Adventures in cooking

One of the biggest downsides of living in Shared DIS Housing (housing with all other American students) is that we have to cook for ourselves. I didn't think this would be too much of a problem as I had to cook for myself last year, but now that I look back on it, I think I ate a lot more Subway than I realized. And when it wasn't subway, it was usually pre-packaged, very simple meals to make from Trader Joe's. Well, I haven't found a Subway in Denmark yet, and if I do find one I doubt I'll be able to afford it nor have I found anything like a Trader Joes, so I'm really on my own.

And what is the biggest lesson I have learned so far?

I can't cook. I don't know why I can't cook. My mother is an excellent cook so one would think that I should have picked up cooking along the way somewhere. But I've been told that her mother was not so great of a chef, so perhaps these things skip a generation. Anyway, I've found a couple meals that I'm quite proficient at. The first I call 'Toasted bread with a hole in the middle and an egg in the hole.' I think it has another name but I don't know it. This I can cook with no problem, because the bread holds the egg together so the yolk doesn't break when I try to flip it. I'm also quite good at spaghetti with pesto. Sometimes I'll throw a vegetable in with the spaghetti for good measure. And finally, I've invented a great dish called potatoes with basil and eggs. Basically, I cook potatoes in a pan and put basil onto it and then fry an egg to go with it. It's pretty good, and I had thought I reached the point where I couldn't mess it up any more but then I almost burned down my building trying to make it the other day. Basically, I put the oil into the pan and turned the stove on, but forgot to add the potatoes. I realized this like 15 minutes later when I smelled burning. I ran to the stove and figured I'd add more oil in order to cool down the oil in the pan, but then I accidentally dropped the plastic cap to the oil into the pan, which instantly melted into a giant yellow glob of plastic goo. Oops. I quickly threw the pan into the sink and ran water onto it which made the oil splatter everywhere, including all up my arms.

Dinner in progress.
Spaghetti boiling on the back burner. Artichokes cooking on the front burner.

So basically, there's really no point to this blog entry other than that I can't cook. Perhaps I should have considered that when I was signing up for housing, cause honestly I'm already getting a little sick of spaghetti, eggs, and potatoes. (Plus, I think I'm missing a few food groups in my daily diet). So if you have any brilliant simple ideas for dishes, please tell me about them. I'll be forever grateful! (Simple, meaning no ovens, no more than two burners required).

And on another unrelated note, doing laundry in Denmark is also really complicated!