On What's For Dinner part 2

Charlotte and Prerna mixing dough

Food is made for sharing.  It’s entertainment, it’s comfort, it’s socialization.  Living at Castle Irwell, I am surrounded by people from different countries, and the one thing we love to share above language, music, or stories is food.  In order to best share our multifarious cuisines, we started having large group dinners.

The first dinner was Italian food.  A few of my friends here are Italian, and if they are any indication of Italian people in general, it is a completely true stereotype that Italian people love food.  They made baked pasta with homemade pasta sauce.  Another night, I had fritella, which translates to “fritter” and is really like a chewy pancake.  I called it “Italian paratha.”  Yet another night, we had Classic Italian Pizza night with fresh pizza dough and classic Italian toppings.  There was margherita with tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella; white pizza with cheese, sausage, boiled potatoes, and rosemary; a ham and cheese pizza baked between two pieces of dough (like a sandwich); and for dessert, baked dough smothered in nutella.  Whoever called nutella a sandwich spread is brilliant -- it makes eating the equivalent of frosting totally justifiable.

Me topping the semla with canned whipped
cream (called "squirty cream" in the UK)

The second weekend we experienced the delights of my friend Charlotte, who is basically a Swedish goddess of baked goods.  She made us real Swedish cinnamon buns (I helped!), swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam, mashed potatoes, and roasted root vegetables with feta and thyme.  I will of course be stealing recipes from her so I can take them back to the States.  Everything was incredible.  Charlotte also taught us about another Swedish pastry served on Fat Tuesday called semla.  To make them, you make a rich tennis ball-sized bun, then you cut off the top, scoop out the soft insides, mix them with marzipan and hot milk, and then stuff the paste back into the bun shell and top with whipped cream.  Sounds good, right?  These little delights knock paçzkis out of the park.

Not wanting to be left out, I insisted on having American dinner.  I made mac n’ cheese, obviously, as this is my specialty back home.  Alongside it, I served glazed carrots and salad with ranch dressing.  I picked salad because the US is a nation obsessed with ranch (and rightly so), evidenced by the way we put it on everything we can, and I chose carrots because I was inspired by discovering “American ginger ale” in the grocery stores, which promised to be sweet rather than dry.  The carrots were a hit, but when I tried the ginger ale it resembled neither any American drink I’ve ever had, nor anything palatable.  For dessert, three friends and I baked a small mountain of chocolate chip cookies, which I instructed everyone to dunk into milk.  The leftovers were gone within hours.

Another night we had Indian night, in which we had rice and chipatis with a number of Indian curries, including mutter paneer, at my request.  My friend Prerna, the chef extraordinaire behind all the Indian food, has promised to teach me how to make it.  We also had Polish night, in which we made easily over 200 pierogis, all from scratch.  At the busiest point, we had over ten people making pierogis at the various stages of production, ranging from mixing the dough, rolling it out, cutting circles, filling and forming the pierogis, boiling them, and buttering the finished products.  We are masters of teamwork.

Through all this joint cooking and eating, we’ve discovered that a lot of cuisines include the same foods by different names.  What I call a potato pancake, others call a latke, rosti, or tortel de patate, among various other names.  It’s also become apparent to me how hard it is to make food without proper equipment, like an electric mixer.  If you’ve ever tried to cream butter and sugar by hand, you know what I’m talking about.  To accomplish these group dinners, we’ve had to pool resources and borrow dishes, mixing bowls, pans, what have you.  It’s been a challenge, but it’s been great.

Making and eating food, especially with good friends and exciting new food makes me happy.  Writing about these dinners even makes me happy.  It keeps getting harder and harder to describe how I’m feeling over here, because on one hand, I am having such a good time, and I am so happy so much of the time.  On the the other, I do miss home and everyone who’s there.  To cope, I've had to redefine "home" for myself.  I feel a little lost sometimes, because the home I left doesn’t exist anymore -- if I went back, it wouldn’t be the same -- but this place doesn’t feel like home yet either.  Nowhere is home, and home is nowhere.  Home isn’t a place anymore; it’s an item on a plate.  In my case, as it has always been, it’s a plate of chocolate chip cookies. 

