We've conducted various experiences in our kitchen lately, with more and less success depending on the project.
For several weeks, there were big trucks parked on our street corner full of tomatoes for sale. (Part of my --Rachel's-- excuse for taking so long to put up a blog post is that I kept meaning to get a picture of one of the trucks... but never did. Oh well!) We've been told that whatever is for sale in the big trucks is what's in season and has come in fresh from the country-side.
So, we decided to make a big batch of spaghetti sauce!
When Josh worked in a hotel kitchen for a summer, he got excited about learning to make his own sauces, and marinara sauce has been one of his favorites, since then.
(Also featured in this photo are our gas stove top, the hood/vent, and our water heater. And the pretty bowls we bought when we came (prettiest dishes we've ever had!). :)
Freshly washed tomatoes.
Eight pounds of tomatoes, all cut up. At $0.40 a pound, it's a much better deal than the $3+ cans of sauce in the import section of the grocery store.
(Also featured: dishtowels, potholders, and trivets that we brought with us to make it feel like home. Josh is standing in front of our countertop oven.)
Right here should be a picture of 4 liters of sauce in plastic containers, ready to go in the freezer. But we didn't take one, sorry!
This experiment: a success! We had tomato cream sauce and rigatoni a few days later. :)
On the same trip to the market for tomatoes, we bought a pound of peanuts, to try making our own peanut butter. We can get peanut butter here (Skippy), but we thought this would be cheaper, tastier, and healthier.
It turned out to be a lengthy process! After washing them a lot, we roasted them.
(Also featured... our oven light. Not much else!) :)
Beautifully brown and cooling.
But do you notice a problem? Yeah, the peanuts still have their skins on them. We probably should have taken a picture of us standing at the counter, rubbing off peanut skins... and rubbing... and sorting... and rubbing. I think we were too irritated to get around to it.
The peanut butter turned out great... a little sticky, but super creamy (we blended it for a long time), with only like 1/8 teaspoon of oil to get the first batch going, and a little salt. But our grinder/blender attachment only holds really tiny batches, so the blending took awhile, too.
I still like the idea of making our own peanut butter, and to try to convince Josh it was still worth it --as long as we could get pre-skinned peanuts, I did a price check at the import grocery store.
Only to find out that Skippy costs the same amount per pound as skinless peanuts. :P And thus far, we haven't seen skinned peanuts in any of the local markets.
This experiment: May never be repeated. :(
This... is a pile of wilted, but washed, celery.
(Also featured, our random blue and white plastic stuff, which probably covers up pipes and makes the kitchen all blue and matchy; our funny, old-fashioned washer with one compartment for washing and a separate one for spinning; the faucet and hose that for manually filling the washer for every wash and rinse cycle; and me at the sink, which you can't see. But it's a double sink, and our landlords eventually agreed to install a new faucet before we moved in, so that's lovely.) :)
...which I combined with other odds and ends to make vegetable broth!
My first few attempts at saving onion skins and carrot peelings, etc. in the fridge resulted in a pile of moldy vegetables before I had gathered enough to make anything. But then a friend told me she keeps her's in the freezer. Brilliant! So now I've made broth a few times and using whatever other random things happen to be in the fridge at the time. (Also, my awesome soup cookbook that I brought with us says to add ginger, soy sauce, bay leaves, and rosemary to veggie broth, so I've been doing that.)
The only problem on the particular occasion pictured was that I had half a cucumber in the fridge that needed to be used up, so I threw that in as well. Result: bitterness, only slightly masked by the too much ginger I put in. Oops!
This experiment: Well, not so good. I ended up taking it out of the freezer about a week later, tasting it again, to see if it was as bad as I remembered, and melting it down the kitchen sink. But, I have since made a beef broth with a big bone, and it was amazing! We had some of it by itself with a meal, and it's now waiting in the fridge for something else good to happen with it.
FAIR WARNING: The following picture of a dead duck is... a picture of a dead duck.
One of our Chinese friends has been talking about making us "beer duck" for a couple of months now.
So, about a month ago, I went to the meat market and bought my first ever duck! I was quite proud of myself, but don't let this picture fool you...
On the bus ride home with the duck, I held it at arms' length so it wouldn't drip on me, tried not to look at it's feet popping out of the plastic bag, and ignored the stares I got from people. (I think it was me that was weird to them, not the dead duck in my bag.)
When I got home, I promptly stuffed it in a pot and put it in the fridge.
But then our friend got sick, I had to move the duck to the freezer, and several weeks passed. I think I eventually got used to the idea of a dead duck in my kitchen.
Anyway, our friend came over and cooked it, together with ginger, half a bottle of beer, soy sauce, and some five spice power for two hours...
This experiment: unbelievably delicious. But I don't have any plans to buy another duck and try it again. :)
