When Justin, Rebekah, and I were living in our Dublin apartment and cooking all of our dinners, one of the most difficult things was working in a very sparsely-furbished kitchen! We had one saucepan, a Teflon-flaking skillet, a spatula, plates, some measuring cups, bowls, knives, spoons, drinking glasses, mugs, and forks. We had a fridge and an oven/stove. I don't think we had very much else.
Anyway, now that I am home, I have at my disposal some very cushy things like a blender, an electric mixer, spoons and spatulas in basically all sizes, a garlic press, and an assortment of pots, pans, and skillets.
So I haven't done quite as much cooking since being home as I'd kind of imagined, but I've been doing some fun stuff! On the table:
I've been making guacamole! I knew I wanted to do this ever since last spring when Julie Klassen my German prof had our class over to her house and she charged me with making the guacamole. It was so easy and super good!!
So Momo picked up some avocados from the store, and I chopped up some cilantro and an onion, and I made some yummy guacamole. It was really simple. You basically just put the ingredients together in the bowl and mash up the avocados. Here's the recipe I used, minus the peppers and tomato!
I'm on my 3rd batch of guacamole, and the biggest problem I've noticed is that after you've made it, the avocado turns brown, kind of like an apple turns brown after you slice it from the oxidation. This doesn't affect the flavor at all, but it does look a little unappetizing. I've tried increasing the lemon juice and getting rid of the oxygen by putting saran rap on the surface when it's stored, but so far I haven't been successful. Oh well!
I've also been making hummus! This has also been super simple (though I've been using a blender, which I've realized takes a little more skill than I used to think, and plus I used a garlic press) - you just mix the chick peas and stuff in the blender and liquidize them. Here's the hummus recipe I used.
The hummus is really soft and has a great texture. It also caused me to buy an ingredient I had never heard of, which is tahini sauce. Tahini sauce is ground-up roasted sesame seeds! Momo and I ate a little by itself, and it's very quick-sandy in texture and strange in taste, but in a good way! Anyway, it came in this giant jar, and I've only made two batches of hummus so far, so I don't know how quick it's going to be used up, but maybe I can find something else to do with it...
Last night, I decided to make a souffle for dinner! I suppose I was spurred on just to see if I could actually do it, since I'm so used to movies where people's souffles fall down and stuff, or there's some huge big deal drama about a souffle.
Anyway, I found this website that walked me through it. Making the souffle was actually pretty simple and really fun! The hard part was that you had to do everything very quickly and mind the temperatures of a few different things at once. But it was really not that hard.
The souffle had a really neat texture, a lot like a puffed-oven-pancake if you've ever had one of those, and it basically tasted like cheese, since it was a cheese souffle. It didn't fall over and collapse like I was expecting, but I think it sort of slowly deflated after it was out of the oven. Next time I'm going to try adding veggies and things!
I'm hoping I'll do some more cooking before I go back for spring term. Do you guys have any ideas of things I should try? What is delicious and fun to cook?
love, Jimmy
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