Feed Me

Cooking here is kind of an adventure. Or rather, it is not an adventure at all; I cook the most basic of basic things because it is very difficult to keep foods fresh and I only have a stove top and one kind of good knife and no microwave so I don't cook much. Good thing it is super cheap to get take out curry! So on Saturday night I was making pancakes for dinner. I never eat pancakes back home but here they sell the Betty Crocker mix which you can just add water to and it is quite convenient. As I'm cooking pancake number one I feel like it is taking forever to cook. Then when I put the batter down for pancake number two I hear a weird noise so I look at the flame (gas stove) and see it flickering. Pancake number two barely gets cooked and then poof - the flame goes out. No more gas in my gas tank.
See, unlike gas stoves back home where your gas is piped in, my gas is from a tank which sits just below the stove top and is connected by a rubber tube (and yes, I do find this scary). Seeing as I've never operated this way before I had no way of knowing how to tell if it was getting low.
Of course, as with most things here, I hadn't the faintest clue how to get it refilled. So I went into work on Monday and asked my go-to guy and voila, just a few hours later I had a full tank.
But this meant that Sunday I was stove-less. So what did I do for food on Sunday? Well after some toast for breakfast (hooray for toasters) I went out on a mission - Greek food. I had once seen a Greek restaurant from my car but couldn't remember where it was...turns out I've driven past it tons of times but it isn't well marked. I was very excited. In Toronto I lived in Greek town so I ate Greek food quite a bit and I'd heard through the rumor mill that this place was pretty good. Alas it wasn't. It wasn't terrible; the veggie stuff was pretty good but they added a weird flavor to the chicken and the tzatziki was not exciting. I was so disappointed.
I feel like food has become such a focal point in my life here; what will my next meal be is always on my mind. I was hardly a great chef back home but I really miss the ability to get any ingredients I want and I also miss my good knives and good pots and pans. Funny, the idea of never having to cook for yourself sound glamorous but, for me at least, it isn't. I think that when I go home I'm going to take a few cooking classes to improve my skills so I can cook like crazy. Simply because I can.