If you’re in desperate need of a post-bop skin detox and have some leftover beer lying around that you’ve promised the almighty god of hangovers never to drink again, this week you’re in luck! Treat yourself with that stale half can of Heineken and still stay sober enough to meet your essay deadline by making it into a facemask. With radiant skin, you might even be able to, ahem, face your tutor after he’s marked it (hahahaha).

1 egg white
1/2 can of beer
2 tsps fresh lime juice

Separate the egg white from the yolk and throw the nasty fatty yellow thing away. Stir the former thoroughly into your beer (it doesn’t matter if it’s stale or warm) before squeezing fresh lime juice from an actual lime into the mix. Do not use the neon green stuff you can pick up at Tesco instead. Apply to the face and remove after 10 minutes using warm water. The lime and beer contain a variety of vitamins and the egg white aids elasticity.

When people think of Brazil, they generally think of Rio’s beaches, or the Amazon rainforest. If they know Brazil a bit better, they might think of São Paulo’s booming metropolis, or the diversity of flora and fauna found in the Pantanal, or the planned capital city of Brasília. But Brazil is a huge country with 26 states, and not many people travel beyond Rio and São Paulo. I was born about an hour south of São Paulo, in Curitiba, the largest city in Brazil’s south.

Life in Curitiba doesn’t fit the international stereotype of Brazil. For starters, Curitiba doesn’t have a beach, and is actually quite cold in the winters. The news and pop culture displays all of Brazil as looking like Rio’s favelas (Brazilian slums), but in general Brazil is actually quite a safe place, where babies are adored and their first birthday party is a huge event. Although there are favelas in any big Brazilian city, they aren’t as dangerous as their reputation, especially not in Curitiba.

As a city, there are several interesting things that make Curitiba unique. Curitiba is known in environmentalist circles internationally because of its sustainability. The RIT, or bus system, was designed to increase consumer usage of buses over cars, and was so successful it won multiple international awards. So many people used the system that there are now plans to build a subway due to overcrowding on the buses. There is also a beautiful flower clock – literally, a clock made out of flower beds – downtown, that appeals to locals as much as it does to tourists. Florianópolis isn’t far, and Iguaçu Falls is also in Paraná (Curitiba’s state) and is stunning.

What I miss most when I’m away, though, is the food and drink. Brazilian food is great! I love snacks – pao de quijo, which used to be sold in the Covered Market as ‘bolitas’, are yummy cheesy balls of dough, and brigadeiros are chocolate, truffle-like sweets. On a Sunday, when English families traditionally have a roast, Brazilian families often eat a barbeque – either at home, or at a churrascaria, or barbeque restaurant. Churrascarias serve every cut of meat you could want, from sausages to the favourite Brazilian cut, picanha. Meat is brought around and sliced off huge skewers at the table so you can get it cooked exactly how you like it; I order mine ‘mal pasado’, roughly translated as ‘badly cooked’ or medium rare. They also have huge, elaborate salad bars with any toppings or sauces you can imagine.

The national drink of Brazil is the caipirinha. It is traditionally made with cachaça (sugarcane alcohol), lime, and sugar. However, the varieties are endless – at parties, there is often a caipirinha assembly line, with alcohols, fruits, and sugar. The most popular alcohol for caipirinhas is still cachaça, but Steinhäger (a German gin) and vodka are also common. It’s very easy to make yourself – cut up a lime and put it in an empty glass with sugar, muddle them together, add the alcohol and ice and give it a swirl. Many cocktail bars and restaurants in Oxford include caipirinhas on their cocktail menu, and Las Iguanas sells bottles of cachaça.

Curitiba is a beautiful city, where the historic district’s old buildings meet the lights of the university town and regional financial centre. Although the traditional Brazilian tourist spots are definitely worth a visit, there are many other cities worth visiting if you want to get a better sense of Brazil as a country. With the Olympics coming up next summer, and the Brazilian real fairly cheap at the moment, when could be better than to book flights?

Speaking to a perpetually single friend drunk on the dancefloor on the brink of her first relationship, she asks me: “How does it feel to be tied down?” Drunken, horny me of course did not construe this to mean tied down in a relationship. “Oh I’ve never been tied up”, I slur into her drinksmattered shoulder, “I’ve only ever tied people up. But that can be hot.”

Birmingham Tom was nothing special. I’d felt the need to satiate my undying need for cocktails one evening and wandered along to a local bar with a few friends. When I went to order my poison of choice, I was greeted by a group of men in suits about a decade older than myself. Leaning across the bar in the most graceful manner I could muster after a few whiskey sours, I caught his eye. I was a little drunk and feeling flirty so took a painfully obvious elongated route back to my table through his party.

