Improvised Dinners and Desserts

I am starting to get used to cooking and baking here, although it is never quite what it is like back in the states with things like herbs, an oven, and real cheese. Anyway, I haven't given up yet.

Last Saturday, Michael was craving Pane. If you recall from earlier posts, pane is a so-called Italian dish consisting of spaghetti doused in a cream sauce served in a garlic and sweet bread bowl. We ate it for the first time at The Grazie two months ago and Michael still thinks of it fondly. Having just returned from a hike, and having little money left until our next paychecks, I agreed to make it so we wouldn't have to go down to Myeongdong.

I am starting to get making the cream sauce down, using flour as a thickener. I think it helps that we get "low fat" milk here, that is way fattier than 2%. We never really know what we're getting because of strangely labeled Konglish cartons. We had little to no ingredients, since we needed to grocery shop. So I used buckwheat noodles for the pasta, biscuits for bread bowls (since it would take about three hours to make real ones), and green onions when it would have been better with regular onions and mushrooms. We did have plenty of fresh garlic as well. The pasta was pretty tasty but the biscuit for bread didn't really fly. Anyway, it was kind of fun to see what I could do with what we had.

Sunday I went into baking mode and made chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles. The chocolate chips here are like little chocolate flavored candies and therefore didn't do much to enhance flavor. They looked pretty though. I overcooked each batch of snickerdoodles, but they were pretty good. I will try again in a few days, reducing the baking time.