Just because many students live on instant noodles and delivery pizza when they start university, doesn't mean you have to as well. Aside from being more satisfying, eating nutritional and filling meals will also help keep your energy and focus up in class. Of course, to cook a good meal, you need good utensils and equipment—but most students can't fit a fully-stocked range in their cramped, shared kitchen.

Thankfully, you don't need every utensil in the department store to cook well as a student. If you select your kitchen range carefully, you can fit all the essentials you need into one small cupboard. Here are three kitchen buys that will help you cook your brain food without taking up too much space.

1. Collapsible Cooking Products

It's surprising how many big and bulky utensils you need to cook many simple meals. Cooking pasta, for example, requires a colander for draining, while making a cake requires a large mixing bowl and a range of measuring cups. While these utensils can take up too much space in a student kitchen, there is an alternative that takes up hardly any space at all: collapsible cooking products.

Nowadays, you can find a huge range of kitchen equipment that folds down when not in use—including colanders, bowls and measuring cups. Buying collapsible versions of the utensils you need will ensure you can make all the meals you used to at home without needing a family-sized kitchen.

2. A Halogen Oven

Not every student apartment has an oven, and in the ones that do, you'll often find that your housemates are using it to reheat leftover pizza or make stovetop popcorn when you need it to cook dinner with. Adding a second full-size oven to your student apartment may be an impossibility, but there is a smaller option that works just as well: halogen ovens. 

These tiny and affordable cookers take up less counter space than a microwave, but they're still big enough to cook a whole meal. Best of all, because of their convection heating mechanisms, they can often get foods like chicken or fries even crispier than a regular oven would.

3. Multipurpose Gadgets

Another smart way to save space is to invest in multipurpose kitchen gadgets that combine multiple tools and utensils into one. Nowadays, you can find tons of handy combination items like peeler-graters, chopping boards with built-in knife sharpeners and even beer glasses with bottle openers in the base. Multipurpose items take up far less space than their separate counterparts, allowing you to stock your small amount of drawer and shelf space with as many utensils as possible.