Hello?

I might be talking to the spiders creeping around the corners of this blog, but I'm here to turn on the lights and wipe the dust away – second year at college has been crazy, but these are all you need to know about the past few months of the gastronomy of student life:

The most important things I've learnt from student living:

1. Cream cheese and honey on toast makes a bangin' breakfast. Richard claims it to be "like cheesecake on toast". TIP: Stuff warm pita with the same stuff. It's ridiculous.
2. If you don't buy it, you won't eat it. Do you really need a pack of McVitie's Chocolate Digestives every time you pass (or delibrately browse) the biscuit section in Tesco's?
3. Light butter spread is pretty useless. I dunno, it might help with the calories and saturated fat and whatever, but it barely tastes like the real deal!
4. Never let yourself run out of milk. Milk is the loo roll of the refrigerator. Gotta have it at all times. No milk means dry cereal, black coffee, black tea, no means of making hot chocolate, pathetic scrambled eggs, no impromptu pancakes... and the list goes on.
5. Abstain from purchasing cereal. Mostly if you're someone like me who cannot resist eating cereal out of the box, cinema-popcorn style. I've opted for porridge oats, which are less edible straight out of the box.
6. Frozen food is your best friend. Meat, veg, pizza, pies, ready meals – the best thing to do after a long day at dance college is sticking something into the oven for dinner which hardly cost anything.
7. Sweet potato fries are the ish. Slice them up, stick them into the oven with oil, mixed spice and salt, and you're ready to go.
8. Portion minced meat before freezing. It's not much fun digging your pathetic knife into a solid block of meat when all you want is just enough for two portions of spaghetti bolognese.
9. Raw mushy sausages can become meatballs. Feeling like bits and bobs instead of rods? Worried that sausages and pasta don't look very sophisticated? Cut up raw sausages before cooking.
10. You can indeed accomplish an epicmealtime 'handle it' recipe. I've done it, and it was glorious.
11. Just take the mould off the cheese, nobody's going to die. Cream cheese and cheddar alike – I'm still here, aren't I?
12. Don't look down upon a roasted onion half. It's gooood.
13. Make and keep tons of tiny pancakes to use up expiring milk and leftover chocolate chips. You're welcome. Keep them in the freezer for an eternal breakfast backup plan.

It's been two years of student-living in an English country, but there are wonders undiscovered, the gaps of which my English boyfriend has happened to fill with his superior knowledge.

1. Fire ovens still exist. Richard had one in his student house.
2. Gravy granules! I'm learning.
3. Golden syrup or honey with beef and gravy. *Melts*
4. Mixed herbs can save your life. A sprinkle does magical wonders to almost anything.
5. Sweet and sour sauce with spaghetti is legit.
6. Actually, anything with pasta can be dinner.
7. Yes, even gravy.

Other stuff you should totally try making:

1. Peanut butter and banana milkshake: Blend two generous dollops of peanut butter, a chopped up banana, one or two tsp of sugar, and milk to cover 3/4 of what you've already got in the blender.
2. Peanut butter and banana porridge: Stir in mashed banana and however much peanut butter into your warm porridge for an energising start to the day! Much needed when you start with a ballet class every morning at college.
3. Nutella and peanut butter sandwich: I don't know why most people I speak to haven't tried this yet. Spread one slice of warm toast with nutella, the other with peanut butter, and stick them together. Watch them ooze and fuse. Enjoy.

Cadbury Wispa Hot Chocolate Drink

I received this as an Easter gift (yes I know, this post has rolled under the bed and gathered dust and crumbs for a little while) from my homestay hosts, as they know how much I love chocolate.

In Singapore, Milo is the breakfast drink for kids and teenagers – it is a chocolate and malt drink, ubiquitous in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, but is also available in some other parts of the world. (100 points for specificity!) I used to have it every morning, and sometimes in the afternoon as well, chilled with ice cubes. Milo is also served in eating places, and has developed into all sorts of different desserts.

But enough about Milo, because hot chocolate has taken its place in my heart.

After having hot chocolate almost every morning while in London, I went back to Singapore during term break, had a cup of Milo, and, no sir, something had changed in that relationship. I found my tastebuds craving something more than a diluted, malt taste with only a tinge of chocolate.

