Weekend Eating

I know that this blog has been left largely abandoned for a year, but I'm going to have a go at starting it up again.

Last night, N & I went to Johnnie Mountain's The English Pig, thanks to Groupon, who had a deal for 2 courses & a bottle of wine. It was in the city so I was a bit concerned that it would be dead on a Saturday, but actually it was quite busy (although not full). It's a nice restaurant, all wooden tables, with a long bar. They only do a set menu - 2 or 3 courses, for £25 or £30, and about 5 optins for each. Unsurprisingly, most of it was pork-related, although there were always veggie options.

I started with the pork scratching salad with apple and rhubarb:


This included little edible flowers, the little balls were apple pieces, and there were rhubarb and apple sauces.

N had the chargrilled prawns, which had a good chili kick & garlicy sauce:


We both had the slow roast pork with mustard mash, cabbage & apple for mains. It came with crackling too:


I was too full for dessert by then (we'd had gelato in Covent Garden earlier!) but Nick had a chocolate fondant type dessert with a white chocolate sauce. It was very good!

Revision Food

So last time I popped in here, I was busy with the thesis. It had taken over my life. Life was wake up, library, lunch, library, dinner, work at home, sleep. Boring. And now that all feels like it was aaages ago. Because now there's revision. Yes, it's not enough that I had to write 30 000 thesis, words, I now have four exams to get through. Silly Oxford. And silly me for signing up to it!
Needless to say, revision's been pretty slow going. First of all, a group of us went away for a few days. Then, the boy and I went to London to see our family and friends. Then there was an election and I looove politics, so that was more important. We've both had interviews. And now it's hot. Really really hot. And much harder to revise.

Today was glorious and I just wanted to sunbathe. And as the evening approached, I could smell the bbqs. I'm jealous. I'd like nothing more than to spend the evening sitting outside with a drink and lots of grilled things. But I can't.

So instead, speedy food, perfect for revision.

It's an old favourite, but you can't beat couscous with roasted vegetables and a spicy sauce. Especially if you add chickpeas.

Couscous:
My trick with couscous is to stick it in a bowl, and add boiling water. Then, crumble in some stock, and some spices - I like cumin and coriander. That way is has much more flavour.

Veg:
I roasted courgette (zucchini), red onion, yellow pepper and mushrooms. That's a good range of colours.

Sauce:
Easy easy easy. Take one little tin of tomato puree. They cost about 25p in the supermarkets. Add spices - chilli, cumin, corriander, cinnamon - some oil & vinegar, and lots of lemon juice. Blend with a hand blender.

Combine all with chick peas! Yum!

Pasta - Yum!

Sadly, this blog's been a little abandoned recently. You see, I'm doing my masters at Oxford at the moment, and my thesis is due in (eek!) 2 1/2 weeks. That's not much time! So in the last month or so, it's been pretty solid work. The whole things has to be 30 000 words long. Double spaced, that's over 100 pages, I think. And it's a lot of words. Not all of which are written quite yet... So it's keeping me pretty busy.
Last week I went home for Pesach/Passover. Whilst the food that we cook at that time of year is always nice - I mean you can't go wrong with roast chicken, grilled fish etc - it gets pretty boring. No meal is good. Well, breakfast is ok, you can have fruit, and yogurt, and that's all I ever really have for breakfast. But lunches get boring. We have soup, or salads with fish or cheese, but they would always be improved by some nice bread. And the cheese is never as nice. And having potatoes every night with dinner... it gets dull.

Any, the end of Pesach is always great, you get to eat all those things you've missed for a week. To celebrate the end, my family and I went to Wahaca, definitely one of my all time favourite restaurants. We had lots of tortilla chips with guacamole and frijoles, and then we all had amazing steak burritos. It was sooo good!

That night I returned to Oxford with the boyfriend, to spend some quality time in the library (fun fun). There's nothing quite like weeks spent getting up, going to the library, having lunch, going back to the library, leaving at 7 when it closes, having dinner, and working until you can't keep your eyes open. Then doing it all again. Honestly, without him to have meals with/talk to/cuddle I'd go crazy! Anyway...
I demanded pasta on the first night we were back. We went to Tescos and looked at the reduced to clear stuff for inspiration. We bought some pieces of squash and some salad, reduced, and then added fresh pesto and spinach. So dinner was fairly simple, but so good.

