Of Food

It's a truth universally acknowledged that I don't really cook. Indeed, this was the main cause of anxiety for family and friends alike when they learned last year that I would soon be off to foreign shores and my primary means of survival would be my own cooking. Of course, that isn't really true. Germany has excessive variety when it comes to any kind of meat (if you are open to try out things that is) along with bakeries, bistros, cafés, vendors, restaurants, fast food chains and ice cream and yogurt parlours galore. But when you're on a student-budget, an Atlas ever conscious of the loan on your shoulders, you can't really afford to buy every meal. So you go grocery shopping, cart and all, and take each day as it comes, hoping you haven't run out of salt only to discover it when the potatoes are burning themselves on the gas hot-plate-thing.

The hot-plate-thing is one of the really annoying/ridiculous/impractical/irritating things about this place. The other being the bathrooms, but don't even get me started. What is the point of having a separate hot and cold water tap at each end of the basin, really? What the hell do you do with them? Open both and take turns to freeze or burn your hands? 

But I digress.

So the first time I cooked (cooking here defined as anything that requires heat and changes colour/shape/texture/taste after being exposed to it), I was just attempting to fry an egg for breakfast. So there I was, having put oil in the frying pan and broken the egg into it, and nothing happened. The egg just sat there gloppily in a pool of oil, while I stared at it, losing weight and wondering whether I'd done something wrong. After many many long minutes of coagulation, it finally began to make weird but welcome sizzly noises, and I set about making toasts. The world was sunny again. Which was really rare for most part of my stay in Germany.

Since then, I've got used to the burner tantrums, and I just circumvent them by studiously ignoring it while it heats up angrily, giving it my undivided attention when I know it's going to be submissive. Mostly I cook simple things like vegetables, omelettes (my flatmate thinks I only cook eggs, which is a bit unfair because I don't even cook them every day, but somehow always happen to be when he's around. It's a conspiracy.), meat patties, and I managed to find Maggi which was a moment of triumph, really. The microwave was my best friend during my stint in the US a couple of months ago, for everything from kappi to heating up the canned chicken-in-white-sauce, to 'cooking' buttered veggies and all kinds of rice (read: dumping a bunch of ingredients into a microwave dish and letting it do its thing). Not half bad.

I'm not a huge fan of the 'döner kebab' here but the city does have Turkish joints serving those at every corner of the street. Although delicious and value-for-money for the first couple of instances, it turned out to be nauseating to have to take in the same aroma wherever you are in the city. I also tried a lot of different cheese.. We also had friends' dinners comprising of BBQ, frozen pizzas and a big salad. As in we bought them frozen and baked them. But you knew that already.

Germany is a delight for fruit lovers (and also BEER just to make sure I don't end up writing a post from this country without the mention of the sacred word) - artificially grown I assume, but it's the variety and yearlong availability that works for me.