Flatting Food Fun!

Flatting broadens your horizons and teaches you to get on with a wide range of people. It’s also where people sharpen their culinary skills—or not, as the case may be. Some of our younger Army whānau have bravely shared their kitchen adventures and advice. Even if you’ve never flatted or flatting is a hazy memory, you can still pick up a few tips from our novice nourishers.

Emma, student

I admit that I find it difficult to strike a balance between burnt and undercooked. The fact that I need to check with other people probably tells you all you need to know about my cooking skills. I’ve had two very different experiences of making pancakes since I’ve been flatting. Last year, I managed to set off the smoke alarm and wake my flatmates up far earlier than they would have liked.

This year, however, I borrowed a flatmate’s recipe and proudly served pancakes that were not only edible but also produced zero emergency alarms. My offerings are sometimes met with cautious hesitation, which is fair, but at least now everyone stays asleep.

Ledean, on the campaigns team at Territorial Headquarters

The reason we shifted to doing shared meals in my flat was we had all gone to do our grocery shops separately and brought back some of the same items as each other. When you come home to three separate milks and a cupboard with three flours and two sugars, you quickly realise how much easier it is to rotate who cooks dinner and to share the basics.

As a flat, we really don’t like food waste. Being able to minimise fruit and veggie waste, leftovers and expired food is incredibly important for us. After moving away from our hometown of Gisborne, having the ‘pig-scrap person’ come and collect your food waste to be fed to your uncle’s pigs was something we didn’t realise we’d taken for granted.
With that said, I am incredibly happy to share that we did not once get any food poisoning or upset stomachs, outside of missing the mark with the amount of chilli flakes added into one particular taco dinner…I think for the next generation of flatters, I have two bits of advice.

Firstly, have two or three meals you know how to cook without a recipe. They can be super basic like a pasta bolognese or a simple bangers and mash. When you know that you can switch between three staple meals, the world opens up for you! Once you’re comfortable with your staples, you can begin to change things—the protein, the vegetables, the carbs, etc. Though it might be the same base, having variety will build your confidence to a point where you’ll start exploring new recipes.

Secondly, if you have no experience cooking your own meals, reach out to a flatmate to join them in a shared- meal arrangement. If you can’t share cooking with your entire flat, having even one other person with you can help build your confidence in the kitchen. Nine times out of ten, there’s someone else in your flat who would want to make mealtime easier for themselves too.

Lastly, one extra bit of advice. When you don’t want to even look at a kitchen, just season and oil veggies, protein and some sort of greens, toss into an oven tray for 45 minutes, and you’ve somehow made dinner!

Nina, graphic designer at Territorial Headquarters

I’ve been friends with my flatmate Mia (pseudonym) for 17 years. People have often described our dynamic as being quite old-married-couple-esque. She is one of the loveliest, gentlest, kindest human beings, but since living together, we’ve discovered that we can’t cook together unless the chef versus sous chef dynamic is clear.

The day we found this out, we were trying to scrape together a meal out of scraps, as we often do. We decided on nachos. We had a single limp carrot left in the veggie drawer and to me—the food-waste-phobe—I thought it was a no brainer that we put it in (I still hold to this). Mia didn’t think so. I argued that ‘You won’t even taste it!’ and ‘It’ll go to waste!’ After much back and forth, the argument came to a head when she forcibly removed me from the kitchen, said, ‘I’LL EAT IT THEN’ and proceeded to rage-eat the slightly brown, wrinkly carrot.

Sort your dynamics, folks. Avoid kitchen arguments.