Somehow, we ended up having pasta again last night, but this time, with sardines, because that's what we had. It was a quick, throw together pasta, but it was really good!

Excuse the messy bowl - I nearly forgot to take a photo!

Spaghetti with sardines and capers: (for 2)
Spaghetti for 2 (rather a lot if this 2 includes my boyfriend)
One tin of sardines, drained
A couple of large handfuls of capers
One chilli
Two cloves of garlic
One tin of tomatoes

Start by cooking the spaghetti. (Ideally you'd get your boyfriend to deal with this so that you can get started on the sauce. However, he may be pre-occupied by making the salad, which is obviously a complex task, so you may need to do it yourself).

Then chop the chilli and the garlic and put in a pan with some olive oil. Cook until they are obviously starting to cook.
Add tin of tomatoes and stir.
Add sardines (kind of separate them out with a fork as you go) and capers.
Stir, and season.

That's pretty much it. The sauce takes about as long as the pasta. It was so good, we nearly forgot to take a picture! I'm going to submit it to Presto Pasta Nights, which is my favourite weekly blog event! This week it's being hosted by Daphne of More than Words.

Cooking for others - and using the leftovers.

Friday was my night to host the weekly graduate Jewish Society event. It's a pot luck and everyone shows up, unannounced, and brings something. Usually, amazingly, it works quite well. This week was fairly disastrous as only two people turned up. On the plus side on bought chocolate cheesecake!

It can be a lot of people, and I am not doing well on the cash-flow side of things, so I opted to make a quorn chilli and rice. A good quorn chilli with decent spicing tastes much better than you would expect from looking at it!

I started by frying an onion, some mushrooms (I had to have some kind of vegetable!) and then I added the quorn mince. It's ugly:
I then started with the spices. Lots of them. Cumin and corriander are essential. Chilli powder (but not too much). More cumin. Cinnamon to lift it. Crumbled vegetable stock and a bayleaf, and salt and pepper. And some more cumin!

Then I added two tins of tomatoes, a tin of tomato puree, water, some Worcester Sauce, and two tins of kidney beans.


Lots of tasting and adjusting spices - quorn absorbs flavour, so it's best to put lots in! And it tasted pretty good in the end.

I did a giant portion of rice, too, along with sour cream, salsa and tortilla chips.

I had lots of leftover rice to use up, which obviously screamed egg fried rice to me. So tonight that's what I did.



I started by frying onion, garlic, ginger, chilli powder, and then broccoli and mushrooms, which were what I had in. (Excuse the poor iPhone photos).

I then added the rice, stirred until it was heated all the way through, with added soy & sweet chilli sauce, then cracked a couple of eggs in too.

Once done, I put it onto a plate and then pan-fried a piece of salmon to go on top.



I love left overs!

Valentine's Day - Continued

OK, I don't want to be entirely negative, and our evening was much better. He woke up and we watched The Wire on dvd - we are currently on Series 3 and really enjoying it. And then we headed to one of our favourite places for dinner, Santorini, on the Cowley Road.

We opted for their mixed mezze, although it feels slightly like cheating by not choosing, we wanted to try lots of things. And it was definitely a good call! I didn't remember to take photos until half way through dinner, but here are some of the yummy things we ate.

Pasta with meat and mushrooms

Meatballs Calamari and Whitebait

Fava Bean dip

Bread

Valentine's Day

My boyfriend and I have been going out for almost 8 months now, and I think he's wonderful. We are incredibly happy, spend lots of time together, and, frankly, everything is great. Wow, that sounds pretty gross! So, for the first time in a long time, I was quite looking forward to V day. I mean, yes, it's over commercialised and silly. But it also gave us an excuse to spend the day together, and go out for dinner in the evening. These are both things that don't happen in Oxford very often - we see each other every day, but we are usually with other people or working. We work constantly.

Anyway, my dreams of the perfect day were slightly disrupted by the presence of the Varsity Fencing competition on the 13th. For the uninitiated, Varsity matches are between Oxford and Cambridge, and therefore they are a Big Deal. And this is potentially his last year in Oxford, and therefore his last chance to get a half-blue (i.e. to fence in Varsity).

Fencing Varsity: that's him on the right.

