As opposed to the Iron one, y'know...?
It's not that I can't cook, or that I won't cook. I can actually whip up a pretty decent meal when I decide to -- and more importantly, when I've had the foresight to stock up on ingredients that are meant to go together. The rest of the time, well... yeah, I do things to food, but I wouldn't necessarily call it cooking. Surely the, uh, element of improvisation, and the randomness of the ingredients that come together in my hands in these occasions, disqualify me from any such pretension.
An example, you ask?Eh. As I write this, I'm chomping on my latest offense against gastronomy, which I assembled at 4 am from the twin dead zones that are my pantry and refrigerator.
Details in a minute, but, to set the scene, I must first confess that the most represented foodstuffs in the former, after chocolate, are sardine tins and rice cakes, while the fridge currently contains two packs of butter, a lonely bottle of ketchup and a jar of recently-acquired, supposedly French-style pickles (little ones, as opposed to the massive quasi-cucumber-like behemoths the natives here favor) that turned out to taste revoltingly of cloves (cloves in pickles, really, I ask you?!).
Yes, I need to do some grocery shopping. That's my whole point.
Anyway, to the consequences of this sorry state of affairs.
Desperate with hunger, I resolved to experiment with the following ingredients, which I scrounged from among the chocolate, sardines and rice cakes.
- Mini-farfalle pasta, two handfuls -- oh, this is starting out quite promisingly.
- Italian-style stewed tomatoes, one tin. Wait, this actually sounds boringly conventional. Bear with me though.
- Instant wakame broth (Japanese seaweed soup with sesame and shiitake mushrooms), lyophilized, one packet. For seasoning. Umm, with tomato?
- Small green peas, one tin that was here before I moved in. Hey, it didn't hiss when I opened it, and I need the vitamins (it's green so it has vitamins, don't argue).
- And a dash of cooking wine (no Mom, it doesn't actually have alcohol in it) to smooth over any flavors that might clash too strongly. Seriously, this trick has worked for me in the past.
Fifteen minutes later, the verdict... well, it's edible. I should have realized that the wakame broth flavor would be too subtle and get overpowered by the tomatoes and wine, so it was a bit of a waste of an instant soup, really. I should have had it separately. The rest was fine though. I think I like peas with tomatoes. Not as good as with carrots, but hey. Onions would have been nicely complementary, but lacking the skill to conjure one out of thin air... nix that.
But my stomach is full, and it wasn't actively unpleasant; that's almost a success!
A real success was breakfast yesterday, and looking back I suppose the lesson is that simplicity pays off. Breakfast, in case anyone's wondering, was my improvised version of bubuzuke -- an allegedly typical Kyoto dish of green tea over rice that can be served plain or spruced up with a variety of toppings. Interestingly, offering bubuzuke to guests is apparently a polite way of telling them they've overstayed their welcome and it's time to leave (the things you learn from watching cartoons -- oh alright, anime...).
Anyway, my version was extremely basic but delicious: a bed of rice in sencha tea (brewed fairly strong) and a generous spoonful of unrefined blonde beet sugar or cassonnade (my favorite sugar, typical of Belgium I believe -- fellow Belgians, correct me in the comments if I'm wrong). The taste of the sugar beet cassonnade complements the green tea beautifully.
In my next food-related post, I will rave about how wonderful is my brand spanking new Zojirushi bread machine, and how deeply life sucks when my brain cells get mixed up and I end up buying butter that I don't need (hence the two packs in my fridge, referenced above) instead of the yeast that I do.
Come to think of it, I guess it's pretty bad for a professional microbiologist to run out of easily culturable single-celled microorganisms.
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