I spent much of the past week with my boyfriend, which was a nice pseudo-vacation and way to end the summer. We also cooked a LOT.
The thing about cooking is that I decided it was fun, mostly when I was in Moldova and couldn’t do it (you know you miss what you can’t have). I continued to like cooking when I was living in an apartment over the summer, because there’s something about everyone loving you for making cookies that is really appealing to me… what can I say, I’m maybe too eager to please.
The point of this is that I have 3 cookbooks I bought in Moldova that are in Russian: one about Spanish cooking, one about traditional Russian meals, and one that’s called “cooking can be not harmful” and is about healthy cooking. It tells you that there are very few ingredients in each dish which makes them healthy, and shows you pictures of every ingredient. Somehow I doubt that just because a cake only has 3 ingredients, it becomes good for you: chocolate, oil, and sugar do not a balanced meal make.
But it’s so cool to make something that I ate in Moldova, or to make something and not realize it and then say “okay yes I definitely did eat this in Moldova.”
And to add to my collection, when my boyfriend got back from Italy he gave me a cookbook in Italian, which I cannot read, because I don’t speak Italian.
Here is a menu of all the things we made:
- Chocolate Churros with Orange Zest (from the Spanish cookbook I bought in Moldova)
- Biscuits with Orange Cream Filling (also from Spanish cookbook; this did not work because I bought the heavy cream but forgot to use it, and then the filling just was raw egg. So we used peanut butter frosting instead.)
- Peanut Butter Cookies
- Broccoli meatballs with sesame seeds (from the Italian cookbook)
- Bean pasta (see above)
- This thing that I think is called Лапшепник, except I can’t actually find any results on the Google when I search that, and is kind of like kugel I think, except it also didn’t work to make it because there weren’t enough eggs. It did have goat cheese, though, which I found out I liked a lot in Moldova.
- A coffee-whipped-cream filling (with the heavy cream I forgot to put into those other cookies) that we dipped fruit in
- We also ate the Challah that we made another time, but as we did not technically make it recently, I’m not sure it counts.
Then I got home and made these rolls with chocolate filling, a similar thing to something I am pretty sure I did have in Moldova.
The point is that we had way too much food, so we took it to a picnic when we went to see A Comedy of Errors at a local park, and tried to give it away to strangers. Apparently between the time I was a child playing Safetyville and now, something has changed, because people actually took our food.
So much for strangers poisoning the chocolate churros, am I right?
The show was SO GOOD though. It was professional actors on an open stage, and they performed it with an almost Doctor-Seuss inspired costumes and set. It was really quite phenomenal, even through the rain in the second half.
Other things that we did this week included ballroom dance lessons. I hadn’t been back to my dance studio, so it was really nice to be back, and then we went to a Friday night party hosted by my dance studio, which was also really nice, and which I had never been to before. Can I just say that I really liked having someone to dance with all night? That was one of the things that I didn’t like about dance and it is GREAT. I could dance all night! Freshman year me would have been so thrilled. Who am I kidding- now me was also thrilled. 🙂
Overall it was a really nice week, and I like cooking, and I really like dancing, and here we are with me going into freshman year of college about to overextend myself doing 17,000 separate activities. I gotta not do that.
Maybe after I make some more food this week…
American in Moldova 