I imagine you are currently questioning why this disrupted the 14th. You may correctly imagine that training for Varsity means lots of early mornings, lots of training, and that sort of thing, but you may assume that the day after we'd be relatively free of fencing. Not so. For all Varsity competitions are followed by Varsity dinner. Varsity dinner involves putting two teams who spend all year waiting to compete together, in a room, with lots of alcohol. Dinner is always followed by drinks, and sometimes fighting. Lovely. So now I imagine the impact of Varsity on V day is becoming clearer...

He came in the morning at 7.30 (although he'd slept for a while in College, apparently). We woke up at 11, and he seemed to be doing ok, and by 1.30ish he was requesting food. I had planned a special V day/hang over brunch for him - blueberry pancakes and bacon.


He seemed very pleased by the idea, and helped cook the bacon, and even showered for the occasion. But it all went downhill after that. He went a little pale. He managed a mouthful. He disappeared. He came back, ate a little more, and went to bed. So nice idea and I thought it tasted good!

A giant, misshapen pancake

Chinese Cookery

It all started when I sent my friend Annie a text to tell her about the wonderful Asian shop I'd found. When I say found, that's a slight exaggeration. It's about 2 minutes from my house. The thing is, at the end of my road, I turn left to go into town (on my bike, I should mention), and this shop requires turning right. So I never go past it. And when you are on a bike, which I always am, it's harder to just wonder in to a shop, because there's the whole hassle of finding a bike rack, chaining it up etc etc. So although I knew it was there, I never really went in.

Annie is from New York. She is used to slightly more variation in food than can be found in Oxford. Don't get me wrong, I love Oxford, and I do think we have great restaurants. The centre is dominated by chains that vary from the mediocre (Fire & Stone) to the amazing (Jamie's Italian), but if you are willing to venture slightly further afield, into Jericho and Cowley, there's huge amounts of curry to start with, plus countless other cuisines. Even on the other side of the bridge (and almost in the centre of town) there are few interesting places. But anyway, Annie misses New York and she misses Asian food. So she was excited about my shop.

So Annie decided that she and I should cook an Asian feast at my house (she lives in halls/dorms), and I supported that idea. We invited another friend and my housemate, and then my boyfriend decided that he would eat with us after all. So Annie and I had to factor in one hungry boyfriend, one over-excited Annie, and Anna who is a vegetarian. And Annie was determined to make dumplings.

So we bought a mountain of dumplings, and a steamer to steam them on! And then because there was a poor variety of vegetarian dumplings, we also made a veggie stir-fry with fried tofu in it, which was also lovely. It was a pretty costly venture, but it was really good. Sadly I forgot to take any photos, but when I cook the left-overs, I'll be sure to post them for you! I loved the veggie dumplings, but the char sui / bbq pork buns are probably my favourite! We made so much food that we couldn't manage the red bean dumplings that we had bought for dessert.

The following night I headed home for dinner, and mum was making roast duck and pancakes, as a farewell dinner for a traveling sister. So I took the left-over veggie dumplings and the red bean dumplings home with me. The former went down really well, the latter less so....

Tea Time

Now I'm sure after Christmas and New Year everyone promises to start dieting to make up for the Christmas excess, but this week my family failed at that.

On Sunday, for my grandma's birthday, I went with mum, my two sisters and grandma to Fortnum and Masons for tea.

We started with pink champagne and canapes: cheese straws, cheese and anchovy straws, cheese tartlettes and little salmon mousse toasts.

Then it was on to sandwiches: one egg and cress, one chicken, one roast beef, one salmon on black bread, and, of course, one cucumber. All crustless, naturally.

Then we moved onto the sweet stuff - and there was mountains of it!

This tower was just for two people!

We each had a fruit scone, and a plain scone, with clotted cream and jam, lemon sponge cakes, date and walnut loaf, jam biscuits, and then we got to choose from the cake tray. There was a big cube of solid chocolate with layers of chocolate inside, a fondant fancy, a lemon meringue sandwich, chocolate eclairs, a plum tart - all sorts of lovely things.

We couldn't eat it all!

And of course we had gallons, and gallons of tea!

The cake that nearly wasn't

Recent posts suggest that I do a lot of baking (and I haven't even mentioned the mince pies!) but to be honest, I really don't. Most of the baking in my family home is done by my youngest sister, because she believes in eating a lot of chocolate, and at uni I don't really bake. The one exception to this is cheesecake. I make amazing cheesecake!

