Pasta With Ketchup? No, Thanks!

Use your neighbours for the best of their knowledge, and invite them for a cooking experience above any else. Anikó Mészáros shows the way to do it!

Imagine you’re a student who just moved to Lund. Soon you will be shocked by the prices when eating out. (Nations can help temporarily, though.) After first weeks’ cooking/baking activities with your mentor group, the good days are over. Unless you’re so lucky to be a hobby chef, you probably already have experience in eating frozen pizza while watching How I Met Your Mother on your computer. You don’t really want to do it every day, or?

Take advantage of your multicultural corridor and friends: go to the local store together and try out each other’s cuisine! That’s what we did with my friends and that’s what you can read about here.

The first real session happened quite by accident. It was the farewell night of our French flatmate who had worked here during the summer. (Poor him, he left Lund exactly when fun started… now he remembers the city as a cute but boring and empty town.) We didn’t plan anything special for that night, but we ended up having a party – and an amazing French onion soup.

He had promised weeks before to show us how to cook “the best dish ever”, and he repeated the promise again and again. Finally, on this Friday we realized that this is our last chance and literally forced him to cook dinner for us.

Later it turned out that there are some variations, and maybe we invented a brand new meal. Well, it was onion soup, cooked by a French, so it’s a French onion soup, OK? And it’s pretty easy to prepare:

First, all you need is love potato, onion, bread and cheese. If you want to keep it simple, you can buy grated cheese – a big package, preferably. You can go random with the amounts, but if you need some numbers, 3 onions and 1 potato per person work fine.

Peel and cut the potato and the onion. Start playing some loud funk music. Meanwhile make toast from some slices of bread. Find alcohol in the upper cupboard. Put some oil in a big pot and after one minute add the onion. Skål. Give it some minutes, then add the potato, water – so it becomes a soup -, salt and pepper. Don’t add alcohol. Cover it and let it cook itself on small fire. Start singing. Stir it sometimes. Start dancing.

When the potato is ready, add grated cheese – as much as you want. Still don’t add alcohol. Put the bread on the top, then some more cheese on the bread. Learn songs in each other’s language. Grab the pot and put it in the oven. You can dance meanwhile. It’s ready when the cheese becomes brown.

Offer some for the angry neighbours if they already showed up.

If somehow you forget the whole thing there, no worries: onion soup is also great if you have its cold leftovers for breakfast.