Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 9

Quite Like: Tesco's bake at home bread rolls, a.k.a. petit pains. So, so, so good.

Rather Dislike: No screens on windows or doors = bugs in the house. I just smashed one on my computer screen. Yuk.

Source

Nathan and I had a great day out at Belsay Castle and Gardens. Pictures will come tomorrow!

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 8

Quite Like: Innocent Pure Fruit Smoothies

These are amazing! I tried them when we were visiting our friends in London, and when I saw them on sale at Tesco, I splurged. They're the organic-no preservatives-no gluten-no wheat- no fake kind of thing. Nathan likes to call them "free range smoothies." They're better than Bagels and Blenderz or Jamba Juice or Smoothie King or Planet Smoothie. They're more juicy than icy, which I like, and the flavor is positively explosive! I tried the blueberry and acai flavor first. Yum! Mango and passion fruit is scrummy (scrumptious + yummy, as the Brits would say) as well. Cheers!

Rather Dislike: Not Much Resealable Packaging

I've totally taken for granted the fact that most American products are resealable: crackers and cereal have the box top, cheese and meats have the zipper close, bread has the twisty tie, frozen foods have some way of sealing it to keep the contents from getting freezer burn, etc. It's not nearly as common here. Sometimes there's a little sticker on the rice or bread or whatever so you can roll the plastic down and seal it with that, but it never sticks for more than a few minutes. That's good news if you don't want more expensive and probably wasteful packaging, but it's sometimes bad news for a girl who just wants to have the convenience.

"Just put it in a Ziploc bag!" you say? Those aren't as common either. I finally found some generic zip close plastic sandwich sized bags at Tesco online, and I was really pumped about them. I've turned into one of those people who cleans the used ones out and reuses them. Up until now I've had the dual handled plastic bags, kind of like mini versions of plastic grocery bags. They work okay, but there's just too much going on with the excess plastic and the knots I tie to keep the air out. 

Listen to me... there are worse things to complain about! I guess you know it's going really well for us here when I have to whine about the lack of zip close plastic bags.

I'm off to put these just opened deli meats in my NEW (used) Ziploc bag from Mrs. Qualls. :)


So, my dear readers, if you've been to England, what do you quite like and/or rather dislike? The gorgeous countryside? The now-fabled bureaucracy? The accents? Feelings of claustrophobia on an island? If you've never been to England, what can you imagine you'd love and/or hate?  

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 7

Quite Like: Some New Slang


Pigeon hole (or just pidge), n.: mail box
Pinch, v.: to steal
Elastoplast, n.: Band-Aid
Hobknobs, n: really yummy biscuits (cookies) that taste like Nature Valley granola bars... but better
Six and two threes, idiom: Six to one, half dozen to the other
Mac (short for Macintosh), n.: Raincoat
Brolly, n.: Umbrella


Oh! And our ever-so-resourceful archivist (not librarian) neighbor told me about the pandora.com British equivalent, www.last.fm.  I'm still learning my way around it, but I've already been enjoying having music back in the house. 


Quite Dislike: Gale force headwinds up to 35 mph on my way to work this morning.

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 6

Quite Like: Grocery Delivery Service


I type this while I'm waiting for my groceries to be delivered.  I paid for the cheapest time slot, between 8 and 10 p.m.  It is now six minutes to 10, and they're still not here.  I guess we'll find out whether or not this will stay in the "Quite Like" category.  In theory, it's the greatest idea ever, especially for me who has no car and can't carry much more than two Trader Joe's size grocery bags full of college sized everything half a mile home.  I can put the largest sizes of rice and peanut butter in my virtual basket without my shoulder muscles twitching.


Four minutes to ten...


Rather Dislike: Christmas in September, October, and Now November


When Nathan and I arrived on September 1st, we noticed that restaurants were already advertising that they were available for Christmas party bookings.  I thought that was really strange.  Then, when I went to the card store to get cards for my very first blog drawing winners, I noticed that it had been overrun by Christmas decorations and Justin Bieber 2011 calendars.   Now that Halloween is over, it's officially Christmas everywhere.  They don't have the Thanksgiving holiday to slow down the Christmas train.  It seems just wrong to me.

