March 11: Bombay Brasserie



First Course: Potato and lamb thingie, left,
and spicy fish, right



Today we had lunch at an incredibly posh restaurant called the "Bombay Brasserie." Usually lunch there costs around 50 quid a head, but our program has a deal with the owner so we can go as a "pound trip" and only pay one pound. It was truly incredible. Starters were veggies (and I was surprised and delighted to see they included kohlrabi!) with spicy dip and strange rice crackery sort of things that were crunchy and good. Our first dish was a potato and lamb cake in a crunchy coating with a bit of ketchup and I don't even like lamb (at all) but it was still great. It came with flaky white fish with a nice spice served on a bit of banana leaf. The fish was phenomenal. I have no idea what spices were used to make it though. Next was the main course: mildly spiced chicken in a creamy sauce, beans, rice, nan, and the most incredible (though nasty-looking) spinach stuff. I don't know how it was made, but it looked like your typical dark-green spinach that's been run through a blender and mixed with sweet corn that is supposed to be healthy but tastes awful. It was so much tastier than it looked! It was creamy and must have been made with some sort of dairy product, and you could hardly taste the spinach. It was just sweet and mild and delicious. I wish I could find a recipe, but I don't even know where to look. My friends and I all ate a ridiculous amount, as always. Good thing I was hungry! Dessert was ginger ice cream and a bread and butter pudding with a little branch of red currants. I loved it all, but my friends didn't like how "spicy" the ice cream was (it's ginger, people, it's supposed to have a kick!) or the texture of the pudding (it's supposed to be gloppy and eggy!) or the tart berries (what did you expect? They're not grapes!). The good news was, they just passed theirs over to me so I got lots. I was a very happy camper.

Smushy spinich stuff

Wonderful dessert!

After lunch, our history professor took us to Westminster Abbey. We had to make up class time we'd lost just before Spring Break. Somehow he even managed to make the Abbey boring, which is pretty darn bad. Since I've been there before and know way more British History than a 20-year-old American usually does, I still knew what I was looking at and enjoyed myself. I saw graves and memorials to Henry Purcell (a composer whose music I once performed and competed with) and Benjamin Britten (composer of the War Requiem, which I performed last year), Wilfred Owen (the poet whose work Britten used for the Requiem), Handel, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, playwright Ben Jonson (who I spent all last semester studying and thoroughly enjoying), Laurence Olivier, Jane Austen, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, the Bronte sisters, Lewis Carroll, John Keats, Longfellow, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Winston Churchill, and of course Shakespeare, and quite enjoyed standing on T.S. Eliot.

After the Abbey, I got to work on my paper for Contemporary Britain. I think I'm going to write about the British monarchy, though that could change. I've also been trying to arrange everything for when my family comes. There is still so much to do!