Kitchen woes

It's been nearly nine months since my last post, in which time a lot has happened. I took, finished, and passed my exams, had an awesome time at my university's Summer Ball, spent a week in Paris with the parents, attended my first ever festival, and made cupcakes. Lots and lots of cupcakes.

First attempt at making and frosting cupcakes. I'd like to point out that I have improved. Something about frosting 75 mini-cupcakes will do that to a girl.

And where am I now? In the south of France. Montpellier, to be precise - for my year abroad.

The mini Arc de Triomphe just opposite Peyrou.

Montpellier has a lot to recommend it: beautiful architecture, gorgeous weather and one of the youngest populations in France (something like 60% of the Montpelliérain are under 25) - but the kitchens in halls are truly atrocious. For a culture that is so defined by cooking I have never seen halls so ill-equipped for doing precisely that.

Each floor of the building has about 20 rooms, and I'd estimate that about half of these are studios, so have their own small kitchen corner. The rest of us have to use the communal kitchen. And what a sorry thing it is, too. For the ten to fifteen people who don't have their own facilities in their room, we get to go to an opressively dark and antisocial kitchen and cook on one of the four hot plates. It's worth noting that in the three plus months I've been here, there's been maybe three weeks where all four are functioning, and there was one horrid week where none of them worked. We also have two sinks. No oven, no microwave. Just four rings which may or may not be working, and two sinks.

Back when I was a lowly first year and in my halls it's not like I used the oven a lot, but it was nice to have the option there. It was nice to know that if all I wanted was an oven pizza or a quiche or to make potato wedges I could. And the old saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is so, so true. I have never missed the presence of an oven more than in these past 3 months. I've had dreams where I assemble an amazing roast dinner and then get to this ridiculous kitchen and have to cook all of it over the one ring that's working - the small one, too - and in a frying pan. I wake up in a cold sweat.

So is it really any surprise that for the past three months, after the novelty of spaghetti/rice with meat and tomato sauce wore off (I'll give you a clue: it didn't take more than a week), I've been daydreaming about an opportunity to come home and use the oven? Baking cakes, helping my mum out with the Christmas dinner, making stews - I'm not entirely sure whether I miss my parents or my parents' kitchen more. Now that they've had underfloor heating installed, I fear it may well be the kitchen that I miss.

I am aware that sympathy for someone who gets to spend a year in the south of France as part of her degree is not going to be particularly forthcoming, but please, won't somebody think of the kitchen?

Sink number two is just around the corner, but this is the kitchen. It makes my inner foodie weep, it honestly does.