Tuesday, September 7, 2010

A little about the food...

I figured that I put something about traveling with food intolerances in the subtitle so I might as well talk about them every once in a while.


So the way our meals are set up are as follows:
7:55 breakfast in the great hall at Balliol college, which is a 6-8 minute walk from our dorms.
    Breakfast has been: fried eggs, hashbrown cakes, sausage, bacon (more like canadian), mushrooms, broiled tomato halves, toast, yogurt and fruit. Lots of grease and as Dr. B has said "it is 1/4 food and 3/4 oil." I got so over-oiled the third day that I went to the storre and bought some gluten free musceli and have been having that and a banana every morning. Sometimes they have cold cut ham and I'll have some of that. The tea here is also something that I've surprised myself with by enjoying very much.

Lunch we have on our own.

6:30pm - we have Dinner in the great hall.
      This is a 3 course meal. An appetizer (very good, high quality but swimming in oil). A main course with usually some kind of potato (fried or roasted in butter), a vegetable (generally steamed or stir-fried so less oil which is nice), 2 meat dishes and a vegetarian one. They have been very helpful in accommodating my unfortunate intolerances. {[ on a totally unrelated side note, it just started hailing- bummer, I was going to go on a run later.]} I am told which dish I can have and they generally bring me a fruit cup or my own dessert because they are almost always some kind of custard or panecotta for everyone else. Its kind of a toss up what my main dish is going to be. Last night it was a divine curry dish with mini prawns but one night it was my very own whole cooked trout! Skin and all. I will say that I tried it but I couldn't get over the bones. I felt bad for wasting it.

The Pubs:
There is a collection of somewhere around 45-50 pubs on the official Oxford Pub Crawl list. We bought a poster with little cartoon drawings of them all and plan on coloring and dating them as we visit them. Almost all of them serve a cider on tap (which I believe I've mentioned before) but we found this pear cider which tastes so good. Its made in Sweden. Ah! Devine. Not a lot of the food here is accessible to me, but that's good news in my opinion! ;)

The grocery stores have a line of foods called FreeFrom and are all gluten free with a large number of them also being dairy free. There are things like bread (crumbly but I have bread!), crumpets (which are actually pretty good), pastries, prepared meals and the like. I'm satisfied with getting that, some hummous, veggies and  fruit to munch on for lunch and snacks.

The majority of restaurants we've been to have been good enough but to be honest I haven't tried a lot of them. We walked past this Italian restaurant the other day and it said that they have GF pizza and pasta options so I might go there once. There is a good resource of everything Oxfordian on The Daily Info page including GF dining options.

I must get back to reading- my tutorials (went well! more on that later) are very reading intensive so I must get going on that.

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