Cooking adventures

Today started off with some sad news, followed by more sad news. But it did lighten up when I went to my one and only class for the day, Australian Studies, and got to watch Crocodile Dundee. That was pretty cool.

After class I went to the IGA and bought baking supplies; four, sugar, eggs, etc... Then came back finished economics homework and reheated leftovers from last night. I made a broccoli, cheese, chicken, and noodle casserole. There was not any cheddar cheese at the grocery store so I bought the Australian cheese called "Tasty." That is the flavor not the brand. Kind of like how we have American cheese. Anyway, after I poured the cheese sauce all over the food and took a bite did I realize that the cheese is a very strong flavored cheese. It was a little hard to eat dinner last night. So tonight I took the left overs and rinsed them with hot water, to get rid of some of the cheese, and then added garlic salt and basil. It was actually very yummy! I'm so proud of myself. I'm becoming quite the little chef over here.

After dinner I decided to bake chocolate chip cookies. The back of the bag of chocolate chips did not have the recipe, like all of the ones in the states. So I had to go online and find a recipe. This worked out just fine except I did not have brown sugar or vanilla extract. Lucky for me it was 7:00 pm and all of the stores were closed. Even if they were open, you don't want to go to that neighborhood after dark anyways. But I had already made up my mind that I wanted chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Neither I nor any of my 7 female roommates had any type of measuring utensils. I used a coffee cup as a 1 cup measure for everything, and just estimated half and third cups. And then a regular spoon for all of the small stuff, filling half of the spoon and what not. No vanilla and used regular sugar in place of brown sugar. We also do not have any oven mits, which I discovered when the cookies were done and I had no way to get them out of the oven. Between a hand towel and a wooden spoon I was able to cleverly save the cookies. The oven, by the way, is in Celsius so I had to do some rough estimating and a lot of checking to see when the cookies were done. The cookies were delicious. They were a little more crunchy and chewy and brittle, yet soft and gooey at the same time. They tasted amazing and accomplished the job they were created to do. Eventually, I would like to by measuring utensils I just haven't found any yet. They do not sell them in the grocery store, which is the logical place to sell them in my opinion, so I will have to do some investigating to figure out where to purchase them.