(Dragon picture is Power Chord by Anne Stokes).

I know I don't say this often, but I think I might have been better off just making it myself.

I was making some lemonade with a hammer tonight - I didn't realize that the box of concentrated lemon juice we'd bought contained a bottle, and as we'd kept it in the freezer I needed to break the lemon-ice up inside it before being able to slide it all out of the spout into a carafe.

After that, the procedure would have been straightforward, except soon after starting I realized that I'd been following the wrong recipe on the back of the box and had been making a lemon meringue pie. I thought that the amount of sugar it called for seemed a bit much - on balance, it's just as well I noticed the problem when it was telling me to put butter and eggs into it.

It's very nice - sweet, though. And also quite opaque.

I have no idea what this is.


At its core, it's chicken with rice - but after putting those together semi-successfully, I decided to improvise a bit. It's surprising that I always forget years of past experience and only ever remember that this is a huge mistake towards the end of my cooking process.

I'd known that it was at least theoretically possible to infuse rice with egg, but all the recipes I could find were full instructions for egg fried rice with soy sauce and everything, so I just made it up as I went along and threw some milk and curry powder into an egg mixture. I think I overdid the volume of egg a bit despite only using one, and it didn't produce the sizzle I'd hoped for on putting it into the pan, more sort of sitting there squelchily - once I'd folded it all in and overcooked it to make sure it wasn't raw it fell on to the plate like some sort of rice omelette.

And the chicken was just picked off a roasted whole one (done much more professionally by Whitney the previous night) and wasn't cooked from raw - I'd tried to warm it up a bit under the grill, but I left it in a little too long as I got distracted with other things and I sort of... toasted it a bit. Dinner last night was the weirdest breakfast ever.

Tonight it's Pancake Day, though - I can do those without any problems.

I've lasted ten days fending for myself with only the aid of a large collection of pre-made supermarket meals. Only one more dinner until we're back together and I can officially declare myself having survived.

Today, it's the Independence Day of this great country, where over a fifth of the population believe their president is a Muslim Nazi, creationism is seriously debated as a political issue, and there isn't a branch of Tesco for 3000 miles. I got up late - still a novelty to me - and not wanting to be a sore loser about my new country of residence's celebration of its independence from me, made some pancakes for lunch. Because let's face it, you don't get much more American than pancakes for lunch without putting them through a waffle iron and then going out and indiscriminately shooting people.


I think my normal recipe worked just as well for larger pancakes as well with a bit of added milk, although due to misjudging the sizes a little, I obviously had to spend a while shuffling them back and forth between the griddle and two plates so that no larger one was ever on top of a smaller one before I got to eat them.

I might take a heap of British biscuits into work to share around tomorrow, as a reminder of what they'd be paying far less import money on if they hadn't thrown our tea into the harbour.

Tonight, I put together a chicken korma, with an imported Patak's simmer sauce and rice boiled in stock for some added flavour.



Absolutely nothing remarkable happened at all.

Now go away.

I have something here called a Hot Pockets, or possibly a Hot Pocket if it adopts a singular noun. As it's been more than demonstrated by this point that I am not meant to cook for myself, on the occasions when Whitney is away during the evening I now base my own dinners around America's ample and diverse supply of instant meals, and this pizza... thing is the latest in my line of experimentation.

In the box, you're given a pair of strange pop-up sleeve things, along with the two expected frozen brick-like lumps and two separate sets of instructions on how to prepare them. I chose the oven method rather than the microwave, because even though I'm resorting to things like this I've got to at least grant myself the illusion of some decorum, and I considered that even I could handle leaving it in a hot place for twenty minutes and that there was little to no chance of seriously injuring myself. Indeed, this is the entirety of the preparation - you just need the wits to separate the bit that's edible from the bit that's not, small as the distinction might seem.

The sleeve that I mentioned is for holding the "sandwich" (I have no idea what to call it, it defies classification), in a further health and safety measure for people who don't realize that ovens are hot. It instructs "This side up", and I wasn't sure whether it meant the flat side or the curvy side of the cooked article, but I chose not to worry about it because sandwich orientation has never been among my priorities. On the reverse, the sleeve also proclaims - and I am copying this directly from what's in front of me - "Might as well have a free hand to text while you're eating". I mean, crude as these comments are, do Americans even have to wonder why they're the subject of so much obesity-based ridicule throughout the world? They practically write this themselves.

Still, once you have slipped the nondescript un-sandwich into the pocket in accordance with its instructions, you can have at it, and the outer shell is a sort of crumbly pastry that breaks away to reveal an orange tomato and cheese sauce underneath with lumps of pepperoni in it. I suppose it doesn't contradict the description, but as with all instant meals, the disparity between the appearance of the recognizable cheese and tomato product on the box and the orange guddle of reality is not exactly unnoticeable. I was actually surprised because I had expected the outer part to turn out more bread-like, but in fact it's not unlike eating a pastie, with the ingredients of a pizza instead of meat and onions.

Who else would be stupid enough to combine pastry and pizza?

