Last week* Blondie invited 2 of our friends from the chemistry departmet, Emma and Khairul around for dinner. Eager to show off our culinery skills, we devised a Japanese meal fresh from Matt's
Wagamama book and my patented French chocolate cake. Since Khirul is muslim, we had to use halal meat - meat that must be facing east when slaughtered and killed by draining its life-blood. Halal or not it was certainly the best quality meat I've seen in a while -
supermakets pump their meat full of water to enhace its appearence and my usual fallback, Iceland, seem to have resorted to the grade F supplies as the breasts fall apart as you try to cut them. Thankfully the cooking went off without a hitch (well it was all very easy) and the food was appreciated (until I let them know exacly how much fat and sugar was in the pudding). It's great to enjoy cooking again. In the 2nd year we had a brand new Ikea kitchen in the house and y cooking came to the fore: roasts, cakes, full meals. Then our 4th year house had a kitchen about 5' square.
Cooking was largely an in-an-out experience as my 4th year houemates weren't exactly au-fait with the washing up so deciding what to cook usually boiled down to what was clean or whatever required the least amount of pre-washing up. The pantry on J2 was nowhere near big or stocked enough for 6 postgrads all wanting to cook at once - especially hen we had "extras" on the landing. Thankfully, our house kitchen (although small) is perfectly sized for the 3 of us and Easter has reminded Bondie and I how exciting cooking can be. Hopefully the days of rice and meat in a bought sauce (yawn) are over.
*I actually wrote this over a month ago, but only got the pictures yesterday.
Last week* Blondie invited 2 of our friends from the chemistry departmet, Emma and Khairul around for dinner. Eager to show off our culinery skills, we devised a Japanese meal fresh from Matt's Wagamama book and my patented French chocolate cake. Since Khirul is muslim, we had to use halal meat - meat that must be facing east when slaughtered and killed by draining its life-blood. Halal or not it was certainly the best quality meat I've seen in a while - 
supermakets pump their meat full of water to enhace its appearence and my usual fallback, Iceland, seem to have resorted to the grade F supplies as the breasts fall apart as you try to cut them. Thankfully the cooking went off without a hitch (well it was all very easy) and the food was appreciated (until I let them know exacly how much fat and sugar was in the pudding). It's great to enjoy cooking again. In the 2nd year we had a brand new Ikea kitchen in the house and y cooking came to the fore: roasts, cakes, full meals. Then our 4th year house had a kitchen about 5' square. 
Cooking was largely an in-an-out experience as my 4th year houemates weren't exactly au-fait with the washing up so deciding what to cook usually boiled down to what was clean or whatever required the least amount of pre-washing up. The pantry on J2 was nowhere near big or stocked enough for 6 postgrads all wanting to cook at once - especially hen we had "extras" on the landing. Thankfully, our house kitchen (although small) is perfectly sized for the 3 of us and Easter has reminded Bondie and I how exciting cooking can be. Hopefully the days of rice and meat in a bought sauce (yawn) are over.
*I actually wrote this over a month ago, but only got the pictures yesterday.
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