As good as hot chocolate goes, my favourite powdered milk chocolate drink would be by Waitrose Essential. It is £1.58 per 400g glass jar, and very chocolate-y and delicious. Galaxy's hot chocolate is nothing. It is a little on the bitter side, and unimpressive in general.

Waitrose's chocolate drink powder may be my favourite, but Cadbury's Wispa comes pretty damn close. They both have a rich and sweet chocolate taste, but Wispa boasts an additional feature – frothy bubbles.

The jar of 246g costs £2.79 (Tesco), and contains some carbon-dioxide related ingredient (again, 100 points for detailed description!) within the powder to create a frothy layer which rests on top of the drink.

The powder fizzes audibly when water is poured onto it, and a fair amount of bubbles rise instantly, so pouring becomes careful business, while you gotta ensure that the drink doesn't overflow. This frothy layer really makes a difference to the overall experience of the drink, and is also quite fun to scoop out and eat, if you are a weirdo like me. However, the bubbles don't stay forever, and will dissipate eventually, so drink it up!

If you're getting bored of having the same old drink for breakfast, why not try Wispa's Instant Hot Chocolate for a change? Unless you despise chocolate (what are you even doing on this blog?) you are bound to love this drink!

IKEA

I had never realized how much strategic planning goes into the layout of every IKEA megastore. When I was younger, my route simply headed straight up the escalators and into the ballpit-playground for about two hours, making friends and enemies within the mass of multi-coloured spheres, before coming out into reality and heading home in a car full of large cardboard boxes and plastic things.

The food bit didn't seem relevant to me until I sat down in the IKEA Resturant one day with my mum and had some poached salmon slathered with what I know now as hollandaise sauce, and it absolutely blew my mind and made me fall in love with salmon fillets. My mum also started to buy a seemingly never-ending supply of Swedish meatballs, as well as lingönberry jam and that creamy, brown, magical gravy. She'd pop them in the oven and I'd have about fifteen of them for dinner, with fries and hot gravy. Mmm.

About two weeks ago, my friend, Esther, and I, shared a few plates of food picked out from the various 'stations' in Wembley's IKEA restaurant which vaguely resembles an Oliver Twist-esque food queue, with the generic grey trays and all. However, the place had a lovely, large and homely interior with golden wood, and simple but chic lighting.

Esther is a queen.

Ten meatballs were £3.89, and they came with gravy, a free flow of jam, as well as mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Some other customers had fries with their meatballs, but I'm guessing that they came with the larger quantities. The meatballs were bouncy and tasty -- flawless, and never failing to impress.

The salad bar had a small variety of beans, leafy greens, beetroot, giant couscous,coleslaw and cucumber. For a the size of a soup bowl, it was somewhere between £2-3. (There was a fixed price but I can't remember it now.)

The salmon and spinach lasagne was a generous portion, and tasted so good. Warm, browned lasagne layers encompassing fluffy salmon bits and fragrant spinach -- it was quite filling as well!

There is also a free flow of coffee, which one has to pay (If I remember correctly, it was about 95p per cup or something like that) for per possession of mug, unless you have IKEA FAMILY membership -- then you get free coffee on weekdays!



And of course, who can resist their desserts?

No, salad leaf, you are healthy, get out of the picture.



Filled with whipped cream and held by a yummy shortcrust pastry, this strawberry tart was simply heaven.

Their quality-control is really good as well. Every tart looks the same, and just by looking, you can tell that each one tastes absolutely yummy. I guess it is due to the fact that we are talking about IKEA, and they probably handle their food like their generic, please-all furniture.

The almond cake with chocolate and butterscotch pieces (£1.75) was too good-looking to resist. The layered, nutty sponge cake has a lovely caramel-like flavour, and when topped with butterscotch, whipped cream and chocolate, there is a rich blissfulness which is not overpowering due to the presence of the almond sponge layers. 

There is a lot of apple in this Swedish Apple Cake (£1.45), which is great. At a glance, one would think that the apple in encased in shortcrust pastry, similar to the likes of an apple pie, but upon closer inspection, the 'pastry' is actually a firm cake, which I guess is what makes it Swedish. Customers are promised vanilla sauce, but I guess they ran out, because we got a blob of whipped cream instead. I would have preferred the cake warm, rather than cold from being stored on the chilled shelves. It's alright, but I'm not a huge fan of this one.

