venture into more cooking adventures; I meant to try pulled pork this year but I bought so much frozen food that I’m trying to eat it all before I leave Vancouver for the summer!

Do you have any cooking ideas? Leave a comment!

Cooking: The Second-Year’s Nemesis

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Chances are, if you were living in residence for your residence, you are now living in some sort of accommodation that includes a kitchen and now you are staring at the cupboards and appliances which stare back at you unhelpfully and you realize: you have to cook for yourself. Yikes.

Maybe you’re one of those people who always cooked a lot for themselves at home anyway, so it isn’t really a big deal, but I am not one of those people; my parents always made the meals in our house. That’s just the way it was. So when I was left alone in my kitchen to try to feed myself, I was anxious. What should I make? Will I screw it up? Will I make a mess, will I break something? Will I over spend on food?

I’ve been cooking for myself for approximately the past two and half weeks (although it feels much longer than that), and I’m feeling much less nervous now. Once you get the hang of things, it isn’t so hard to manage. So although I am no expert, here is my method of feeding myself and relatively healthily and cheaply.

  • Start with what you know. Make a list of all the things you know how to make and what you’ve made before. Gather recipes that your mom made at home so that the familiar tastes will remind you of home and not feel like such a shock. Speaking of mom, get her to walk you through some basics of cooking and a few of your favourite recipes before you leave.
  • Plan ahead. Figure out what you want to eat for most of the week and do a shopping trip at the beginning of the week so you don’t have to go to the store every other day. That way if you also need to take something out of the freezer to make later that night, you’ll remember and not have to deal with frozen pasta sauce that won’t come out of its tupperware.
  • Freeze things. Cooking for one can be challenging, especially since most food is sold in fairly large packages.There’s nothing more disappointing than having your food go off before you can eat it, and things like pasta sauce and cheese can go bad pretty fast. So once I open a jar of pasta sauce, I freeze in serving-size tupperware what I don’t need right away, and when I buy a package of cheese I grate about two thirds of it and freeze it and leave the rest in the fridge. If you’re sharing a fridge/freezer with a lot of people and don’t have room, you’ll have to get creative. Maybe try coordinating shared meals with your roommates? I only have to share with one other person, so I have it easy…
  • Cook ahead. Cooking during the week when you have no time can suck, so making a larger meal on the weekend and then eating leftovers all week can save you the trouble. This week is taco week for me!
  • One thing I like to do to stay healthy is to make sure I have at least one thing from each food group in every meal. Well, the big meals anyway. Breakfast I tend to skip out on the meat group.  I find the hardest thing to get enough of is fruits and vegetables, but what I’ve found that fresh fruit and vegetables like grapes or carrots can easily be added to a meal to fill it out. And frozen vegetables like peas and corn are SUPER easy and fast to make in the microwave.
  • My words on eating cheap: stalk the flyers, take advantage of deals, and don’t buy what you don’t need. Good deals are a no brainer, but sometimes people forget that they don’t really need chips or granola bars, or the most expensive brand of cereal.  In addition, meat such as chicken is usually much cheaper than its equivalent in beef, so maybe hold back on the cow.  Budget yourself, and see what you need to improve on in your spending habits.

I think my favourite go-to food is the quesadilla: fast, easy, and melty-cheese-good. Probably not coincidental that it’s also one of my favourite comfort foods. 😛

A Story of Loving Rain

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As many of you probably know, the Student Recreation Centre here at UBC does this wonderful thing at the beginning of every term called Shopping Week.  You can go try out any class for free to see if it’s something you want to sign up for.

Originally, I had looked at the schedule and said, “Aw man, none of the yoga classes are at good times for me!” And I thought I’d try going to a place off campus. And on Sunday, that is, yesterday, I was going to go check it out, but I discovered that because of awkward bus changes it would take me nearly an hour to get there, and back. This is despite the fact that it would take a car less than ten minutes to get there.

So I took another look at the Shopping Week Calendar. Sunday Night Vinyasa. Sounds good, what time does it start? 7:30 PM. Time on the clock: 6:45. I quickly signed up for the class (they want you to do that now; you didn’t have to last year) and then dashed out the door in the pouring rain toting my yoga mat and bag filled with water bottle, wallet, cell phone, etc.

In fact, I had to dash to catch the bus coming up the road behind me, but made it sort of dry to REC Centre. I walk inside, and what’s this? Oh, the lights are off inside the studio. I take a closer look at a poster for Shopping Week. It starts on Monday. That is, today. My class won’t be starting until next Sunday.

Initially, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t been a great day, and now this. But then, I just sort of didn’t care; I found myself feeling positive. Oh well, I thought to myself. Now I have a whole hour that I didn’t think I’d have before! The only logical thing to do now is to go home, drop off my stuff, and take a walk in the rain to Menchie’s and buy some delicious, delicious, fro-yo.

I walked to Wesbrook Village with my hood down, the rain soaking my hair. Now, I am not normally a person who likes rain. I rather dislike it, in fact. In Winnipeg, when it rains, it rains hard, each drop cold and stinging, painful even. But as I walked to Menchie’s, I just thought of the delight that was ahead of me, and noticed how the rain was soft on my head. I liked it, and welcomed being soaked. The clouds were dark, and I appreciated that. None of this nonsense where it’s raining hard but still bright out, with white clouds. That, to me, is just silliness.

The cheerful bight pink and green of the frozen yogurt shop welcomed me inside, and I picked my flavours – they always have new ones and the choices are so exciting! – pineapple and green apple tart, and then put maraschino cherries on top. Oh, happiness in my mouth. I had a peaceful walk back as the rain dripped down my face and clung to my glasses. When I got home, it occurred to me that without even realizing it, all the stress I’d been feeling earlier that day had just melted away.

I’m trying to describe to you how peaceful I felt in that moment, but it’s hard. I guess what I want you to take away from this is that you’ve just gotta roll with the punches sometimes. Sometimes, it’s just gonna be a hard day, but when something else goes wrong, just laugh and say, Of course! Just go with it. God knows the sunshine isn’t going to last forever and sometimes, you’ve just got to learn to love the rain.