Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Reaching a fun milestone: cooking at home

I'm not a very domestic person. I've been more into intellectual and outdoorsy pursuits instead of knowing how to cook and sew, for example. However, it's never too late to teach an old dog new tricks or for the antithesis of Martha Stewart* to learn some new skills.

I was always in awe of my friends who have stronger domestic skills; they sometimes casually say they'd usually rather just cook at home than eat out because they can cook better. I always thought, wow, that's cool that they're so skilled! I've been asking them to share cooking methods and recipes with me. An awesome benefit of having international and well-traveled friends is that they can either share their families' recipes or demonstrate how to cook food they've encountered while traveling, and they know a lot of vegetarian options.

Now that I've been experimenting with cooking, I often find myself preferring what I've cooked at home to eating out too. To be fair, though, I have to say that I'm just not into German food, or anything that's meat-centric, potato-centric, or always drenched with dairy-centric. Pasta and pizza are on the gives-me-a-headache list so I try to avoid them. I don't live in a large metropolis and there aren't a lot of vegetarian or ethnic restaurants that I really love, outside of Safari (Eritrean food).

Now that I've learned a lot of new vegan and vegetarian recipes, I've enjoyed my meals at home more, and love to share them with my friends, too. I can even enjoy Mexican salsa without having to put up with the addition of sugar and/or curry powder that our local restaurants think are staples for some reason. Now, if I could just get my coworker to show me how to make tamales...



*She makes me nervous for many reasons, including because she's too fancy. However, she does have good taste in horses :)

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