Food Glorious Food

Now that I'm living alone, one of the greatest concerns that's been on the minds of Whitney and my mother has been my basic survival with regard to being able to cook and eat for myself. My mother has left a variety of food from her visit, most of it unusually healthy for me, so I will have to work out some way of cooking potatoes that don't come in powder form.

Being worried about my cooking may be justified - I am admittedly the only person I know to regularly use a claw hammer as a kitchen utensil - but there is a bigger problem that isn't anything to do with my method of food preparation.

First of all, I've been colourblind all my life. This, combined with the way that I unburdened myself with most of my sense of smell during two years in the Purdie Chemistry labs, means that I have very little facility for telling whether food is off or not. Some things are easy enough - milk is probably undrinkable when it slides out of the carton instead of pours, for example, and carrots are off when you can tie knots in them - but there have been times when I've taken a bite out of something, asked Whitney "Does this smell all right to you?", and she's collapsed into a corner.

So assuming that I don't die from eating out of date smoked ham, the next stage is to be able to cook individual items into something resembling meals. Thanks to my job at the Kintore golf club a couple of summers ago, I am able to cook, but only by using a gigantic hotplate and deep fat frier. Even with more conventional, non-Scottish kitchen equipment, I think that the main downfall of my cooking is the willingness to experiment. Chicken korma with pasta? Works fine. And why not do it with Udon noodles, because they're basically the same thing, aren't they? And there's still some salami in the fridge, so I can chop that up and add it to the curry. It's meat, after all.

That said, there's still a pizza in the freezer, so I'll have that tonight and I'll at least live to fight another day.