Trip to the Gyp: Freshers’ Edition!

Another year, another time of non-stop partying and freshers flu. Between getting no sleep and being incredibly hungover, there is no way you’re finding time to cook complicated and healthy dishes, let alone in a gyp! This is why we tested, timed and rated three easy meals you can make to fuel your body for the next night out.

1. Chorizo Avocado Toast – 30 minutes

For this, we (almost) followed Gordon Ramsey’s recipe for Spanish-style avocado toast. We would recommend eating this with someone else, given it’s quite easy to make two portions instead of one and it’s a perfect chance to bond with your new besties.

I don’t know about you guys, but we certainly aren’t going to buy chicken stock or sherry vinegar for one recipe. Therefore, the Tab has student-proofed every meal so that they’re still delicious, but you can drop some of the more niche ingredients.

First, you will need:

• Sourdough bread (we used corn bread, because it was on sale.)
• Chorizo
• Garlic
• Cherry tomatoes
• Lettuce
• Cheese
• Onion
• Avocado
• Butter

Next, you’ll want to chop up the chorizo, onions, garlic and cut cherry tomatoes in half. We then toasted the bread slices on the pan using butter because we wanted to be extra, but this is in no way necessary. After this, remove the bread from the pan, fry the chorizo until crispy and then add the onions. Once these have become translucent, add the garlic.

Then, push all the ingredients to the side of the pan and add the cherry tomatoes to the middle, flat side down. We then seasoned with some pepper.

While this is cooking, we tore up some lettuce and prepared (and smushed) the avocado onto the toast. Pour the stuff from the pan on top of the toast and voila! You have a nutritious and literally insta-worthy meal.

(And a close up, for good measure)

Rating: 7/10. This was really really yummy, but is definitely a bit more effort. Also, the recipe uses ounces and cups and most of us don’t have the equipment to measure that.

2. Pork lettuce wraps – 20 minutes

A super easy and flexible meal to make, these are also great to do as a group! We didn’t follow a recipe for this (which goes to show you can basically switch out most ingredients) but for our version, you will need:

• Pork mince
• Onion
• Bell Pepper
• Carrots
• Lettuce

Midway through chopping the onions, I decided to try the whole ‘teaspoon in your mouth stops you crying’ trick, so you don’t have to. It’s slightly uncomfortable, but to be honest I did stop crying so maybe it works?

We made sure the peppers and carrots were chopped quite thinly so they’d cook easily, but this was just personal preference. Once the veggies had all been chopped, we started by frying the onions. After they softened, we added the pork mince and fried until golden brown. Finally, we added the pepper and carrots.

We added salt, pepper, soy sauce and Chinese Five Spice to season this dish. To serve, peel off some lettuce leaves and use a spoon to place some filling inside. Wrap it up and bam, a super healthy and quick dish to make!

Rating: 8/10. We love how easily you can change and add ingredients of this recipe to your own tastes, although it does require a bit of prep with chopping.

3. Vegan raspberry mug cake – 10 minutes

Shockingly, I had never made a mug cake before this recipe and when I tell you it has changed my world, I mean it. We followed this recipe and all you need is:

• Dairy free milk (we used oat milk)
• Self raising flour
• Bicarbonate of soda
• Raspberries
• Caster Sugar
• Oil
• Lemon juice or lemon zest (optional)

Although you might not have a lot of these ingredients, honestly the convenience of mug cakes is definitely worth investing. First, place the milk and lemon juice/zest into a mug and let it sit for a minute or two. Then, add the oil, flour, sugar and bicarbonate of soda and stir it until it is smooth. Finally, add the raspberries .

After this, microwave for 1 min 30 seconds to 2 mins. And that’s it, your mug cake is complete!

This recipe made the raspberries almost melt inside the cake and it was DELICIOUS. You can’t tell lots by the picture but the cake did rise quite a bit as well!

Rating: 10/10. SO easy to make and very very yummy!

All in all, we are so excited to welcome another round of freshers to Cambridge, and we hope you have an amazing time not only in Fresher’s Week, but your whole time here!

All image credits: Hannah Huang