The Chocolate Truffle Cake (95p) was what you'd expect from a truffle – rich, dense, and chocolatey. It might be a bit too rich for an entire bar, but it was alright when served with whipped cream and shared with a friend.

This pretty much sums up our IKEA trip.

After the long and tedious journey through the land of beds, tables, plates, potted plants, toys, and the final showdown of the ceiling-high shelves of brown boxes, we made it to the cashier, which felt as good as reaching the finish-line of a marathon track. All I checked out was a bottle of Dryck Bubbel Apple & Lingön, which is a sparkling drink made of apple juice and Lingönberries. (£1.89) It is a sweet and satisfying drink, and both flavours compliment each other well –neither overpowers the other.

My bottle is green, though.

Like a drink stall for the said marathon track, there is a bistro just beyond the cashiers which sells hot dogs for 60p along with soft drinks, soft-serve ice cream cones, cinnamon buns and doughnuts. Perfect for the exhausted shopper. Sneaky.

Next to the bistro is the Swedish Food Market, which sells Swedish food (no shit, Sherlock.), some featured in the IKEA restaurant earlier on, such as the apple cake and the almond-layered cake thing. Of course, there are frozen meatballs, packets of gravy mix, jars of lingönberry jam, and packets of vanilla sauce mix for the cakes. Other popular Swedish items such as herring roe, cod roe, salmon, and oat biscuits (I sampled some of these – really really nice.) were aplenty on the shelves.

Like Choccie Dodgers, Kakor Choklad (50p!) is a sandwich biscuit filled with chocolate ganache, with a portion of it peeking out through a heart-shaped hole in the top biscuit, which is a plain butter biscuit, while the bottom one is a chocolate biscuit.

Wow. The chocolate filling really is something. It is thick, creamy, and has a fragrant chocolate taste, without the sweet, milky, artificial THIS-IS-CHOCOLATE-DO-YOU-HEAR-ME flavouring you sometimes get in other cookies. 

See that map on my screen? I'm planning world domination at the moment.

Also sold at a great price of 50p, Kex Äpple looked interesting to me. I bought it thinking that it would contain an apple-flavoured filling, but the biscuit sandwich was filled with vanilla-flavoured filling, while an apple-flavoured candy occupies the heart-shaped hole. What?

Okay, the filling was good and the biscuits had a good, firm texture without being too crumbly.

The candy did have a lovely apple taste, but that little centre is the only instance during which you have any apple taste at all – the rest of the biscuit is a normal vanilla sandwich cookie. The apple taste didn't even spread. Furthermore, that candy was hard. Not hard like rock-hard, but more gooey-hard, like a licorice stick. Determined to prolong the lifespan of the apple flavour to last throughout the entire biscuit, I bit into half of the candy bit and had to wait a good 4 seconds wiggling the biscuit about, trying to rip apart that damned heart. IKEA could have been much smarter with this biscuit.

I can't wait to go back to IKEA to try the rest of their budget-priced foods!

IKEA - Wembley

2 Drury Way

North Circular Road

London

NW10 0TH

0845 355 1141

Opening hours:

Monday to Friday	10:00 am – 10:00 pm
Saturday	9:00 am – 10:00 pm
Sunday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm

St Margarets was all slushy and raining during a Saturday in January. I had just finished a rehearsal at school, and was looking for lunch.

I ended up joining my friends at a little café in St Margarets, just next to the station, called 'La Creperie Bretonne'. Apparently there's a famous eating place in Paris which bears the same name, and the one in St Margarets is un-Google-able.

The rain was annoying and I wanted to get indoors – this café welcomed me with its lit-up display counter containing cakes, muffins, rolls and croques, as well as a long menu full of reasonably-priced food and drink behind the counter.

One of the things I love about London is the cafés and patisseries, which are just everywhere. Even if you've just had lunch, you could pop into a café for some hot chocolate or coffee, or salivate on the shop windows of patisseries. It is comforting to know that there is food everywhere, available in a chill and comfy atmosphere.

The guy told me that this was a nougat, but [again] I can't seem to find a nougat like this on Google. It's basically some sort of danish pastry with cinnamon and almond, with glaze. It filled me up okay for a lunch meal, and was satisfying.

The hot chocolate was just great. It was sweet, warm, chocolate-y and really value for money. The small size already came in a pretty big cup, unlike in Café Nero's overpriced, tiny, little shot-mug.

