Tonight's Menu...

Tonight for dinner: delicious salad of fresh feta cheese, baby greens, roasted red peppers, avocado, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Tanya made this for dinner a few weeks ago, and I've this is now my third time recreating it, I love it so much!

(Forgive the picture quality, but I wanted to give you some idea of what the thing looked like...)
Yes, I am a poor college student. Yes, I am eating my salad out of a sauce pan. Don't judge me.

This is from the last time we made the dish, but this time around I'm subbing out the olives and adding fresh avocado instead...a taste of California home. Mmmmm.

Delicious Dinner

Roasted red bell peppers, feta cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and herbs, all tossed in a nice green salad. Delicious Mediterranean dinner, indeed.

Roma!

I'm finally settled back into the school routine here in Cambridge, so it seemed high time to start catching you up on my trip! First stop, Rome, where the coffee was delicious, the streets were crowded (even more than normal, as we were there over Easter), the art and architecture were amazing, and the sense of history was overwhelming.

Ubiquitous coffee shot. Pun...intended. So much coffee was had on this trip. Most of it delicious. This cup sure was. And STRONG, too.

Of course we hit the major highlights, like the Colosseum, which almost doesn't seem real, I think partly because you're just staring up at it going "Wow, I've seen pictures of that all my life. And here it is....this is crazy." That happened a lot, actually, and it never ceased to be strange. You'd just be walking down the street and be like, oh, hello, Trajan's Column, how's it going?

We also saw the Trevi Fountain, which I loved, but so did about 8bagillion other people, I guess, because it was SO crowded!

One of my favorite parts of Rome was the Baths of Caracalla, a not-on-your-average-tourist-map site of ruins that a friend staying in Rome brought us to. The place was huge and so much of it was still in tact...

...including some amazing mosaics that just chill outside in the elements, and yet have been around since the Roman Empire!

We went in a dizzying number of churches throughout the course of this trip (with I took with two good friends from school, Katie and Andy), and they were each stunningly beautiful. Honestly, I can't even remember the name of this one, but I loved it's ceiling, and the golden light on the underside of the arches.
The art in the churches (and everywhere else, for that matter) was equally amazing. Please forgive the blurry photograph, but these are two works by Caravaggio that were on display in one of the Churches. They were in a dark apse whose lights could only be turned on by putting a coin into a machine. Italy does know how to gouge it's tourists...But it was worth it, to be that close to such amazing art.

There was so much amazing sculpture all over the city, but these two lovely pieces were in the Vatican Museum, where I could have spent days wandering around, if only we'd had the time!
The building itself was art--it seemed like every square inch was decorated with something-or-other. The opulence was overwhelming, and a actually quite saddening, as Sarah Silverman's Sell the Vatican, Feed the World and other similar sentiments came to mind more than once....
We spent an afternoon and evening walking around the Jewish Ghetto, which, while steeped in history, wasn't too much to look at. I did love the storefronts, though!
Dinner at a restaurant in the Ghetto actually provided me with one of my favorite stories from Rome. Katie, Andy, and I met up with a friend of mine and Andy's from Cambridge, a German named Konstantine, and his French friend, Xavier. The five of us went to dinner at this tiny tiny restaurant in the Ghetto, which, while being in the Jewish district, was not a Kosher restaurant. We had a very hard time ordering with our waiters, who spoke very little English (none of us spoke Italian) but were very much mocking us the entire time...it's hard to describe exactly what they were doing, but they made frequent mentions of how they were not McDonnalds and we'd have to wait a long time for our food, sighed exasperatedly when we each ordered a dish and made a big deal about how long five meals would take to prepare, laughed with each other quite obviously about us, next to our table, and were just generally very uninviting. When the food came, the waiter plopped a plate of spaghetti with pork down in front of me, and I immediately tried to explain that I had not ordered that, but just a simple spaghetti in tomato sauce. He jabbed his finger at his notepad, showing me that he'd written down pork. The thing is, I don't eat pork, as I keep Kosher, so I know I didn't order it. I tried to explain, and he just got more and more angry, saying it was my fault for ordering wrong, and raising his voice as he tried to get me to keep the plate. My friends at the table and I were all sort of shocked and stunned by the sheer awkwardness of it all, until finally Andy just erupted with a repetition of "Jewish! Kosher! Kosher! Jewish!" while pointing at me wildly. This actually seemed to do the trick, as they angrily whipped my plate away and brought back my real order a little while later. However, in their lasting graciousness, they charged me for the more expensive plate. Oh, Rome, how I will miss you....

Next stop: Florence!

Yumm

Avocado and cheese sandwich and some tangerines. Mmmmm, late-afternoon snack.

Hooray!

Ballet class = total success! I am so happy and am definitely going back next week! Tomorrow, I will be sore, but still very happy. Now, for a big, carb-y dinner...pasta, here I come!

Dinner and a show

I have a pot (two, actually, none of my pots were big enough!) of homemade lentil soup sitting on the hob, simmering away, a nice cold beer, a sweet chocolate, and the Olympics (in English!) to watch. Life is good.