On What's For Dinner part 1

Many of you know this already, but I love food.  I love to cook, I love to eat, and I love to try new things.  I especially love to learn about new foods, and my time over here is giving me ample opportunity to do this.  Part 1 of this post is entirely about British food (and there will probably be more on this topic later in the semester).  Part 2 is about other foods I’ve experienced while here.

Note the menu items on the marquee.

For starters, some words on Fish n’ Chips*.  Yes, they are a ubiquitous part of British fare, just as they are caricatured to be.  Fish n’ Chips are sold everywhere.  You can get them at any pub no problem, and you can also get them at takeaway shops, which are little lunch counters sprinkled all over the city.  They usually open for lunch and dinner, or sometimes just dinner and late-night, and they always have a kitschy cultural menu theme, choosing between Chinese, Indian, classic British, and American food.  All of them serve Fish n’ Chips.  It’s a little funny to see shops that sell hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken, and Fish n’ Chips, but I suppose that’s what British people think American food is.  And let’s face it, they’re not entirely wrong.  I’ve had Fish n’ Chips a number of times since arriving here, and I really do like it.  I definitely recommend it, assuming you go to a pub.  Do not get Fish n’ Chips from a Chinese takeaway shop.  Trust me.

Continuing with the theme of sampling all that the UK has to offer, I took it upon myself to test the selection of candy available here, which is vastly different that what’s available at home.  It seems that, in general, American candy is specific to the US.  Everywhere else has a global selection of candy.   I can’t get Butterfinger, Reese’s, Skittles, Mike and Ike, Twizzlers, Baby Ruth, or any kind of Hershey’s bar over here or in any other part of Europe.  Instead, they have an array of both British and European candy bars, my favorites being Boost bars, Double Deckers, MAOM, and Crunchies.  Tastes are different over here, as well.  In the US, we are obsessed with peanuts; over here, everything has hazelnuts in it.  We also like cheap, crappy chocolate at home (ie. Hershey’s, with love), but candy in general is of a higher quality over here.  Chocolate most especially.  There’s a lot of talk online about how the UK has the best candy in the world, and frankly, I gotta hand it to them -- they’re right.

It's a bar of soft chocolate cream studded with biscuit bits (tiny chunks of shortbread),
wrapped in a layer of caramel, then covered in chocolate.  It's tres delicious.

One hurdle that I am still trying to clear is grocery shopping.  I know I’m six thousand miles from home and everything here is different, but I am still surprised each time a grocery store item turns out to be different from the American equivalent.  They’re little things, like dark brown sugar is about 50% darker here, and sour cream isn’t smooth like at home (it’s a little grainy and slightly thicker), and milk is sold at 1.5 and 3.5 percent milk fat (where’s my 2%?).  Plus the names for things are different.  Single cream = half and half, while double cream = heavy whipping cream.  Sultanas = golden raisins.  Coriander = fresh cilantro.  Oh, and a shopping cart is called a trolley.  I was actually laughed at for describing a trolley as a public transport vehicle.

Some surprises have been good surprises.  Cheese over here is fantastic.  Even the cheap, grocery store brand of cheese is better than the stuff we have at home.  I could basically survive on extra mature cheddar (maybe with some bread or crackers) -- it’s that good.  Clotted cream is a common spread for scones and cakes at teatime, and I so wish it were readily available at home.  Imagine heavy whipping cream so think you could spread it on toast and you’ve got a good idea of what it’s like.  They also sell a sugar syrup here called golden syrup that is fantastic.  It’s like corn syrup but thicker and with a mild butterscotchy flavor.  It’s lovely in baked goods.  I get all of this at Sainsbury’s, my favorite grocery store of the ones I’ve visited.  The employees there wear burgundy and orange uniforms, which remind me invariably of Dudley and his Smeltings stick.  

Pubs are really the place to go for real British food.  There are two kinds of pubs in the UK - regular bars and free houses** -- and the free houses are the ones to hit.  They serve beer from small or local breweries, meaning better beer.  Classic British food is generally very meaty, but also very much like American comfort food.  Beef stews, steak, chicken pot pie… that sort of thing.  I tried a steak-and-kidney pudding the other day, my first true foray into offal, and I thought it was pretty good.  It came with chips (everything here does, honestly) and a side of mushy peas, which is simply a scoop of peas mashed into a sloppy, bright green gloop.  Also surprisingly pleasant.  And it is an indisputable fact that good British food should be washed down with good British beer.  It’s a perfect pair.

