I've been enjoying cooking during the loooong holiday I have until school starts on February 1. It's fun, and I think Jeff may have gained a few pounds! I thought I'd share some quirks that I've learned while cooking here - most of these things are what I'm really enjoying not having to deal with when I go home!
First, is the measuring involved with cooking and baking. I priced out measuring spoons, and they were REALLY expensive. Maybe it's just the shop I went to, but after seeing the price, Jeff said I seem to do fine with guessing and it's not really worth it. I agreed. So now I do everything by hand for small amounts. It's kind of fun, not knowing exactly how something will turn out, particularly with things like baking powder. For larger quantities, I have one glass that is exactly 1 cup (I measured using the ounces on my Nalgene bottle). From there, I can guesstimate fractions of a cup. Of course, the glass is narrower at the bottom and wider at the top, so those fractions are rarely the same twice. The butter here comes in grams. The recipes I get from
http://www.allrecipes.com/ (my new favorite site) can be converted to metric, which is good. However, I bought butter in bulk (a 2 kilo block) and it doesn't come with the handy little lines marking the grams.
Second is the cooking temperature. My range is gas, which I used to like. However, the burners each have their own personalities. The main one is an overachiever. Even at low, things burn and sometimes I hold the pan in the air above it. The other front burner is smaller, and gets to low quite nicely for simmering things (unless I have a big pan, then the middle burns and the outside doesn't cook). However, when I turn it to low, which is all the way left, the flame goes out. Gas is still on, but apparently the low setting is so low that there isn't enough to burn. The back two burners have two settings: high and flame-thrower. All they're good for is boiling pasta and steaming veggies. The oven is a different matter altogether. The dial is in Celcius, and I've become pretty good at remembering the two main conversions for 350 and 425 (180 and 220, respectively). But it doesn't matter, because the lower temperatures on the dial don't heat up the oven enough to cook everything. So almost everything I do has the dial between 220 and 240, but I have no idea how hot it actually is. The shortcake I baked today was supposed to take 15-20 minutes, but it took 55 minutes in my oven. Additionally, the oven doesn't seem to have good insulation. Within minutes of turning it on, the kitchen is roasting hot.
Finally we have the issue of ingredients. While I love my new favorite website, it seems that all the recipes call for one of the following:
- salad dressing seasoning packet
- dried onion soup mix
- tomatoes in a can (any variety)
- condensed cream of mushroom soup
- cheddar cheese
- sour cream
- baking soda.
I've figured out substitutions for the soup and sour cream, but everything else is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. And baking soda (aka soda bicarbonate) is nowhere be found. Granted, I haven't gone on a mission to find it, but it's not at the stores I regularly patron. For the tomatoes, anything other than tomato paste is rare and expensive. As a side note, mushrooms are very expensive and not always available fresh. I have a big can in my cupboard I bought on sale and I'm waiting for an irresistable recipe to use them. A lot of recipes call for mushrooms, too. Oh, last complaint: I can't find vanilla extract. They sell vanillin, which is a powder mixed with sugar. I use it and it seems to work, but it's frustrating not to have the real thing.
There are some really nice things about cooking here. All the local ingredients are fresh and the produce is all vine-ripened. Strawberry season has lasted for over a month. Some things that are expensive at home are quite reasonable here, like capers. My new favorite dinner is chicken piccatta. And things rarely burn in my oven, even if I forget about them (which I usually do).
Jeff and I were talking about how weird it will be to go home and have supermarkets. How will we handle more than choosing between crunchy and creamy peanut butter? Here, we're lucky if the store has even one brand! (Currently it's Peter Pan and before that it was Skippy). We have two choices of oil: corn and sunflower. It's like that with lots of items. It will be interesting to adjust back to a U.S. lifestyle.