It's nine after ten...


I now rather dislike the grocery delivery illusion.

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 5

Quite Like: The Hot Water Bottle

When Hannah first told me about this, I was a little skeptical.  A plastic bottle filled with hot water to sleep with?  It sounds like something I would have if I was camping in sub-zero temperatures.  People, this is the best marriage saver since the GPS.  It's amazing.  This one came with a fur lining to prevent burns, but I don't use it because it keeps some of the heat from getting onto my toesies.  This little love is going to get me through many, many cold nights.  Nathan prepares it for me before bed while I brush my teeth.  He still doesn't know how to make my tea properly (1/2 a teaspoon of Splenda, splash of milk, tea bag out before serving), but he does a bang up job getting this baby ready for me.  He's officially been relieved of his warming-my-icy-feet-at-night duties, and he couldn't be happier.

Quite Dislike: No garlic in a jar (and other such conveniences)

I spend so much more time now doing food preparation than I used to.  Peeling and mincing garlic is one of my least favorite new activities.  I used to by the monster jar of the stuff and just get a spoonful out any time I wanted to jazz up a meal.  Yeah.  They don't have that here.

I made my neighbor Katie's onion casserole when we first moved into our new house because I found all of the ingredients on my first trip to the store alone: onions (they were the size of golf balls, but an onion is an onion), bacon (good stuff), Parmesan cheese (which I had to grate because the prepackaged stuff was expensive and looked old), and Ritz crackers (just haphazardly thrown in a small box, not in sleeves).  I originally planned to make this as an appetizer, but I quickly decided to make it the main meal because it took so long to make!  Basically you just layer sautéed onions, chopped cooked bacon, cheese, and crushed crackers to your liking and then bake it at 350 until it's heated through.  It's easy peasy and really fast in an American kitchen.  

Not in my old barn kitchen.  First of all, I had very little counter space.  Like maybe three square feet.  Second of all, I had one frying pan.  Third of all, the golf ball onions took forever to chop.  I think I did about 20.  Fourth of all, there wasn't enough room in the pan for all of them at once, so I had to cook them in three batches.  Fifth of all, I only had one mixing bowl to keep the cooked onions in, which took up half the counter space.  Sixth of all, I had only one decently sized cutting board, so I had to rotate using it for chopping onions, slicing bacon, and grating cheese, washing it between each use.  Seventh of all, there wasn't enough room on the counter for me to keep the chopped onions and grate the cheese and slice the bacon simultaneously, so I balanced the cutting board over the sink.  Eighth of all, the bacon took two turns in the pan.  Ninth of all, I feel like I made the recipe three times instead of just once.  Tenth of all, after almost two hours of work, it was tasty anyway.

I'm hoping I don't have to prepare a Thanksgiving meal in there anytime soon, but if I do, it'll be turkey soup in the crock pot.  I sure as heck won't be making an onion casserole.  On the plus side, such obstacles are bringing forth some ingenuity I didn't know I had. Necessity is the mother of invention.  Is that how the saying goes?  

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 4

Quite Like: Squash

This was another "we're the people now" purchase.  It's concentrated juice in a bottle.  One should splash a little splash at the bottom of a glass and fill the rest with water.  It's tasty.  I'd like mine with crushed ice and a straw, but I haven't seen ice or a straw since I moved to this country.

Rather Dislike: Inefficient appliances.  Okay, I'm not too too bothered by this anymore.  I think I've become more indifferent with the passage of time and the installation of my airer.  The washer/dryer combination is located in the kitchen, and it is very, very small.  It holds about a third of the clothes I could put in my washer in Atlanta.  The dryer function doesn't really work at all.  The first time I used it the new white towels came out damp with dark gunky lint, even after 100 minutes drying.  I've taken to either line drying the clothes, putting them on the indoor drying racks, or draping them across the boilers to dry.

The vacuum is currently held together by a piece of brown packaging tape, and it sucks.  And by "sucks" I mean it doesn't suck anything bigger than the sand that falls off the stone walls every day. 

The dishwasher... well, that's another post. 

