The mid-year report that I have been asked to fill out on my progress so far asked how I have dealt with social and cultural differences and changes in my daily life here in Farawayistan. Well, one frankly underreported difficulty (I have hardly complained about this at all!) has been my lack of a microwave and my resulting feelings about cooking for one. Namely, it is a huge pain in the kiester to cook for myself when reheating anything made in more than one portion means frying it in a pan the next day. I'm not even talking about the fact that my frying pan has no handle. This is purely a greasy-food issue. So, in the interest of getting the word out, I'm blowing the whistle on the no-microwave situation. And, as an extra-special bonus, I'm offering a solution that does not involve purchasing extra equipment that will not fit in my suitcases or my future electrical sockets anyway. Here we go:
Step 1) Cook something. Let's say: boil some potato chunks, add butter, salt, and dill. Go ahead, let your eyes be bigger than your stomach and cook way more than you can eat. Don't worry, no need to invite friends over, this one's all for you.
Step 2) Eat more than you should, but leave some in a tupperware in the fridge to ensure self-respect in the morning.
Step 3) Pull out all those little plastic bags you have squirreled away in the cupboard and discover, behind random rice cookers and bread pans...are you ready?...a blender!!!!
Step 4) Cook a soup whose main ingredient is whatever you didn't finish the day before. Look! The Times has like 10 soup recipes that involve potatoes in its health section right now. Don't worry that the main ingredient is already cooked, will get mushy, blablabla; when you blend it, it all turns out awesome. I bet it works with anything: potatoes, eggplant, probably pasta, maybe even pickled herring. Awwwright!
Step 5) If you don't eat all the soup that day, repeat the process the next day to create a kind of second-degree soup, or soup to the soupth power. This is a special kind of cooking I like to think of as "cooking with eugenics." (Related examples of this might be yogurt or kombucha, where you grow a strain of "good" [Gr. "eu"] bacteria in a neutral medium like milk or sweet tea and then perpetuate the strain by adding a little bit of the old batch to the regular old medium to form a new batch.) Our leftover soup example, however, is even more eugenic, because not only are you perpetuating the genes of the yummy leftovers, but you are concentrating them in a new and more powerful super-soup whose qualities we can scarcely imagine today. History may condemn you and you might die of food poisoning. But - need I even say it? - it will be delicious.
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6 comments:
Not to throw a monkey wrench in an otherwise ingenious, fool-proof formula for success, but what if after a very thorough search (in, say, an apartment that hasn't been remodeled or re-stocked since 1980), you find no blender? Should you just go ahead and become interested in only researching countries where microwaves come standard?
Also - next time I'm in Moscow, you're getting the gift of a pan with a friggin' handle. Seriously!
I'm not sure a frying pan without a handle qualifies as a frying pan. I will consult the OED. Meanwhile, there's nothing that says you can't reheat something without making it oily. (Do you really think cavemen died of heart attacks? No! Mammoth attacks.) Just put it over a lowish flame and keep it covered (do you have a second pan without handle (ie, a plate/saucer)?) or go hobo style and wrap the shit/leftovers in some foil and stick the balled up mass into the open flame of the stove. Just make sure you don't have a fire alarm nearby.
MasterGote - yes, in our totally hypothetical scenario, there is, but it's not electric - it's the old-school (all metal!) kind where you rotate the crank manually, and I think that a small quantity of potatoes would remain on the inside rather than come out as a delicious puree...
Good luck with the hobo experience. Good thing you're not up high should you need to jump off of the balcony in case of fire...
This
http://www.bigtray.com/productdetails.asp?catid=18960&sku=MAT072785
is a biggie, but there are smaller, much cheaper versions.
Long ago--long enough for the statute of limitations to have run, thank you--a person would roll weed in a cigarette paper and smoke this (called a joint, I don't know why) down to a finger-burning end, known (from its appearance) as a roach. Thrifty potheads (is there another kind?) would save these until there were enough to roll a new joint out of the contents, which were believed to be extra-strong because of all the smoke that passed through. The new thing was a J-2. A collection of J-2 roaches would eventually yield a J-3, etc. It's a wonder I've got any cerebral cortex left at all.
rootlesscosmo - Welcome to the gotery! There is just one slight flaw in this smoky logic: does not the ratio of weed to paper decrease with subsequent rollings?
Welcome to the gotery!
Hi, kyds!
does not the ratio of weed to paper decrease with subsequent rollings?
No, you remove the sticky, half-combusted weed from the old paper before rolling the J-n. (Not that considerations of logic carried a lot of weight among potheads.)
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