My subtle seduction of carefully cast looks was going so well; until I tripped and knocked my entire drink down his three-piece. Apologies pouring out of my mouth somewhat more liberally than the spirit measures of the bar, I abandon my seducing. However, Tom touches the cuff of my shirt. He takes the blame and offers to replace my drink. In need of something to quell my nerves I agree, making small talk in the meantime. He explains he’s a postgrad studying for his doctorate. I attempt to look interested, and after a few exchanges of sweet nothings and numbers, I leave.

Back in bed and with my room spinning round me, I check my phone. It seems Birmingham Tom is at the same point of blissful drunkenness. Or at least that’s what I understood by the typos and subsequent flurry of nudes I received at 1am.

Horny and drunk, I invite this guy round. Not because he was aesthetically pleasing. I mean, he wasn’t bad looking or out of shape. I mainly invite him over because I’d never been with someone born a decade earlier than myself. The mystique and taboo of age intrigued me. Plus, when someone sends you a messages saying they are “looking to experiment a bit, and for the other person to take control”, the dom within this small masculine frame quivered with excitement. Being asked to shave his genitals was somewhat less arousing and something I utterly refused. But being told how much he wanted me to handcuff him, spread his legs apart and work my magic made up for that.

Arriving bleary eyed, his frumpy fleece kills the slight boner I had. But as soon as we enter my room and I begin to undress him, it soon returns. Lying naked on the bed, he tells me to tie him up and clamp his mouth shut. Inexperienced, I grab the joke red furry handcuffs an ex bought me and set to work. Running around my room to find things to tie this tall man up with, all I have to hand is a couple of dressing gown cords. I feel I can never praise my Gran’s excellent choice in M&S’s festive loungewear again.

I now have a thirty-year-old man trussed up and blindfolded on my bed. I decide I really could do this dominatrix lark. However disaster strikes. At my height of arousal, his undisclosed allergy to strawberry-flavoured lube kick in. Trying to untie all knots made in my horny haste and sobering up, the night ends. But at least I got a free drink out of it. 

Patrik used to work at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. For many months he pestered me to come and work at the bookshop. Because I was broke and lazy, I only wandered over in late September. I stuffed a couple pairs of underwear and some random articles of clothing into the backpack my great aunt Vicki gave me for my 13th birthday. I didn’t have a plan because I was too chaotic to think about planning. Everything was chaos in September. My dog had a urinary tract infection and I had to work as a nanny for three eight-year-old boys.

The plan was to work and stay at Shakespeare and Company. A small, but famous, bookshop in Paris, this is a place where English nerds can stay for free if they work a couple hours a day. I got there and spoke to a man with two braids and a goatee working at the register. When I asked if I could stay there he giggled and said with a snark, “Not tonight, definitely not tonight.” I was totally stranded.

I probably should have booked a hostel. But Patrik, the boyishly handsome moustached man, urged me to stay. As a neurotic New Yorker by birth, images of crime TV shows inevitably ran through my mind as we walked through Paris towards his friend Nuyringa’s apartment.

He assured me I was not being rude. “Nuyringa is the nicest person. Don’t worry, don’t stress, just help yourself to whatever.” A weird lamp, a train ticket and a bunch of peanuts sucked out all the cash I needed for dinner that day. I was late for my train so I only had a Nature Valley bar for breakfast. Despite my polite upbringing, I found myself forced to raid the fridge of a woman I’d never met and who potentially would be rather angry at me pilfering her carefully selected groceries.

I fiddled around the woman’s fridge while I waited to meet her for the first time. I didn’t want to eat anything too expensive so I grabbed a block of cheese wrapped in plastic. It was a bit suspicious, but I convinced myself the best cheeses are stinky and gloopy. Meanwhile, Patrik casually popped open a bottle of Nuyringa’s red wine and delicately poured it into a ceramic mug with a protruding snowman on it.

His round Harry Potter glasses and dark brown hair bustled about as he swigged. He has a moustache that he very subtly waxes so it turns up on either end of his lip, evoking his inner Poirot. I met Patrik a year ago in a café when I was living in Rome. I overheard him having a conversation with his friend in a language I could not understand. It was certainly not Italian, English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. Upon my inquiries, I learned he was speaking in Latin. Duh.