Us three friends split a double chocolate muffin into three for dessert, and it was a really good muffin – hot, chocolate-y and fragrant.

As the name suggests, the café also does crêpes which I am eager to try. I will go back to La Creperie Bretonne during my next chance to try out more of their stuff!

La Creperie Bretonne

113 The Broadway
St Margarets

United Kingdom

Click here for part two.

Oreos in stuff

For the first time since coming to London, I am actually feeling sick of food. At the rate I was going at all the cookies and cakes, I didn't think it was possible for this day to finally arrive.

This sudden crisis is also due to the fact that I had an all-snack-and-no-meal Saturday. Yesterday's diet consisted of a crumpet and several chocolate digestive biscuits for breakfast, cereal bars and more biscuits for lunch, and oreo-chocolate pancakes for dinner at midnight. I didn't have anything savoury, and after the pancakes, my stomach felt extremely uncomfortable, and I really felt the need for something proper like chicken or pasta.

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That was yesterday, Sunday the 2nd of December. I'm feeling fine now, after having some proper food, and I'm back to normal (i.e eating 6 10 cookies and a cup of rice pudding before dinner). Anyway, enough with making myself feel guilty. Here is what I got up to during the weekend:

My friend Adel lives with a middle-to-old-aged (let me know if anyone finds a better term for this age group, thanks) Singaporean lady who lives in a house full of high-tech gadgets and complicated kitchenware. The trashcan opens automatically when you pass your hand over it.

One of these fancy gadgets is a £500 blender. The container is made out of plastic, surprisingly, and not Swarovski crystals. Anyway, Adel has the privilege of using this blender, and likes making smoothies with it. In her world, smoothies consist of a large variety of fruits such as berries, bananas, oranges, apples and the like, blended with milk, and ice. In my world, smoothies  have to consist of crushed oreos, and, unless readily available, with harsh weather or no grocery stores in close proximity, ice cream.

So after Adel blended her gazillion species of fruits, we washed out the blender and put in 3 or 4 oreo cookies, some crushed ice, milk, whipped cream, and the secret ingredient – peanut butter. It was just a knifeful (I am creating some revolutionary, essential vocabulary over here.) but it added such a lovely touch to the drink. To top it all off, I sprayed a generous amount of whipped cream on the top, and Adel threw on a pineapple cube to turn it into a piña colada wannabe.

I do like that cup.

The oreos came in a long packet, so when we decided to make pancakes in the middle of the night, I simply couldn't waste those extra oreos, could I?

FIgure 1.1

What you can observe in Figure 1.1 is three pancakes containing chopped oreos topped with melted chocolate topped with whipped cream topped with more crushed oreos. If the topping is bothering you, here's how the pancake looks like on it own:

It looks diseased but who cares, it was a great idea.

The batter mix

I'm usually a wuss who follows recipes word-for word, as I am afraid of screwing up the outcome and wasting the ingredients to create something barely edible. This time, Adel said that she usually made pancakes without a recipe, and I decided to go with it as well. I'd made pancakes before, so I knew how the batter should look and how the frying should go.

We added milk to flour until it was liquidy and creamy, and I put in chopped oreos while Adel added cinnamon powder to hers. Then all we added was sugar and vanilla extract, and that was it. I guess this pancake is the most basic pancake ever, if you're lacking eggs and it is 12am in the mornight.

The pancakes turned out slightly moist, dense and squidgy on the insides, but they tasted fine. Adel's turned out better because her mix had more milk, so the pancake spread more, and came out of the pan thinner, so the denseness of the inside wasn't too obvious. I think eggs were the major missing factor, and the fluffiness would have been there if we had used some self raising flour or bicarbonate of soda.

But if you are low on ingredients and are looking for a quick fix to your pancake craving, then just throw some flour and milk together and whatever else gets the taste in, and you have a basic pancake good to go.

Oh, don't be impatient and turn up the heat on the stove, I did that out of impatience and it killed my last pancake. Be sure to cook pancakes on low heat and flip them over when you see a number  of popped bubbles forming on the top.

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On a side note, I can't wait until this Sunday, when I will be taking a flight home on my own for the first time, back to Singapore and back to my mum's supply of ingredients and a kitchen for me to bake in!