But yesterday was said little sister's 19th birthday. My parents were in the US and my middle sister was (is) in Morocco, so it was just her and I. That made me chief baker.

She'd requested a plain sponge cake with buttercream icing, which I thought would be really simple. But when I got to it, I couldn't remember the quantities for cake. My mum definitely has the ratios of fat/flour/sugar/egg in her head for cakes, crumbles, pastry etc, but I have been known to get it wrong...

So, I found a recipe (not too complicated, we have a house full of cookery books!) and set about making the cake. However....

The cake specified soft margarine, but I wanted to use butter (it tastes much nicer) and we only had hard butter.

I also didn't have quite enough golden caster sugar so I had to top it up with normal caster sugar.

Then I started putting everything in the Magimix, but that felt wrong, so I transferred it into a bowl to use an electric hand whisk.

But, with butter, flour, sugar and baking powder in, the whisk just made a terrible mess. Then I remembered - we make cakes in the big Kenwood mixer!

Got that out, added cake mix, but it still looked wrong.... Ah yes, no eggs. Oops!

Then I discovered that our cake tins are slightly bigger than the ones the recipe wanted (I reckon they are 8" not 7") so I could have done with some more mixture. Oh well...

But of course that meant that they cooked faster than planned, although the middle of one was very soft....

Anyway, as you can see from the photo above, somehow the cake turned out just fine! I added lots of chocolate buttercream (that's easy to make - icing sugar, butter and coco, and a wooden spoon), and some pink sprinkles which made my sister happy. And it tasted good. Her only complaint was that the 'G' on the top wasn't neat enough!

Christmas Pudding

Look at my Christmas Pudding!!

Normally we buy one (from M & S, so it's dairy free and can be eaten after Turkey) but this year, mum's work Secret Santa bought her a Christmas Pudding making kit. It contained a mixing bowl, a steaming basin and most of the ingredients, bar flour, alcohol and bread crumbs.

So I made it: combined all the ingredients, mainly, adding some extra alcohol, and stirring a lot.

And then we steamed it for 8 hours - with mum feeding it extra rum!

And a few days later we ate it and it was the best pudding we've ever had. Definitely something to repeat. Perhaps next year we will even manage it on Stir-Up Sunday.

Norfolk

Again, I've been neglecting this blog. I've got lots of photos and things to update over the next couple of weeks, but I'm going to start with my holiday in Norfolk. Sorry, no photos this time.

My boyfriend and I went to a cottage in Norfolk for a few days r & r, after a manic term. It was lovely to get away from it all, and have some time out. Luckily, he loves food too, so he was happy to plan lots of nice meals with me. We'd intentionally chosen self-catering so that we could cook and not just eat hotel food every night.

The first night we were using some of the things from an M & S meal deal, which was a meal for 2 for £10. I'd bought two at the weekend, one for Saturday night, before we went, and then another for Monday, our first night there. We had a whole chicken, which I roasted, along with M & S roast potatoes, which I think are pretty good, but ours are better! We bought some parsnips to roast too - I love them - and we had some green beans. We were far too full for dessert after that.

Tuesday lunch was fabulous. We went to a place called The Pigs, and had their 'Norfolk Tapas' to share: mushy peas (one of my favourites, and these were really good), little pork sausages with honey and mustard (pork was evidently a specialty), herrings, and cauliflower fritters. We also shared a portion of mussels and chips, which was just the right amount of food.

After spending the afternoon shopping in Norwich, we went hope, and my boy made a dish he's always talking about: pasta with squash and bacon:
Roast one large/a couple of small squash, then cube when soft enough
Meanwhile, cook pasta
Add to cubed squash a couple of rashers of bacon per person and cubed feta cheese and return to oven
Combine! So simple, but so good!

Wednesday we headed off to Sheringham and Cromer for the beach, but it was miserable weather! We found fish and chips in Cromer - it was recommended by the tourist information board, and was good, although we were the youngest people in there by about 20 years! I had haddock and chips, with mushy peas, and he had scampi.

We didn't last long at the beach, but we did take two dressed crabs home for our starters that evening. We had those first, with some champagne (we each had been given a bottle as a present and we decided to take them with), then we had left over baked salmon and potato salad (from home) and a green salad.

Thursdays lunch was all left-overs, with some bread and some M & S cheese from our meal deal.
Thursday dinner was a Thai beef and aubergine curry with rice.