I ate the entire block of cheese. In my defence, I never meant to be in this random woman’s kitchen in the center of Paris at 12:30am. Patrik promised me a place at his place if all else failed. Upon my arrival in Paris, I learnt that he’d been evicted from his apartment. I have yet to understand the reasons for this eviction. My place at Shakespeare and Company was deferred by the man with a goattee, so Patrik called his friend Nuyringa.

We drank red wine out of coffee mugs and I pretended I wasn’t having serious gas from the block of cheese I ate. Nuyringa was still a phantom-like host at that point. I remember sitting out on her balcony whilst Patrik smoked his Marlboro reds. Patrik promised I would love this figure who I knew nothing about apart from a name and her love of unsalted butter. And when she finally returned like a triumphant Stephen Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s Ulysess, I did. But after a bottle of sherry, numerous glasses of red wine and enough cheese to last my lactose-intolerant stomach a lifetime, who don’t you love? Especially if they provide you with dairy products and booze and warm roof over your head for the night when you need it the most

Raymond Blanc OBE is by all accounts aculinary genius, and one of the world’smost respected chefs. He is also entirely self-taught; a refreshing career model in today’s education-orientated world.Born and raised in a small village in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, Raymond Blanc’s entire culinary ethos, which has revolutionised British cooking and reawakened the notion of the Kitchen Garden, is inspired and deeply connected to his humble French roots. 

Indeed, he tells me some of his favourite dishes are ones that Maman Blanc made when he was young. “I have recreated them today, and they instantly transport me back. Sometimes, it’s a real Madeleine moment – like in Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu!” 

Blanc has strong connections with Oxford, and arrived here in 1972 as a humble waiter at a local restaurant, the Rose Revived. His latent passion for food was revealed when he infamously angered the chef by trying to give him cooking advice. He worked here for a while, until one day the chef was ill, and Blanc had to take over the kitchen. The rest, they say, is history. 

Remaining in Oxford with his young wife, Raymond Blanc opened his fi rst restaurant in Summertown in 1977. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and he and his wife had to mortgage their house and borrow from dozens of people to cover start-up costs for this tiny restaurant, squeezed between a lingerie shop and Oxfam. 

Blanc makes it clear that the restaurant business is one of the toughest businesses around, and the pressure can definitely take its toll. “You must be brave and maybe a little mad. Even when you’re in, the struggle isn’t over. You have to be a craftsman, a manager of money, of people, of any situation that life may throw at you. If you have a true vocation and this is what you want, I mean what you should do, then that’s great.” 

His ambition and passion has paid off, however, and he now runs many hugely successful, world-famous restaurants. The name of his fi rst restaurant in Summertown, Aux Quat’Saisons, has been nostalgically preserved, and is echoed in the name of the two-Michelin-star palace in Oxfordshire, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. 

Le Manoir prides itself on cooking local, seasonal food, and Blanc is keen to tell me all about the principles behind is success. “Seasonal and sustainable produce is vital – to me and my team at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and to everyone,” he says enthusiastically. His mother, the formidable Madame Blanc, always cooked with the produce from their own garden, and food that his father had hunted, fi shed or foraged. Using fresh, seasonal produce is what Blanc is accustomed to, and his high standards are refl ected in every aspect of his kitchen. He believes that people are starting to understand again that food is connected with everything – with the environment, society, the farm, home, family values, the health of the nation. “It is truly exciting to see people start to respect food, enjoy food and give it value – long may that last!” 

Blanc is president of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, and a passionate advocate of the organic gardening movement that has exploded in Britain over the last decade. He is trying to raise awareness about using our local suppliers to get the freshest produce; using our local butchers, greengrocers, and having food markets to visit. Oxford is a haven for fresh fruit and vegetables, and the Wednesday market in Gloucester Green, among others, is a testimony to cheap and delicious produce available to everyone. Similarly, the OxGrow campaign in east Oxford, where local families and Oxford students alike spend weekends growing, harvesting and eating their own plants, is exactly the sort of small-scale project he supports. Blanc is currently working with Love British Food on their Bring Home the Harvest campaign that does just this; encourages communities to work together to highlight local suppliers and buy their produce. 

Le Manoir has also been praised for growing a huge variety of vegetables and herbs in its stunning gardens, and specifi cally for bringing back herbs which are not commonly used today. Wandering around the stunning grounds of Le Manoir in the afternoon sunshine, I find hedgerows of wild berries, beds of tiny strawberries, and rows and rows of nurtured, rare vegetables growing in the rich soil. 

