This week's challenges have centered largely around my cooking skills. More accurately, these challenges focused upon my ability to replicate well-loved flavors from home.
The challenge began, simply enough, when we wanted to have burritos, but lacked tortillas. So I embraced the magic of the internet, downloaded a recipe, and began honing my flour tortilla skills.
My first batch of tortillas came out with the right flavor, but way too thick. They mostly resembled rather flat biscuits. Pretty hard to make a burrito out of a biscuit--take my word for it. Alas, it seemed that without a rolling pin or, even better, a tortilla press, I couldn't get the tortillas flat enough.
This was a simple enough problem to solve--I bought a rolling pin. My next batch a week later resulted in recognizable tortillas which were still too thick, but large enough this time to wrap around fillings. This week, however, I did a bit more internet research on flour tortilla tips, and made a batch of suitable tortillas. Yahoo. Needless to say, there were no leftovers.
Then my loving children desired ranch dressing. Alrighty then. I first checked my handy dandy Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (Which, yes, I sent to Japan. So there). No ranch dressing recipe. So I went to the internet. Found a batch of recipes. I picked one and fiddled with it. One major problem was that all the recipes demanded buttermilk--something not easily found here, if it could be found at all. But, after messing around a bit with buttermilk substitutes (namely, milk and vinegar), I created something that was nearly, not quite, almost approximating ranch dressing.
Clearly the ranch dressing quest will have to continue.
Then, just last night, Patrick had a hankerin' for donuts. Homemade donuts. Of course. So he grabbed....yes...the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (and I for one was mightily impressed that he knew to grab the cookbook with no prompting from me), and he looked up donuts, and finally found a recipe that--brace yourselves--I had all the ingredients for. Unheard of.
Together we whipped up some donut batter, let it chill, and then, with him standing next to me, twitchy with impatience, I heated up some oil and fried up recognizable, edible, actually kinda tasty donuts.
....which lasted about 30 minutes. Patrick kept sneaking into the kitchen and slithering off with his cheeks bulging with donuts--very much like an extremely tall hamster. Behind him Aya and Bob came up and snatched donuts (and donut holes, which I also made of course. What else do you do with those little blobs of batter?!). By the end of it all, there was just one weirdly misshapen donut left on the plate. The last donut made with the dregs of the oil and last of the batter.
And that one donut vanished this morning when Aya ate it for breakfast.
The danger with all this experimental cooking is that both Patrick and Aya are developing the belief that I can cook anything from back home that they get a twinge for. And while it is lovely to receive all this positive regard and to bask in their faith in me and my cooking skills, I am not at all convinced I will be able to consistently rise to the challenge. I may have trouble, for example, re-creating Kraft Macaroni and cheese, which requires Velveeta-ish cheese which is a bit hard to procure here. They may also get an urge to have some brownies. I may be able to make the brownie batter, but since I utterly destroyed our toaster oven with the great empanada fandango of 2 weeks ago, baking the brownies would be nigh on impossible.
So I shall wait, suffering the anticipation, wondering what in the world these people will dream up for me to cook next.
Yeah, my cooking skills are getting a good healthy workout. But man oh man, what I wouldn't give to be able to pop into a Safeway right about now.
Until next time....
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