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 3

Quite Like: Digestive Biscuits

Our first big shopping trip to the big Tesco included buying a lot of the same groceries that Sam and Emily did. Nathan always said, "But Sam and Emily have this/it/them, and they're 'the people,' so we should get it too." Now that we are "the people," we bought some digestive biscuits to serve with our tea. We keep them in a tin, like "the people" do. The kind we like is just shortbread cookies with one half of them dipped in chocolate, as pictured above. It looks like there are two kinds in there, but they're really two sides of the same coin. Anyway, the variety of digestives on the market is endless. They take up almost an entire row in the Tesco in town. There's no chicken broth, but there's an entire row of cookies whose sole purpose is to aid digestion when drinking afternoon tea.

Rather Dislike: Sandwiches. The English do sandwiches very, very differently than the good ol' USA.  I'm not really sure how they're done here, but I've seen, on more than one occasion, people butter their bread (sometimes on both sides) before putting ham and marmite on it. They will even put different kinds of cheese on it, but not in slices like we think of. They're just slivered off of a huge hunk (if it's hard) or smooshed on there (if it's soft). When I want a sandwich, I want one like this.

By the way, the receptionist job is going well with such friendly people to work with. It's been a lesson in British bureaucracy from the inside. I'll be sure to do a post about it soon, as I've been secretly jotting down quotes since I arrived.  I'm loving all of the words they use to describe things: a nightmare, gorgeous, brilliant, smashing, etc. 

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 2

Quite Like: The Cup of Tea Routine

I kind of like my early 80's crockery, don't you? Anyway, with the magic of the electric kettle, making tea couldn't be easier. I've always felt kind of bad when I went out for coffee or drinks with people because I don't like the taste of coffee or alcohol (Mike's Hard Lemonade being the exception, but I have to stop after drinking down the neck of the bottle because my cheeks feel a li-ttle too rosy and my head gets swimmy.  Lame, I know.). Now I feel completely at home drinking or serving tea. I feel like I am "the people," as Nathan would say.  

Rather dislike: Buying eggs.  All the egg cartons here are divided into two categories: free range or caged, and the label is on the front. The free range cartons are made of a nice green recycled cardboard and have pictures of sweet chickens. The cheap cartons of eggs, the ones at the bottom of the shelf unit, are in clear plastic and have the word CAGED stamped in red on top. I've never really wanted to pay more money for free range eggs before, but now I do, but only because it feels like I'm committing some sort of crime when I buy the cheap variety. I might as well stamp CAGED in red on my forehead. I still don't have a well-paying job, so I'm justifying my chicken torture on lack of funds at the moment. By the way, all the eggs here are brown. No white eggs. I don't know why that is.

Quite Like, Rather Dislike: Round 1

Some people have been asking about what I love and/or hate about living in England.  At this point I'd like to say that I've noticed that the English don't really live by extremes.  They don't work hard and play hard.  They work moderately and play moderately.  They don't have love/hate relationships.  They have quite like/rather dislike relationships.  Anything or anyone too wild one way or the other could be internally accused of causing a fuss, thus earning the English sniff and raised eyebrow.  That being said, I've been keeping my very own Love:Hate::Quite Like:Rather Dislike T-chart in my journal.  This may turn into a sort of series.  Here is one from each category for starters:

Quite like: The Electric Kettle

Seriously, what's not to love about the electric kettle?  The old fashioned one I had at home mostly just took up space on my stove, and when I used it last, a nearly invisible water worm wiggled into my tea cup.  Needless to say, it ended up in the trash.  This beauty - this electric kettle - boils water in about one minute.  I've even poured an entire kettle's worth of boiling water on top of dry pasta in a pot and then turned on the stove to keep it going.  It works instantly!  You know the old saying, "A watched pot never boils"?  Well, I'm through watching pots that never boil.  Why aren't these more popular in the US?

Rather Dislike: No chicken/beef/vegetable broth in a can or carton.  Broth was a staple in my cooking repertoire.  What was I to do?  After searching high and low, I've found bullion cubes.  And I made my own stock for the first time in my life using my Crock Pot. I wonder how long it'll keep in the fridge before it goes rancid.  That was a few weeks ago...  Yep. It's mo(u)lded over.  Nasty.