Dinner

I made my salmon, mashed potato, and broccoli dinner tonight and it was delicious! Lots of butter on the broccoli, lots of lemon on the salmon, and well, butter again in the mashed potatoes. :) I have now officially cooked my first piece of fish for myself, and I even have enough for leftovers!

Food, glorious food

Meal planning is more difficult than previously expected! (Mom, I totally understand what you go through now. I'm sorry for any time I ever complained about dinner! You are an amazing cook and I am so lucky to have (begun to) learn from you!). I feel like I'm running out of ideas...luckily, the internet is a wonderful place and a couple of quick Google searches can give me some good inspiration. The main problem is that my fridge is tiny, so I can't buy much in advance. I'm pretty much grocery shopping every couple of days, which gets a little annoying, but its not that bad.

So, tonight I think I'm going to try my hand at pan-fried salmon, mashed potatoes, and broccoli, and make enough to have leftovers for tomorrow. The salmon I think I can handle, but I don't have a lid to my frying pan, which will maybe make it more difficult (?) to cook evenly without drying it out. I also don't have any fancy masher-thingies, so I'll be doing the potatoes with a fork and some elbow grease. As for the broccoli, I've got that down. :-) Wish me luck!

So much good stuff

I think I am going to die from tangerine, nutella, pasty, indian food, and tea overload. Oh my goodness...

Dinner time

Mmmmmm. I just made some of my mother's delicious homemade macaroni and cheese and it is so good! I was actually pretty surprised, it came out almost as tasty as my mom's! I needed some home-cooked goodness today, because I'm feeling a bit under the weather (just a cold, nothing awful, but enough to wear me down a little), so mac-n-cheese definitely hit the spot. : ) Now I'm going to listen to a Wait Wait Don't Tell Me podcast and oggle some gorgeous (and some weird) Grammy dresses. Class tomorrow at 9 (ugh) so, hopefully an early night for me as well.

My room is unseasonably hot, thanks to its small size and voracious heater. It's absolutely fabulous, except that it does mean I have to shed many many layers when I walk in. It's still a mess now from being half-unpacked, so I won't take pictures just yet, but they'll come soon enough.

I'm living at Emmanuel College, even though we're all enrolled at Jesus College, because they didn't have room for all of us at Jesus. The three other girls are also at Emmanuel, in my dorm, whose name I can't remember, and in my staircase, or section of the dorm, which is T Staircase. Emmanuel is beautiful, though I have yet to fully explore it, but from what I can tell, it's old, church-y, and very British! Emma, as they call it, is a short walk (10 minutes, perhaps?) from Jesus, and is right near a good shopping district with bars, restaurants, stores, etc. The college is really old and therefore really, really weird. It seems like most floors have a couple of "suites" on each one, though they're not like the suites at home where you draw in with friends, rather, I believe they just get placed randomly. Seems like there are mostly first-years around here, too. They pay a different rate depending on what size room they have, which is interesting, and they can essentially choose what level of room they'd like. Each suite in my staircase is 2-person, and a bit different from the others. They each have a little entryway (I guess its a small common room, but without furniture or anything), and then the two doors to the two singles off of that, and then something random that the other suites don't have...one suite has the bathtub, for example, while another has the showers, for the whole floor. Weird. The toilets are independent and at the end of the hall, which is, again, strange. My suite has a "gyp room" which is cabinets, a sink, a hot water heater, and a microwave, I think think it's supposed to be a kitchen of sorts...but it's definitely not close to a full kitchen.

That was a bit of a let-down because I really wanted to cook while I was here, but my friend (and fellow abroad student) Tanya and I figured out a remedy. This afternoon, we went out and bought a double hot plate and a toaster, along with various pots, pans, and utensils, and decided that we'd make the best kitchen we could, given the circumstances. We were fully planning on cooking in it today, but it turns out the grocery stores (along with almost everything else except the pubs and bars, it seems) close at 5:00 on Sundays. boo! So, it'll be out to dinner for us again, and then hopefully grocery shopping and cooking tomorrow! I want to stop burning through money for food by eating out all the time and also want to get to be a good cook, so luckily, that can be two birds with one stone.

More about meeting people, my college "parents," classes, and the town soon to come!

It's snowing outside. The novelty has definitely not yet worn off. :)

Well...

Can you tell that I'm hungry? If you need further evidence, I direct you to my most recent post on my other blog, Tea Pots and Polkadots, reposted here:

Oh my gosh, this looks amazing. And yet, incredibly, incredibly simple.

I found this image (and the recipe to go along with it) on a website called What's Cooking, via the always amazing Food Gawker). I am so excited. First, I love avocados. Lovelovelove them. I'm sure there are plenty of savory dishes that avocados would not improve, but I am hard-pressed to think of any now. Second, my hat goes off to such impressive food photography, which can make such an easy breakfast look that mouthwatering. Third, I am so happy that this is something I could make for myself in my tiny, ill-equipped dorm kitchen at college. Toast? Check. Coffee? Check. Cut tomatoes? Check. Hard-boiled eggs? Check. Yummy-looking avocado spread? Check. Oh man, I can't wait to make this for myself soon...

