Cooking!

I have been cooking! Those of you who know me well will recognize this as a big accomplishment for me. I used to say I didn't like cooking because I was always so nervous about screwing it up. Well, thanks to only cooking for myself and Andres (a very supportive eater!), I've been able to experiment more and figure out that I really am capable of following and even, gasp!, modifying a recipe.

There are several cooking challenges that I'm trying to navigate right now. Perhaps the biggest is that I am not in my own country and sometimes things that I expect to be two-second purchases at the grocery store turn into hour long endevors and making things from scratch (read: enchilada sauce). Also, my eczema has been giving me trouble so I'm trying to cut out dairy to figure out if a food allergy might be part of the problem. Giving up cheese was much easier than expected (probably because Ecuador has inferior cheese to Minnesota, Wisconsin's neighbor), but finding recipes that don't use any cheese, mayonaise, milk, butter, sour cream, or cream cheese has proved a little bit difficult. Now, I hear some of you protesting "but there's tons of great recipes that don't use dairy!" And that brings me to my last big challenge, which is finding recipes suitable for freezing. Now that I'm teaching two classes during the week with a sub period and starting coordination on Saturdays, I have way less time (and energy) to cook during the week. So I've been investigating freezer cooking so I can cook just once, on Saturday or Sunday, and have yummy nutritious food all week long.

Last Sunday I made minestrone soup, beef and potato casserole, and enchiladas. It's all been yummy, but pretty dairy-heavy. So I'm looking for alternatives for cooking this weekend. Which brings me to the reader participation section of this post! I invite you to share any freezer recipes with low/no dairy that I can try out! I'm waiting with baited breath!

Mona Uses a Pressure Cooker even though no one reads her blog

This evening I had to make an important decision: keep cooking the most stubborn beans in the world or give up and throw them out. It was a tense moment until we discovered a pressure cooker! ta-da! Don't worry, Dad, I read on the internetz how to use it... And now the beans are merrily cooking away (15 min in the pressure cooker) and nearly done! Happy days!

Beans....

So when I set out to cook dry beans, I forgot a crucial new factor in my bean cooking adventures: I am now living at more than 9,000 feet and stuff takes FOREVER to cook up here.

We're now going on hour 7...

Call for recipes!

So, who wants to help me learn to cook?? There are some restrictions though. First and foremost, the oven is broken and not likely to be fixed. I have a lot of beef, chicken, rice, and potatoes to work with.

Catherine, bless her, has already given me a few ideas. Broccoli beef, stir fry, quinoa...

And I am looking for more help! Some simple sauces and simple combination ideas would be awesome! Let me know what you think :). I have the comments set so that people with gmail accounts can post and you can post "anonymously" without an account.

Cooking in Quito

Tonight Andres and I continued on our saga of cooking adventures. Neither one of us cooks very much (him less than me if you can believe it) so pretty much every time we turn on the stove it's a gamble. Tonight we tried to make chicken burritos, which doesn't sound very hard, but you'd be surprised. Cooking in a strange kitchen is a difficult task in its self, but add to that that it's a foreign country with unexpected ingredients and you have me cooking in an Ecuadorian kitchen. The chicken was in big frozen chunks with bones etc, so we defrosted it in the microwave and attempted to cook it on the stovetop. After cooking for a while we took it off to see if it was done (it wasn't) and to cut some of the bones out. What we ended up with was a tiny pile of chicken meat and a huge pile of bones. So on to round two. This worked out better because by the we had lots of teeny tiny pieces of mostly cooked chicken (we'd also cooked up some less boney chicken at this point) and proceeded to double-cook all of our chicken. We ended up with a great many dishes due to all the chicken fandangos, but thankfully we also managed to make some very tasty burritos, huzzah!

I like to think we are getting better at cooking, but seeing as we cook the same three things every time, its hard to say. I will keep you updated on further cooking fandangos which will surely prove to be silly, frustrating, and hopefully at least some times delicious.