Many of the ingredients at Le Manoir come from the adjacent two-acre kitchen garden, that is home to some 90 types of vegetable and an impressive 70 varieties of herb. The mushroom garden alone sprouts around 20 diff erent species. One of my favourite sections is the herb garden, where I pick and smell hundreds of subtly diff erent varieties of mint, thyme, coriander and rosemary, crushing them in my hands and breathing in their potent smells. Their witch-doctor-esque powers, I later discover, are more than just myth, and Blanc is at the forefront of a new initiative to revive the use of herbs in cooking for their medicinal properties as well as their natural fl avour enhancement. 

In 2006, a new dimension was added to the kitchen garden in the form of a Malaysian Garden. Subtly woven into the existing design of these stately English gardens, diff erent varieties of herbs and spices such as ginger, lemon grass and turmeric grow together with vegetables and pulses such as pak choi and soya beans, as well as squashes and the exotic purple lablab beans. 

In Asia lemongrass is like our mint, Blanc tells me, and there is plenty of it everywhere. It has its own fl avour, smell, character; it is very diff erent from all other lemon plants that I know. It was his trip to Thailand and Malaysia that inspired Blanc to try growing lemongrass in the gardens at Le Manoir, but it took some time to get it right. “I had to try 25 varieties before I could fi nd one that could resist the British weather.” 

Among other things, Blanc is a pioneer of creating new culinary sensations and novel combinations out of traditional old favourites, and I am keen to fi nd out what inspires and drives his creations. As a chef, it is crucial that Blanc travels and discovers new ingredients. He tells me that if you are able to bring three completely new fl avours together, it’s like giving a painter extra primary colours. You imagine the new dishes you can create. “To me, food is about displacement and discovering something new and alive and herbs enable you to do this. Herbs have long held a holistic place in our wellbeing. We depend on them to purify our body, mind and soul!” 

The menus at Le Manoir change with the seasons, and Blanc and his team spend a huge amount of time deciding what to cook to refl ect what is growing in the gardens, what animals are being hunted, and what people want to eat in response to the weather outside. To create new dishes takes time, inspiration and confi dence, he tells me. “I have travelled all over the world and can honestly say that I’ve learnt something from every single place I have visited. My travels help me to experience new ingredients and fl avours and often, the most simple ingredients can be the most eff ective and memorable. For example, I adore the hawker markets in Hong Kong and Singapore.” 

These markets indeed use local ingredients recipe traditions that have been used for generations, and the people come up with the most wonderful and sublime dishes. “You just can’t beat experiences like that and when I return to my beloved Le Manoir, I like to use them as inspiration and add a little twist of my own!” As one of the most discerning cooks in the world, I am interested to know which restaurants Blanc likes to go to when he eats out, and what he thinks makes a good restaurant. At first he avoids the question, telling me that there are so many he loves, and he couldn’t possibly choose. 

For him, it takes an ensemble of things to make a good restaurant, and food alone is not enough. A good restaurant, Blanc believes, should have ambience, warmth, a true ‘food and people’ culture, staff who care and food that makes you dream. True to his humble French beginnings, Blanc enjoys simple and wholesome food such as Morteau saucisson, Comté cheese, homemade preserves and crusty bread. He is a connoisseur of fi ne ingredients cooked to an exquisite standard, rather than of pretentious and ambitious fi ne dining that is vacuous in fl avour and quality. For him, it is the ability to take simple ingredients and turn them into the most delicious recipes that takes a chef from good to exceptional. 

So what are Blanc’s favourite restaurants? In the end, he picks three. Firstly, Le Vin et l’Assiette, situated in Blanc’s hometown, is owned by a close friend, Bernard Leroy. He has a huge wine cellar too, and the most amazing French hospitality. In accordance with Blanc’s nature, it is fi tting that he chooses a local restaurant with an excellent tradition of high standards as his first choice. 

On the other hand, Blanc also believes that Heston Blumenthal has been very instrumental in redefi ning a certain aspect of cooking, namely molecular gastronomy, and Blanc is very fond of his celebrated restaurant, The Fat Duck. Interestingly, Blumenthal spent time as an apprentice of Blanc at Le Manoir, so perhaps he sees something of his own ethos in the younger chef. 

Finally, Blanc describes the “amazing proliferation of small bistros with real character” in Paris, and singles out Le Beurre Noisette as a personal favourite, very simple, but elegant. Looking back over his many years of success, development and incredibly hard work with more than a tinge of nostalgia, Blanc offers me perhaps the most poignant and interesting nugget of all; a single piece of advice that he wishes to impart on me and all other students: “Stick at it! I worked hard and didn’t give up. At times I was [so] exhausted that I thought I couldn’t do it anymore but I did, and the advice would be: stick at it”