I grabbed a chicken avocado sandwich on the way to the Oxford Tube bus to London with Robbie and Cara. I really wanted some soup from Pret as well, but you are only allowed to bring cold foods on the bus. The sandwich was amazing, as everything from Pret always is. I might just have to eat there again today….
It’s really hard not to get chips after a night out. The truck is right there…. just calling my name. Robbie and I got the exact same order without even knowing it! Which strange because it’s a fairly complicated and diverse set of toppings, from a menu with endless possibilities. I had chips with salt, vinegar, cheese, chicken, onions, garlic mayonnaise, and chili sauce. I know that all sounds overwhelming, but it tastes amazing. I need to travel to Turkey to get some real food though, they really know what they’re doing with these kebabs and such. Anyway, it’s always a great late night snack.
This was my first trip to the famous Turf Tavern! The very place that Bill Clinton did not inhale in while in college. The Turf Tavern is a great little place, extremely hard to find, but really cool indeed. I learned from Robbie and Cara that “Yorkshire pudding” isn’t a pudding at all, it’s the savory pancake-like dough. The “pudding” was really soft and slightly chewy, amazing. I covered it in delicious gravy and dipped every bite in perfectly spicy horseradish sauce. To drink, I had an Old Rosey cider, something like 8% but still really tasty, unlike the “K” cider I bought the other day that was 8.6% and I was told it’s what tramps drink. It was a truly great meal, shared with great friends.
I ate at Pret, again. Sorry. It’s so good and they believe in sustainability, local food, and keeping preservatives/steroids/dyes/enhancers/etc out of the food. They don’t have organic food, which kind of sucks, but all of their food is all-natural, which is the next best thing. ALL of their packaging is recycled and recyclable! I wish we had Pret A Manger in the US.
Oh yeah, and I ate a sandwich. It was very good. The bread, baked fresh daily, was crunchy and slightly salted. The prosciutto was so smooth and also salty. The tomatoes were fresh and sweet, and the basil, even though I normally don’t like basil so much, was a good addition to the party in my mouth. The perfect amount of homemade mayonnaise tied everything together. The sparkling apple was simple, sweet, and had real apple flavor, (probably all the apple juice they put in it.) I’m so glad I found this place! It will be hard for me to stay away from it.
I had shepherd’s pie tonight at the college. It was okay, but not as good as the shepherd’s pie that my beautiful wife makes. At least the vegetables were cooked correctly tonight. The yogurt was good as ever. Kind of a lack-luster meal altogether though.
Pret is my new favorite lunch spot, it’s like Eat. but better. They sell sandwiches and salads and soups and weird drinks with a flair for interesting combinations that are inexpensive as well as delicious. My sandwich was awesome! Marinated grilled chicken that was slightly shredded and added to the mayonnaise, layered with thick pieces of salty English bacon, and a fresh punch of mixed greens. The soup was a bacon and tomato with crème fraiche. I normally don’t go for tomato soups, but it sounded so good, I just had to get it. And it was well worth it, so creamy and smooth with chunks of that amazing salty English bacon. The drink was pretty great as well, it was another “no nasties” sparkling beverage flavored this time with grape and elderflower! It was more tart than sweet, but also very pleasantly aromatic. Overall, it was a great lunch! I will be back to Pret again!
More of a snack than a dinner, but I forgot to take a picture of my dinner at the college, so I figured this would do. This is the only time the English call them fries, when they are curly. I asked them why, and Robbie said it’s because “curly chips” sounds stupid. I put something called “brown sauce” on them and malt vinegar and mayonnaise. The brown sauce was a vinegar based sauce very similar to our steak sauce. These curly fries tasted exactly like they came from The Junction, and the garlic bread was just some garlic bread, nothing special.
I love The City Arms though, not for their food but for the discounted drinks. I have a little card on my keys called the Yellow Card, which gets me a discount on drinks at The City Arms. You have to be a current student to get the Yellow Card, and most of my Oxford friends can’t get one, so when they go up to the bar to get a drink, they all have to borrow mine. It’s funny because they go to The Arms all the time, and they have to borrow the American’s discount card every time they buy a drink. Also, the drinking culture is so much different here. They mostly buy their own, and drink their own, almost no sharing. So, at The Arms, a jug (pitcher) of Carling or Carlsburg is only £5 with the Yellow Card. A jug holds four pints, we had four people. In America we would have taken turns buying one pitcher at a time, or maybe even two. Not here, we each got our own jug and no sharing! It’s such a funny difference.
I felt like something a little lighter for lunch, so I picked up this orzo salad from Pret. It was pretty good, lots of orzo and rocket and lettuce with loads of kalamata olives and carrots and fire-roasted red peppers. The dressing was a simple vinaigrette. I washed it all down with a carbonated orange juice that claimed on the can to have “added no nasties, just juice and CO2.” It was a well good lunch for takeaway.
Because of the World Cup final, the dinning hall at the college decided to attempt to make dishes from the final two teams. They made paella and a Spanish dessert called Pan de Calatrava, that’s Spain right? So they were doing pretty well, but then they made ratatouille…. French, so…… weird, then there was a steak with a piece of Swiss cheese….. so, Swiss?….. weird. And then the same old roasted potatoes and salad we always get, English I guess? So out of all this weird combination of dishes, they had two from Spain, good start, and then a bunch of dishes from countries long ago eliminated from the tournament, and nothing Dutch at all. Sounds like a World Cup theme fail to me. By the way, all the food was terrible.
Special message to any of the Oriel College cooks that might stumble upon my blog: stop trying to make dishes that you have no idea how to make! Make me some English food, you’re good at doing that!
After a long night of dancing at the O2 Academy, nothing tastes better than chips and cheese with mayonnaise and barbecue sauce. This is for sure not my first chips and cheese with mayonnaise and barbecue, but its the first one that I remembered to take an extremely blurry picture of. What else what I eat at 4am? So amazingly delicious.
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. 