1. Go to the supermarket and buy a box of cake mix. Realize halfway back that said box doesn't include icing.
2. Go back to the supermarket and buy icing. Go back home.
3. Go back out to the supermarket and retrieve the icing from where you left it on the counter after buying it. Trudge back home.

I think I'll just stay in bed for the rest of the week.

I hadn't realized that it was P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-Pancake Day (or if you're American, the decidedly less appetizing-sounding Fat Tuesday) until mid-afternoon yesterday, so I brought out the griddle again and demonstrated that there are some things that I can make in the kitchen without an actual adult's help.



I think my mobile phone can make even a picture of pancakes unappetizing. Nevertheless, this is the same recipe as last time, with more milk added so that the batter just distributed itself over a wider area.

Here's a question - do you spread your jam/butter/whatever you like on the first-cooked smooth side of the pancake, or on the underside so that it soaks into all the little holes?

I tried to make a pizza again.



I really don't have a suitable explanation for this. I don't remember putting a hedgehog in it.

Or you could alternatively title this post "Why I'm an Imbecile".

One of the nicest features about the building I now work in is its kitchens, which are regularly stocked up with food supplies that anyone is free to nab things from. The 14th floor kitchen was a critical resource for us when we had meetings here, with various raids happening roughly hourly, but during the first few full days here I began to realize that despite the wide variety of things on offer, there's not a whole lot that you can combine together to produce an actual lunch (unless you count a pack of crisps and some Babybel, which I do, but... moving on).

The nearest thing I found was in the larger upstairs kitchen, which had a collection of packets that described themselves as "EasyMac", some sort of fairly vile microwaveable macaroni cheese convenience food. I think that in common with a lot of people from Scotland I have something of an appreciation for really bad food (I've certainly never understood the soup-in-a-tower opposite end of the scale), so this didn't really bother me, and I tried to follow the instructions as a couple of people speaking German to each other wandered in and started making coffee.

The first difficulty was trying to pour "2/3rds of a cup of water" over the dry pasta that I'd dumped from the packet into a paper bowl. America is several decades behind in decimalization, and seems happy enough in being one of three countries, the others being Liberia and Myanmar, not to have switched over to a naturally human system of measurement, and even though I've been in it for two years I can't get used to having to remember whether there are fourteen, sixteen or twelve of anything in anything else and having to think about things in quarts, yards and furlongs per fortnight. A "cup", unlikely as it might sound, is also a defined unit of measurement here, and though I know the general idea of what one looks like it's very difficult to actually translate that to a volume of poured water. I filled the bowl up to just cover the pasta and threw it in the nearby microwave for four minutes.

After pacing back and forward for a while, time was up, and I lifted the arrangement out and looked down at a sort of consolidated disc of dry welded-together macaroni. As I walked back to the counter with it, the larger of the two Germans leaned over. "It looks rubbish", he said happily through his large beard. Or more specifically, he said it in that sort of jovial brutally honest way that only people in German-speaking countries seem to be have truly mastered. I replied "'Schrecklich', you might say", because it always seems to catch people off guard when you know any other language than English or Spanish here, no matter how shakily. He was suitably impressed and wandered off with his younger companion while I looked at my assumed lunch so far and tried to decide what I could do about it. After some considering of the options, one of which was to give up, I added some more water and repeated the process, this time getting something that looked marginally more edible but not really any more appealing.

The cheese component of the mixture was provided in suspicious yellow powder form in a packet that was tightly sealed against anyone attempting to open it. After biting it open with my carnivorous teeth, I upended it on to the bowl despite there looking like there was far too much of it, then decided that there really was far too much of it and not enough water in the bowl to possibly absorb it. I topped it up a bit from the hot tap, then wondered how on earth I was meant to stir the watery, powdery, pastaish stuff together into a glutinous whole with the amount of room that I have available in the bowl without spilling everything over the sides. In one of my moments of genius, I went for the approach of placing another paper bowl over the top of the existing one, holding the arrangement tightly to prevent any of it shooting out the sides, and shaking it up and down over the sink.

My manual prevention of the stuff leaking out the sides worked perfectly. Unfortunately instead the bottom of the first bowl instantly gave way, having been already weakened severely by being microwaved twice, and the entire contents splurged revoltingly down into the basin, leaving a wide yellow splatter mark with a perfect disc of macaroni in the centre, which was still fused to itself as well as the entire bottom of what had once been the bowl it was microwaved in. Deciding it was best at this point to back off from the toxic substance, I scraped the remnants out of the sink into the bin, washed off the sink and made a cup of a Pot Noodle-like concoction instead, which could simply be reconstituted by pouring some boiling water into it.

On the way out back to the office area with this I passed the Germans again and had to explain what had happened to my original meal as they noticed that what I was carrying back was significantly different from what they'd seen me making. They were most amused - as much, I think, at the idea that anyone had attempted to start making the stuff in the first place as at my abject failure at it. It really says something that I can't even make a microwave meal without it turning out this apocalyptic.