How To Be a Cambridge Vegan III

I have neglected to tell my loyal readers (all four of you) that we recently moved into a much nicer/bigger/more expensive/shower-able flat. This is it on the left. Those big windows on the top* floor there are all ours.

If you plan on stalking me in Cambridge with the use of this picture... good luck. All the houses around the city centre look the same.

Despite my lack of tools** I've recently been experimenting with some new recipes and spent a long while today in the bookstore looking for vegan cookbooks. I ended up finding a few but was annoyed at their lack of pictures and the fact that they were all mostly by the one author. So I bought a vegetarian "cookbook" called Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A Chef's Stories and Recipes from the Land.

The reason I chose this book over the vegan ones was because I enjoyed I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends so much when I read it and, despite the fact that it wasn't vegan, it taught me how to make good, simple pasta and inspired me to make a lot of my own recipes. I love recipes (and I've been lately thinking about making my way through Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook one recipe at a time Julie & Julia style) but I've been cooking long enough now to know what goes with what... and I want to create my own recipes! So I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more because it would give me the chance to tweek the recipes while still reading an enjoyable book. And it got some good reviews so I look forward to reviewing it myself!

We had our start of semester maths luncheon yesterday at Selwyn***. I was a bit nervous about what I was going to get as food but in the end it was actually quite good! They had prepared me my own separate meal and just pulled it out when I was ready. It did have potatoes in it (my close friends will know how much I hate potatoes) but they were thinly cut, nicely cooked and seasoned wonderfully so it turned out to be quite a nice lunch.

Tonight is one of the few MCR**** dinners and apparently this is the yummiest of the dinners you get so I'm hoping for something good. I will laugh very hard if they just give me what they served me yesterday.

Wish me luck and I'll let you know how it goes!

* There is actually a couple living in the roof although we aren't sure how exactly they do it as our ceilings are very high and there doesn't seem to be much space for anything but crawling!
** Note: Don't buy £1 chopping boards from Poundland (see picture right & click on it to get a closer view of our new kitchen!).
*** Selwyn is the college I belong to at Cambridge. The system here is weird and you have to join a college to be admitted to the university. I joined Selwyn because it's half way between the city centre and the Cavendish lab where I work and because it's less touristy than the others. The purpose of the college system is networking. And it works! I've met lots of people although mainly from the sciences.
**** MCR = Middle Combination Room = grad students of the college.