Cooking!

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I'm quite the little cook. I've been using allrecipes.com to make dinner now that I have a place and no money. I've made some baked ziti, chicken parmesan, stir fry chicken, chicken strips over rice. Mostly chicken, since that's all I have right now. I made taco's tonight, which was great. Haven't had any problems converting US to EU measurements yet.

I bought these pans from IKEA, you know, the cheapest 2 pan skillet set they had (18kr about $2.50). Man, they SUCK ASS. They just won't come clean sometimes. I highly recommend against them. Kapil brags about his stainless set, although I'm partial to my T-Fal. I guess I just like the fact that they're French and they have the cool red color changing dot in the middle. (The dot changes to solid red when the pan is heated up uniformally) Now that I know where the grocery store is, I'm gonna start to work from the recipe, instead of looking up what I have. Meaning, I'll go buy the stuff for a meal, rather than piece together something from what's lying about.

I learned how to make rice. I know this sounds lame, but I always used a rice cooker, since burning it is so easy and oh so much fun. Well, I don't HAVE a rice cooker, and rice is cheap and filling, so I Googled, "how to make perfect rice" and found a great site explaining all of the things you can do wrong when making rice. Lo and behold, my first pot of rice was perfect, and I make rice almost every night now. I'm sure I'm gonna fuck it up soon enough though, but I like the guessing and fussing around with it part. Mmmm, rice.

Mushroom Soy Sauce? Anyone had this? There's some in the fridge, so I was like, well, what they hey, I'll just use it. It's like super dark, stains everything, and doesn't taste all that good. I should have known better. I could expect nothing more from a mushroom. I HAVE to go out and find some regular soy sauce or I'm gonna flip out. I really like soy sauce, being the sushi maniac that I am.

OH! Sushi! They have lots of sushi places here, but not much variety in terms of the fish. They seem to really have a thing for salmon. It's pretty affordable to get the little bento box for lunch but it's primarily salmon. But that reminds me. I had some weird allergic reaction at work the other day. At lunch I was like "MMMmmmmm, super fish day!!" cuz I love fish, so I helped myself to all of the different kinds of fish and happily ate away. About two hours later I was staring at my hand and kinda hallucinating. I though, "Man, I fell funny, like I'm tripping" and then I started getting all itchy. I didn't notice at first, but then I was hot in the face, and my wrists were itchy (and my ass), and I was kinda worried that I was gonna swell up or something and not be able to breathe. I have no idea what it was. So now, I don't eat the fish, which too bad b/c I want it really badly. Yesterday I tried just one of the fish on fish day, and I was fine. So, I'm sorta doing this self-experiment. We'll see if I end up in the hospital or not! I need to find the apothecary so I can have some Sudafed or other anti histamine on hand in case it happens again. I figure in an emergency, I can crush one up and drink it with water, so I my throat doesn't close up and I die naked and alone in my apartment after work someday. YIKES! We don't want that, do we?!

Ok, I'm getting sleepy, so that's all about food for now. Ooooooh, I miss Top Chef! I wonder who won the elimination? I guess I could buy the podcast and watch it. For now I'll just have to wonder.

~Spanktar the Fisherman