So it was a pretty good eating week, all in all. We managed to drink two bottles of champagne, and two large Tiger beers, but we only got 3/4 of a bottle of red in the whole week!

Theatre Eating

Wow, everyone's blogs are full of lovely Thanksgiving recipes. I'm currently craving things related to cranberry and turkey! Thankfully, Olives, my favourite deli in Oxford, had a Thanksgiving special yesterday: turkey, cranberry, brie, stuffing and rocket. It was quite good, but I wasn't convinced about the stuffing. Or the turkey. Next time, I may just get brie and cranberry, which I think is an awesome combination (see M & S brie and cranberry parcels for further details!).

Last week was a week full of sandwiches and eating out, in fact, as I was stage managing West Side Story at the Oxford Playhouse. It was a great show, but as usual, left me completely exhausted, and with zero chance for cooking. In fact, pretty much every meal last week was in a restaurant, or some kind of take away.

I had at least three different baguettes, the winner probably being tuna with sundried tomatoes, tomato chutney, rocket and roasted vegetables. I had soup, I had pizza, I had bad pub food, I had meals that weren't really meals but snacks when I could fit them in, or were purely made up of biscuits and sweets (cookies and candy if you prefer!) and I had meals that I can't even remember.

I had great Chinese food at Sojo which Giles Coren adores. The boy and I shared a beef and aubergine dish, a spicy prawn dish, some duck and egg fried rice. It was good - but not cheap.

I had a great sag paneer at Chutneys where we all ordered more food than we needed to make sure we got free poppadoms!

On Friday night I went home for part one of mum's 50th birthday, and had more Chinese food. But this was Chinese for 25 members of my family - including lots of very hungry teenage (or grown up) boys. There was more food than you can imagine, a whole table groaning with it. And I loved being able to sit down and relax during a meal! Plus, the boy survived the introduction.

On Sunday I went back for part 2, a catered brunch, entirely made up of canapes. The food was amazing:
Shots of fresh orange juice
Shots of smoothie
Tiny expresso cups of porridge
Tiny cocktail glasses of granola and yogurt
Welsh rarebit
Blintzes
Fritatta
Bagels
Quails eggs on toast
Kedgeree
Croissants
Lemon cake
Muffins

Lovely. But this week I've been cooking finally. More on that to come...

Oxford madness - and some pasta

In the holidays I forget how crazy term time is here in Oxford. I think I'm going to have tons of time to do all these fun things, like cooking and blogging, and then term just runs away with me. This week I met my thesis supervisor and he reminded me how much work I still have to do my thesis (30000 words at the end of April!), and he set me some much more urgent deadlines to get me going. Plus, West Side Story is about to start. I'm the Stage Manager and the past week and the one to come are just filled with theatre time. Oh, and I have another class that requires lots of reading, I have college things to do, I have friends to see, and a boyfriend who I want to spend all my time with. So, it's busy.

But, I still have to eat. Occasionally, I still have time to cook. Even more ocassionally, I remember to take photos - with my iPhone these days, as my camera has died :( and on Thursday night, I did.

In my freezer I had some salmon baked with pesto on the top. I love this when mum makes it at home, but often by the time I get it back here and heat it up again, it's fairly dry. So, in preparation for this, I opted to turn it into a pasta sauce.

I roasted a red onion, whole cloves of garlic, a courgette and some broccoli. It's amazing how much vegetables shrink down when you roast them (especially when you over-cook them slightly because you are not paying attention).

I combined all those veggies with some pasta - I'm currently on tubes - and the pesto salmon. I then added lots of Parmesan cheese and black pepper, as both of those make (almost) anything taste better! And it really was pretty good.

I ate it curled up on my sofa watching TV and drinking wine with my housemate, which was the perfect way really, even if it meant I failed to do any of the job applications I had been intending to work on that evening. Never mind...

I'm going to send this to this week's Presto Pasta Nights which is being hosted by Kait of Pots and Plots. It's one of my favourite blogging events - there are just so many things you can do with pasta!

Repetition

One of my housemates eats the same thing every day, pretty much. Same breakfast, same lunch, and one of about three dinners. I couldn't do that - I'd just get bored. I love thinking up new things to cook all the time.

But when I look at the things that I've cooked recently, there doesn't seem to be much that's new. I frequently return to things that I know I've mentioned on here before. So my aim for the second half of term (we are half way through now!) is to cook different things, and to blog about them. So watch this space!

