Cooking and baking and cooking

This one has been a week for food!

Well as like I ended my last post I made pancakes on Tuesday; Jane came here for our weekly, the second last one I'm afraid since the show ends for this autumn, Heroes night, and this time I had decided, she had forgotten of course, that we would make pancakes, which I say finally, it's been like two months or more since I made it last but that will change now. After a small mishap with a dl measure that was actually an oz = 2dl we accidental go about twice as much flour in the mixture that we should have, so nothing to do but to add more eggs and milk and plan for a week with pancakes for dinner, lunch and breakfast every day. It took to long too cook all of them though so when we were about half done, like two hours later, I came up with the brilliant idea that I could save it for later, and an even smarter idea that I could make an oven-pancake with the rest. So I saved the rest for Thursday (today that is). The pancakes were good of course but the problems of making them with an induction-cooker and a wok-pan made the cooking a slow and difficult task.

Last night I was too lazy to go out and since I had proper, err KFC, for brunch I figured I might have breakfast for dinner, so I baked scones and had them with tea, A Jiao came over too and shared my dinner-breakfast-thing and then we went out to look at her new apartment, she reminds me in many ways of Gui Mei Sun, who always tends to change jobs and apartment and plans. After like two hours of walking around in eastern part of central Chengdu, finding out more or less exactly where some clubs I've been to, that I had no idea of where before, are, and another side of Sichuan university, where I have also been before but not exactly from that direction, and everything in a place where I have actually been before, I finally took a taxi home and slept quite earl, just to get up not-so-early and take a bus to Jane's home to share the same scones for breakfast, or rather brunch, thanks to whoever invented of steaming: the way to make dry scones not so dry again, the question is why we don't use that in Sweden?

And the whole day today we have been on the move, first IKEA; where I spend about 400 yuan, first only planning to buy a new bowl, since I dropped one of my old ones and it broke into.. well maybe not a thousand or even a hundred but at least an unrepairable amount of pieces, but finally ending up buying stuff I hadn't really thought of before, at least not seriously, first among a few is a frying pan, and that one made my day, or probably my week, I can finally cook properly! Then of course I had to do my Christmas purchases; gingerbread, all sorts of glögg; "bloss vinglögg", "bloss starkvinsglögg spetsat med cognac" and "blossa starkvinsglögg spetsat med rom", more meatballs and I found a bunch of different Malaco sweets that I have been craving recently; more djungelvrål, gott & blandat and zoo.

Next stop, after a too long stop at home for recharging, was Metro, the place where you usually can find most of the western stuff you need my goal was: ham! I wanted some ham for my oven-pancake but ham is the one thing I couldn't find there, well not exactly the one, I wanted some cooking cream too, not for today's cooking, but had to be satisfied with the way too thick whipping cream. I bought, as I always do, some better-than-I-can-find-elsewhere beer too, this time I only bought Chimay, I usually buy some Newcastle too but they didn't have any today. What I did find though but didn't buy anything from was a tiny liquor store for imported stuff, they have just about everything you can want, I even found a bottle of Fernet Bianco and that made me rather happy, it is a bit expensive though, almost 200yuan, the other stuff like rum, gin and Absolut anything and most stronger wines and spirits like Malibu and Cointreau costs around 100 yuan, totally affordable, for later.

Going home without the needed ham I had already decided to improvise a little, I bought some paprika and onion and at home we fried up some chicken in my new pan, spiced it with curry, pepper, salt and soyasauce added that with the vegetables to the pancake mixture in a longpan and voilá, the result was great!!