When it comes to food, I want to try everything here.  Seriously, everything I see is more enticing than it would have been at home.  Economists would call this increased demand due to scarcity (because these opportunities are only available for a short time), but I think my attitude has a lot to do with it.  Just being abroad makes me open to anything and interested by everything.  I want to do it all, to see it all.  I’m here!  I’m ready!  What has this place got to show me?

* In case you don’t know, Fish n’ Chips is a classic British dish consisting of a mound of french fries (called chips) topped by a piece of battered and fried fish.  It’s served with ketchup, mayo, salt & vinegar, or HP brown sauce for dipping the chips.

** The term ‘free house’ is synonymous with ‘public house', from which the nickname pub is derived.  Free houses are owned independently of the breweries that produce their beer, so they serve unique beers from a wide range of breweries.

The First Post

I know a lot of people at home want to know what I’m doing over here, plus there are some people that don’t use facebook, so this is a way to see pictures and hear stories or get explanations on what’s happing in the pictures.  Feel free to stalk my fb pics, my blog, or both. 

And before I begin, a few points of clarification:

1. Yes, the blog is called Manchester Adventures, but I don’t really live in Manchester.  I’m go to The University of Salford, and I live in the city of Salford, which is directly adjacent to Manchester,  one of England’s largest cities.  
2. I’m here for one semester (four months) on a cultural exchange.  
3. I’m studying English while in England.  
4. My semester ends on May 27, and I will then travel to continental Europe to backpack for 35 days before returning to Manchester for my flight home on July 3.

These are pictures of my room and my house in Castle Irwell Student Village.  Castle Irwell is basically a neighborhood of townhouses, and because they’re fully furnished, a lot of foreign exchange students are placed here.  I live in House 46, and I have ten housemates.  We each have our own bedroom with a washstand, desk, and lamp.  There is no wifi here, and if I were staying for more than four months, I would get a router.  This is the 21^st century people.  Wifi world is upon us.

During the first week here, there were a number of welcome events, and I met a TON of people.  Like I said, most of my neighbors are exchange students, so I’m learning a lot about other countries and other cultures.  Languages, as well.  Myslet is Czech for the verb “to think.”  Mercoledi is Italian for “Wednesday.”

I’ve finished two weeks of classes now, and they’re going very well.  It was a little rough at first because my classmates have a lot more background knowledge on the course material than I do, but after doing some catch up work, I feel just fine about them.  School here is a lot less demanding, as well.  I’m a full time student, but I'm only in three courses, and I go to class for just seven hours a week. 

Salford’s campus is really nice.  It’s a lot bigger than Wayne State’s campus, so I walk a lot.  I usually do about four miles a day, but it’s often more than that.  Like many places (Salford, Manchester, Liverpool), the campus is a good mix of very old buildings and very modern buildings.  It’s kind of like Wayne State and parts of Detroit.

Nightlife is really big here.  With so much free time, and being so close to the city, it’s easy to go out to the bars and clubs a couple of times a week.  Manchester is known for being a really great music scene in the UK (the band Oasis is from Manchester), so there are often live performances from musicians and DJs in venues around the city.  There are also cool events to go to, like the Chinese New Year in China Town Manchester last weekend. 

So far, it has been a really great experience.  More than anything, I am having so much fun.  I feel like I have far fewer responsibilities here, so it’s a really carefree life.  And there’s so much to do, so much to try, I honestly can’t imagine getting bored.

People frequently ask me if I’m homesick, and I keep wondering (if) when I will be.  Sometimes, when it’s late at night or I’m staring out a classroom window, I forget that I’m in a foreign country, an ocean away from home, with no way to get back for five more months.  But then something insignificant, like the people I’m going to see tomorrow or what I had for dinner today wanders into my mind and I’m jolted by the realization that I’m not at home.  And immediately after, I’m jolted again by the realization that this doesn’t scare me.  No, each time, I’m glad I’m here.