Meanwhile, here are some photos of some old favourites that I've made recently:

Couscous with spicy harissa dressing, roasted veg, chicken, apricots and pine nuts - yum!

Thai green veg curry
Cheesecake - decorated with witches hats for our Halloween Party

Roast Lamb

Until this year, I hardly ever cooked meat for myself at university. In my first two years I lived in nominally kosher places and therefore could only buy and cook kosher meat, which is both expensive and hard to get hold of. Most of the meat I ate was part of leftovers brought up from home. And then after that, meat was still expensive, and I like vegetarian food. And a lot of my leftovers from home were still meat. But this year things have changed. And the key to that change is the boyfriend. We eat together a lot of the time, and he likes meat. So, I eat more meat. There is also the fact that I have a smaller freezer, and can rely less on mum's cooking!

This weekend, Marks and Spencers were doing a £15 deal - a meal for four involving meat, a side dish, a dessert and wine. There were 5 of us for dinner - including 3 hungry boys (well men, I guess) - so we opted to get two. We bought two shoulders of lamb, with roast potatoes, mixed veg, chocolate pudding and an apple and pear tart. And wine, obviously. I actually thought that, whilst most of it was good value, the side dishes were a bit lacking - we needed more vegetables. But anyway, it was a lovely meal - and all of my housemates were in for the first time which was particularly nice. And we definitely got through more than those 2 bottles of wine!

We had a decent sized piece of lamb left over, and I decided to use that up last night. I had some mashed roast butternut squash as well, left over from home, so thought I'd so some kind of vaguely Moroccan style curry.

Chopped leftover lamb - apologies, photo is from my iphone

First I chopped and fried an onion, some garlic and some ginger paste.
I added some cumin seeds.
Then I added mushrooms (a handful) and the squash.
Then tomato puree (two tablespoons) and some water
Then I added spices: ground corriander, paprika, salt and pepper, ras-al-hanout, cinnamon and some honey.
I cooked that for a few minutes before adding the lamb, because I didn't want the lamb to be over cooked - I like it quite rare.
It was really good, but needed some more squash I think.

Hooray for cooking time

Sadly I can't make my camera talk to my computer at the moment, but I'm working on that...

Anyway, tonight was designated cooking night. It was very satisfying to be in the kitchen again, and to sit and eat a nice meal. However, I spent most of the day completely uninspired as to what I wanted to cook. I literally had no idea, but I knew it needed to involve vegetables. Eventually, I just went to Sainsbury's (now my nearest supermarket - I prefer Tescos) and hoped to be inspired there....

First stop, reduced to clear veg. I found leeks and mushrooms, two of my favourites. My immediate thought was miso soup, but an intensive search of the supermarket proved miso-less. New plan....

Looked for reduced fish. Nothing...

Went to meat. Bingo! I found four huge chicken legs for 1.25 pounds (I still cant find a pound symbol on my mac!). The plan was formulated: honey mustard chicken with mushrooms, butternut squash mash and creamed leeks.

So, my first step was to roast the squash. I don't bother attempting to cut it while it's raw, I just stab it all over with a sharp knife, drizzle with olive oil and stick it on a baking tray in the oven. It always takes ages! As soon as it's soft enough, cut it in half so it cooks quicker. And when it's very soft, remove and discard the seeds, then scoop the flesh out of the skin and mash. No need to add anything, it's soft enough already. (And the crispy skin tastes pretty good too!).

Meanwhile - the chicken. First I made the sauce in a pan: I combined honey, grainy mustard, and some spices - normally I use curry powder but we didn't have any so I settled for paprika and ground cumin. Heat until it bubbles. I then chopped an onion and some mushrooms and put them in a large oven-proof dish, and laid the chicken on top, before covering with the sauce. It just goes in the oven for about 45 minutes - check the chicken is cooked.

Lastly, leeks. Very simple. Chop, and saute in butter in a pan, When cooked, season and add a tablespoon or two of mayo.

I made far too much tonight so have at least two meals left over. I may even produce a photo eventually!

Normal Service....

.... Will be resumed once Fresher's Week is over and I have time to cook again!

Rosh Hashannah Cooking

I'm back in the UK! My last week in the US was really busy, and I'll fill you in on some more US restaurants next week. But this weekend is Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, and here are our menus for the weekend.

