Oberlin

I'm surprised that after this past weekend, I haven't turned into a piece of cheese. It started on Friday, when Marc Blecher, professor of politics and turophile extraordinaire, took us on a very cheesy trip to Borough Market. We first visited Neal's Dairy Yard, a purveyor of (mostly) English cheeses, and met his friend Michael, a cheese seller. Michael told us about the small farms that Neal's Dairy Yard buys from, outlined proper cheese storage and care (the secret, apparently, is never to let your cheese dry out), and, perhaps most importantly, gave us lots and lots of samples. Neal's Dairy Yard's Stilton Blue Cheese is, as my roommate put it, a "transcendent eating experience."

From there, we walked through the beautiful market to the Kappacasein stand to try, quite honestly, the best grilled cheese sandwich I will ever hope to encounter. Monterey cheddar, onions, leeks, garlic, perhaps white wine, sourdough bread . . . this is what I will eat in heaven.

At the Borough Market, we also sampled cheeses at two more stands--one French and one Italian. The next night, we had a dinner of 4 cheese appetizers, a burrata first course, cheese fondue, and chocolate cake at Marc's flat. And if that wasn't enough, on Sunday I sampled all sorts of fresh, interesting street food at the Brick Lane Market.

If you couldn't tell from the previous three paragraphs, I really, really, really like food. I like eating (obviously), but I also enjoy cooking, which living in an apartment (or flat, in Brit-speak) has allowed me to do. My flat-mates and I like to congratulate ourselves when we have meals that include a vegetable, starch, and protein, but we are really just inflating our own egos because this happens every night. Today we had a delicious stir-fry with a garlic-ginger sauce, and yesterday we made tomato soup from scratch. I never have time to cook at Oberlin, and this is one of the most satisfying parts of living here.

All this cooking means we have to do a fair amount of grocery shopping, which means I've had to get used to British market idiosyncrasies. For one, they have these weird automated self-checkout stands where you scan your own groceries. For another, things like black beans and salsa, staples in California or even Ohio, are extremely difficult to find here. Most of the vegetables have different names, too. Eggplants are aubergines, bell peppers are capsicums, zucchinis are courgettes, and rutabagas are swedes, a fact which helped to assuage my immense shock and concern when my roommate proposed making mashed swede for dinner.

The most notable difference, in British grocery stores, however, is the space devoted to biscuits. These are not biscuits of our biscuits-and-gravy sensibilities. On this side of the Atlantic, biscuits are something like a cross between a cracker and a cookie: they are usually sweet but are much, much crunchier than the cookies we eat in America (as Virginia Woolf says, "here the water-jug was liberally passed round, as it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core"). My flat goes through about a packet of biscuits a day in the highly scientific process of determining which brand is the best. So far, the dark chocolate Digestives (not as gross as they sound--sort of like thin crackers with chocolate on top) are in the lead, but Jaffa Cakes (shortbread with orange marmalade dipped in chocolate) have recently become very popular. It's a highly unpredictable science, which is why I shall perhaps have to do more testing, but, heeding the advice of Ms. Woolf, I won't forget to have my biscuits with milk.