I Sure Hope That Was Cooking Oil

I forgot how much I love cooking. Many of my favorite memories revolve around cooking with someone I love. And I’m not too bad at it. I think I have pretty good instincts. Although I make lots of mistakes, I usually can come up with some way to fix them. I just love it.

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to cook in the last 4 months. During PST, my host family was paid to provide my 3 meals, so they cooked for me. And now, I’m paying my host family for lunch and dinner (and I usually sleep until the very last minute, so no time for cooking breakfast). Sometimes I think about just paying my host family for dinner, so that would give me something to cook for sometimes. But Parascovia cooks a lot, and I worry about being in her way. Plus she’s a great cook, and it’s just easier this way.

But these past 2 weeks, Parascovia and Roman have been in American visiting their son, and I have been in charge of my meals. At first, I was really excited about this. But since I’m only cooking for myself for 3 weeks, I don’t want to go out and fill the cupboards with all sorts of stuff. I sort of feel like I’m cooking as if I were moving in a couple weeks; you want to use what you have already and buy as little as possible. Nearly all of my meals have been frozen ravioli or spaghetti, mostly out of laziness.

Well, today I cooked, and it felt great. It was an interesting experience. I was using products in a Russian kitchen, so I had to depend on the pictures on the labels and my nose on things like spices and unmarked cans. And there aren’t cups and teaspoons. In fact, I couldn’t find any measuring utensils. So it was all eyeballing.

My aim was split pea soup. I didn’t have chicken broth, or cream, or dry peas, or many vegetables at all. And I couldn’t identify the spices. I did have a can of peas, oil, sour cream, onions, and garlic. Those are the only things that I actually know for sure went into my dinner. Everything else just smelled right. Because I didn’t know half the ingredients and I had no measuring utensils, I couldn’t reproduce this recipe if my life depended on it. But it turned out well. And it was a fun challenge actually. I kind of felt like I was on Iron Chef or something, except I didn’t know what ingredients I was using and I had no sous chef.

The scariest part was when I decided to use what I was hoping to be cooking oil. The cooking oil is kept under the sink in old water bottles. And they look like oil, but I was half worried they were drippings or cleaning oil or something. But I have eaten my dinner and don’t feel sick yet, which is a good sign. However, if I’m MIA for a couple days, you know why.