**As a side note, last night my German teacher told me my German was ugly. Sad day. Of course, I was attempting to defend my choice modal verb, which she said wasn't really right. Note to self: My German is not to the point where defending a German word choice to my German teacher in German is really a good idea. At all.
One thing that I really appreciate about living here in Switzerland is how what once were mundane tasks have suddenly become exciting adventures. (See: Laundry Fiasco from last week. Or Ordering Coffee in Neuchâtel. And don't even get me started on cleaning with the mystery cleaning products...)
Of course, cooking here is also an adventure. For goodness sakes, even grocery shopping is an adventure! For starters, they don't have things like brown sugar here. Baking powder comes in a little packet. And eggs and milk are not stored in the fridge. Or even some meat products. Chocolate takes up a whole aisle. Fruits and vegetables are only available if they are in season, meaning that I have been eating oranges for the past two months. Skim milk doesn't exist. Vanilla extract doesn't exist, but vanilla paste does. Meat is freakishly expensive. As in over $10 for a pound of ground beef expensive.
And everything has a German name (duh!). So I took four trips to the store to figure out where shortening was so that I could make these homemade oreos for some friends. Thanks to copious amounts of online research at the English Forum and Coop@Home, I finally located shortening. Shortening is appropriately labeled Pflanzenfett (Plant Fat) and is located by the vinegar, not in the baking goods section. (And I will say that the homemade oreos are pretty amazing.)
In fact, only today I finally located the yeast, which happens to be by the butter. Why?! I have yet to cook anything resembling Tex-Mex, since the spices and products are not readily available. I have to plan a special trip to the one Mexican store in Zürich to find what I need.
Since meat is so expensive, I've been learning to cook more vegetarian options. Lentils and quinoa are becoming staples in my diet. Some of my favorite new recipes have been cheesy zucchini pizza, curried lentils and sweet potatoes, homemade Naan, curried butternut and red lentil soup, and when I splurged and bought meat, chicken marsala. I have also made salted fudge brownies for several occasions with a very high success rate.
Of course, once the grocery shopping is done, the fun is just beginning. Then I need to figure out how to translate the cups and tablespoons into grams. And the baking temperature into degrees Celcius. And figure out how to scale a recipe down to fit the smaller pan sizes we have here. Quite often I cook with my computer in the kitchen so that I can frantically Google things like "how many grams of butter are in 4 Tablespoons" and so on. It keeps things interesting, at the very least...
