Brie, Chemicals, and Being Creative...

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure.  In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude."

- Julia Child

The past 6 months as most of you know have been quite a challenge for many reasons; being away from home, being in a different country, learning a new language.  But one of the biggest challenges has actually been cooking.  This is my first time living in an apartment, ever.  My first two years at university I lived in dorms so I ate at the dining hall.  If you asked me at home if I could cook, I would have said yes.  Here, I would have to think about that a little more before I answered.  Americans are spoiled when it comes to cooking.  When we say we make things from scratch, we truly only make about half of the dish from scratch and then cheat a little with some sort of pre-made thing.  

You probably won't remember this photo, but this was the first day I was in Denmark.  Kate and I went to the grocery store, where we were terrified, and bought potatoes, bread and butter.  That first night we made mashed potatoes.  Thankfully I have moved past mashed potatoes for dinner.  

 Now I have moved on to cookies! Just kidding, cookies were already in my repertoire before coming here.

I have to say that some of our best times  this past semester were when we were cooking together.  We made a lot of cookies, cakes, and other goodies.

We started a tradition to bake cakes for people's birthdays and show up at their bedroom windows at midnight.  

 There was one night, that we are not super proud of, when we ate three cakes for dinner.  Also not one of the proudest moments of my life, I invited a diabetic to this night.  Oops. (Chris if you read this, sorry about that one)

 Not only do I need to cook all of my food here, without the help of a cafeteria, but I also need to deal with everything being in metric.  Also Denmark kind of scorns pre-made food.  This not only includes things like frozen pizza but cream of mushroom soup and other things like that.

And yes you can make all of these things completely from scratch but it is not really the same.

Because truthfully, the chemicals and preservatives added to our food at home add taste.  And they taste good, crazy I know.  

This was my dinner tonight and this is where the creativity comes in.  Since we don't have the same ingredients here as in the US I have gotten creative mixing different things together.  I have also become more creative because I only cook for one person, which is actually extremely difficult.  I made this quiche because I needed to use up eggs, because there is no way that I can eat a dozen eggs before the go bad, unless I eat eggs everyday.  I also had brie cheese that I needed to use, so I tried to substitute that for the Swiss cheese that was in the recipe.  

The reason I started thinking about my cooking here was because last week my friend, Niklas, started writing a blog.  Niklas does not cook at all, so for his birthday we made him a cookbook, where each of us wrote a couple of recipes for him to try.  He started this blog as a challenge for himself, he wants to cook each of the recipes in his cookbook in the next two months.  So far he has made 3 of the recipes, even my recipe for German Potato Salad.  It is very humorous.  If you want to check it out here is the link: Niklas' Hyggelig Cookbook

Also I don't think I have shared photos of my apartment yet.  Christmas Eve all of my roommates were gone and I was having people over for dinner so I majorly cleaned my apartment.  Since this is probably the only time it will ever be this clean, I decided to take pictures.  So here is my room:

And here is our living room:

 And our kitchen.  On the left you can see our refrigerator.  One of the things that I am looking forward to the most next year is having a full size fridge! The fridge here is about half the size of normal ones at home and 5 people share it.  This also makes cooking difficult because we don't have enough room to store things.   

So there you have it my cooking and apartment.  I know this post is not very exciting but it's all I've got, until I have things to do such as classes and I have friends.  Ok that sounded pitiful, I promise I am not that pitiful.

Random Danish/Denmark/Scandinavian Facts:

- In Iceland there is governmental agency whose job it is to go to building sites before construction begins to see if the site has elves or trolls, which means that the building/road cannot be built on that site (and we thought the DNR was bad).

- In Denmark if you are not married by the age of 30 you receive a pepper shaker, no one really knows why.

- The refrigerator, the zipper, the pacemaker, and the computer mouse were all invented in Sweden. 

- Finland, a country that is roughly the size of New Mexico, has 188,000 lakes and 98,000 islands.