Freshers’ five: a cheap and easy recipe to share with flatmates

By Charlotte Brown

If you’re wondering where to start with befriending your new flatmates, one of the oldest tricks in the book is to make some food to share around your student accommodation as an ice breaker. However, this doesn’t mesh well with the equally old and possibly correct stereotype that students can’t cook. We’ve got your back with this - below we’ve included our idea for an easy, cheap and healthy recipe that you can’t go wrong with. Try it out and let us know how it goes!

3-Ingredient Banana Oatmeal Cookies

The original recipe can be found here: https://cleananddelicious.com/3-ingredient-banana-oatmeal-breakfast-cookies/

Makes around 15 cookies.

Ingredients:

• A pack of instant oats (I prefer golden syrup flavour but you can use whatever you have on hand)

• Rolled oats (you can get a big bag of these for cheap at most food shops)

• A pack of chocolate chips

• 2 medium bananas (the browner the better - you can get brown bananas for discounted prices at certain times of the week in your local food shop)

All of these ingredients are just rough estimates. Don’t sweat it if you don’t use the exact amounts, and feel free to experiment with what works best.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees celsius.

2. Line a baking tray with baking parchment paper.

3. Mash the bananas in a mixing bowl.

4. Weigh the pack of instant oats, then add rolled oats until the oats combined weigh around 140g.

5. Add the oats to the bananas and gently stir together.

6. Stir in the pack of chocolate chips.

7. Grab around a big teaspoon of the batter and form into a cookie shape, then lay on the baking tray. Continue until you’re out of batter. Don’t worry if any have a weird shape, we celebrate uniqueness here!

8. Cook for 12-15 minutes until they’re lightly golden and set properly. Store in the fridge for up to a few days.

These cookies are a massive lifesaver as a healthy and quick snack you can eat on the go. We hope you and your flatmates enjoy them!