Tonight, for the start of the festival, there are 13 of us for dinner at our house. We are doing starters & mains, and our friends are doing dessert.

We have made our favourite roast butternut squash, sweet potato and ginger soup to start with, and we will have homous, chopped liver, challah and various other dippy things to go with it.

Main course will be roast chicken, roast sweet and normal potatoes, roast cauliflower and broccoli, and green beans.

There seem to be an excessive number of desserts - chocolate brownies, lockshen pudding (a traditional Jewish dessert made of noodles, sultanas, raisins and things. I don't like it), lemon meringue pie, ice cream, and something called apple snow.

Tomorrow there are 25 of us for lunch and dinner - we expect the party to go on all afternoon. It will be my family, cousins and grandparents, and my grandpa's sister's children and grandchildren, although my great-aunt died last month. We are all contributing different things. Lunch will be meatballs and a chicken casserole type thing, dinner is cheese and smoked salmony things.

We are making: sausage rolls, a corn salad, chopped liver, egg mayonaise and egg and onion for lunch, brownies, caramel shortbread and crumble for both desserts, and then a baked bri for later.

Sunday will just be my immediate family, plus my sister's boyfriend, although sadly not mine, as he has family things. We will have bagels for lunch, then pesto salmon for dinner.

My weekend in DC

Three of my best friends came to DC this weekend - we all interned out here a couple of years ago and it was great to have a catch up. I hadn't seen two of them for a whole year, since they visited London last summer, and the third I hadn't seen for two years! My travel blog details what we did and saw: http://lostjules.livejournal.com/

In terms of eating, it was definitely a bit all over the place. Thursday, when the girls arrived, we had nachos for a late lunch, tortilla chips with our drinks and then take-away food after drinking.

Friday was better mainly because we had sushi for lunch. For less than $10 I got miso soup, 4 different fish nigiri and 6 spicy tuna maki. It was very good - I may return before I leave the US. We then shared some pizza for dinner, and made quaesadillas when we got home after a lot more drinking!

Saturday we had actual meals! We went to a place called Tunnicliffe's Tavern down by Eastern Market. It's an old favourite of ours, and their brunch is very good. I had poached eggs with spinach and hollandaise, along with home fries, which I'd never had before my previous DC visit. I think they are pretty good, particularly when they have some pepper and onion in them, but french fries are better! We wanted to go somewhere nice for dinner so we picked Cabanas, a Mexican place by the waterfront in Georgetown. We shared tortilla chips with guacamole and mango salsa to start which were great, and two of my friends thought their food was good, but mine and my other friend's fish tacos were very disappointing!

On Sunday we went to Chadwicks for brunch. Their Georgetown branch does all you can drink champagne with brunch for $20, which we were hoping for, but instead their bottles of champagne were $9, which is actually still pretty good. We managed 5 bottles - although I really sat the last one out, I can't drink that much! For dinner we went to Chipotle, which is a US chain of Mexican restaurants that I really like. I actually think their $7 tacos were better than the ones I had for twice the price the day before!

Our weekend of eating ended Monday at a place called Pho 75 which serves big bowls of Vietnamese soup for $7. They were lovely and very filling!

Boston Eating

There will be photos to add to this post once I'm back home. Annoyingly, I left the cable for my camera in the UK, so I cant upload any photos yet.

Boston was a couple of days of mainly disjointed eating, and lots of rushing around, as I was interviewing Professors at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard.

On Monday, after my first interview, I went to Au Bon Pan for lunch, which was not bad - it's a chain, and I had a decent goats cheese and mushroom sandwich. It was after 3pm by the time I had lunch, so I wasn't that hungry in the evening and I went to one the little Japanese places by my hostel for some Tom Yum soup, before meeting a friend from Oxford for a couple of drinks.

The hostel provided bagels for breakfast - and all day free coffee which is one of the best things about it! I went to another Japanese place for lunch, and got their lunch special: Japanese aubergine with brown rice, plus a couple of different types of spring roll and a salad all for less than $10 which is pretty good!

I was travelling all evening (for 9 hours in the end!) and I bought a salad from Whole Foods to eat on the way. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up any kind of fork, so then had to attempt to eat my lovely, not cheap, salad with my fingers! Not easy!

Now I'm in DC and need to explore food options around here.