5 Delicious Meals You Can Cook While Living In Emergency Accommodation
IF you’re one of the thousands of Irish people currently living in emergency accommodation while the government wait for someone to sort out the housing crisis, you may find yourself in an unusual spot when it comes to mealtimes.
With no cooking facilities in hotel rooms, you could be at a loss as to what to put on the table for yourself and possibly your kids, and when we say table, we do of course mean your knees while you sit on the edge of a bed.
Well, worry no longer, as we’ve come up with 5 perfect meals for families currently living that sweet emergency lifestyle you’ve been hearing all about.
1) Pot Noodle
When is a meal more than just a meal? When it’s also dishes, and cooking pots all in one! A Pot Noodle (or cheaper, Koka-brand equivalent) is the ideal meal to make for the family when you don’t have so much as a saucepan. Your hotel room has one of those little single-serve kettles, so get that thing boiling and get some delicious chicken-ish goodness into the kids!
2) Crisps
Remember when you were small and you really wanted your mam to give you crisps for your tea? Well, kids today get to live out that dream every day, as emergency accommodation rules state that you’re not allowed to stay in the hotel room during the day. With nowhere to go between the hours of 11am and 5pm, and not much money to spend on things like food, a simple bag of crisps will tide the kids over until later in the day, when another bag of crisps will tide them over for another while.
3) Toasted sandwiches
If you’re lucky, you may have had the presence of mind to grab your sandwich toaster when you were hurriedly stuffing clothes into a holdall and getting the kids out of the house as quickly as you could before their father came home and kicked the shit out of all of you again. If so, you can enjoy delicious cheesy sambos while ringing up to see if your application for a house has moved on at all since you rang last. If you were in too much of a rush and forgot your sandwich toaster, then you’ll have to settle for the non-toasted equivalent of a toasted sandwich, known as a sandwich.
4) Something from the hot counter in Spar
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but in emergency accommodation, you may struggle to provide everyone with a nutritious, filling meal to set them up for the day. Instead, give the kids a euro apiece and tell them to get wedges or something from Spar on their walk to school.
5) Opinions
If there’s one thing that isn’t in short supply when it comes to the housing crisis, it’s opinions. Literally everyone in Ireland has an opinion on your current circumstance, ranging from ‘it’s not right that families are living in hotel rooms’ to ‘it’s not right that families expect us to pay for them to live somewhere other than a hotel room’. Of course, these opinions never go so far as any actual action such as contacting the government, local councils, donations, or anything other than posting the opinion as a comment on an online article. Luckily, these opinions are edible, so you and your family aren’t going to starve. Why don’t you make yourself an opinion stew, or a delicious opinion Bolognese. Opinion chow mein. Opinion nachos. You’re only limited by your imagination and your waning will to live!