Staring down yet another dining hall meal (I've only been here a week--I am so not allowed to be over dining hall food yet) and all I want is Indian food. Tasty, tasty Indian food....

Passover

Last night was the first night of Passover and what a wonderful Seder we had! 8 friends from school and I all drove out to my house for the meal, where we joined my immediate (and part of my extended) family. The Seder was fun and lively, with the usual wine-spilling, half-remembered songs, awkward moments where we ended up on the wrong tune, great food, and fabulous friends and family. I was on such a high last night, just being around people I loved in a place that made me feel so warm. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mom and Dad, for such a great night. Happy Passover, everyone, I hope you have a lovely holiday.

Vegetarianism

The original version of this post came from my other blog, Teapots and Polkadots, which has much more about sustainability, food, health, etc.!

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I am a vegetarian. Or, more accurately, a pescatarian. Or, even more accurately, a kosher-keeping pescatarian who accepts the yearly urge to eat a piece of amazing beef jerky from Mahogany Smoked Meats in Bishop, CA and sometimes doubts whether I want to be a vegetarian at all. That being said, I tell people I’m a vegetarian; it’s just much easier.

My original motivation for becoming a vegetarian was very uninformed and almost arbitrary. The summer before 10th grade I was at a beach barbeque with my summer camp and I saw big pieces of ground up beef being put on a grill. Almost immediately I thought “Ew. That looks gross. Ok, I won’t eat that any more.” And that was that. I cut beef out of my diet starting that day, turkey came a couple of weeks later, and chicken in the months to follow. Because I’ve kept kosher since I was about 3, and because I’ve always been a very picky eater, those were the only three meats that I ever ate. Within the year, I was a full-fledged pescatarian. Why did I not cut out fish, you ask? That comes back to Kashrut once again. Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) requires that you never combine meat and milk. Fish, however, is not defined as a meat and is perfectly acceptable to eat with all the dairy of your choosing. So, since I grew up not considering fish to be “meat” at all, it seemed silly for me to cut it from my diet when I chose to stop eating meat. And what about this “yearly piece of Mahogany beef jerky?” I’m sure it is completely unacceptable in strict vegetarian circles to have such lapses, but once a year my family gets it and I simply can not resist. I’ve gotten over being ashamed of it and now just have to admit it from the get go. Oh well.

Over the almost 5 years that I’ve had this kosher-pescatarian-yet-once-a-year-meat-eating diet, my motivations for keeping it have changed. After my initial “ew” reaction back on that beach in 10th grade, I came to realize that what really got me concerned was animal rights and the inhumane ways animals could be raised and killed. Kosher meat gets around these problems in some ways (a very strict rule on how an animal must be killed) but not in others (there is no historical directive for how the animals are raised/farmed, though this is changing in some modern branches of Judaism). However, what really keeps me going now is the environmental issue. Just take into consideration some of these facts:

• Meat consumption has quadrupled worldwide in the last 50 years.
• It takes 4.8 pounds of grain fed cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings to consume.
• According to the British group Vegfam, a 10-acre farm can support 60 people by growing soybeans, 24 people by growing wheat, 10 people by growing corn, and only two people by producing cattle.
• Britain --with 56 million people--could support a population of 250 million on an all-vegetable diet.
• A pound of wheat can be grown with 60 pounds of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500 to 6,000 pounds.
• Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the U.S. would free enough
• grain to feed 60 million people.
(These facts come from an essay by Jim Motavallie entitled "So You're An Environmentalist, Why Are You Still Eating Meat?")

The amount of land, energy, water, etc., that we are using to produce cattle for meat-based diets could feed millions, if not billions of people if this land was used grow grain that fed people directly. Now, I fully recognize the benefits of a diet that includes meat, as I am suffering from some of the effects of one without it (low iron, for example). Furthermore, I am not railing against all meat-eaters as evil, environment-hating, or anything of the sort. The other two lovely bloggers on this site, for example, are both meat-eaters and environmentalists alike. I am just providing my own, personal reasoning for kosher-pescatarianism, and also hoping to bring some facts to light along the way. Consider for a moment, the last fact I presented to you: “Reducing meat production by just 10 percent in the US would free enough grain to feed 60 million people.” I recognize that this statistic (along with some of the others) is lacking some vital information (This would feed 60 million people for a day? A year? Are we talking a balanced diet here or just a helping of lentils?, etc), but it does show what my ultimate “point” is: reduce. I’m not encouraging meat-eaters to throw down their steak-knives indefinitely, but I do think people could benefit from reconsidering how much meat they eat, where it comes from, how it is raised and slaughtered, etc. Our world’s resources are rapidly disappearing. We need to start thinking about the long term sustainability of our eating habits and how they effect not only our own health, but the health of the earth as a whole.

Ouch

I had a pretty nasty headache last night, so I stayed in for the most part. Thank you, Tylenol. Tonight, however, I am definitely going out. We're playing our rivals in the championship basketball game, and I'm really looking forward to it. Plus, hanging out with friends outside in this BEAUTIFUL weather, grilling some food for dinner....'tis a good day.

Yummy

I just cooked up some basmati rice and dal from Trader Joe's and am eating it while watching Top Chef. Mmmmmm.