Taking Advantage of the Kitchen

I will admit, I have never really cooked anything special in my day. I can do the basics like boil pasta, toast a bagel, make grilled cheese, you know, easy stuff. Occasionally, I can make decent pancakes. However, I usually use the batter from the box. Cooking is difficult, time consuming, and it can be expensive if you don't shop around.

But since I have money from the Gilman scholarship (thank you) and a decent propane fueled stove in my apartment's kitchen, I really want to test my cooking capabilities when I can. My roommate Anna and I have been having fun scoping out the downtown area looking for cheap supermarkets near our apartment. Last night, my roommate Anna and I made a lo pobro for dinner. We were inspired by a menu item from a local fast food restaurant we spotted close by. I forget the name of the restaurant, but most of the food offered came wrapped in a bun (white bread, thank you) and loaded with guacamole and mayonnaise. Yeah, it is as appetizing as it sounds. However, this a lo pobro meal stuck out to me. It is pretty simple: french fries and a sunny side up egg.

After making a lo pobro, I realized that my oven cooks things very poorly. It is a gas stove and to ignite the fire, you need to light it with a match or lighter. I've heard horror stories about gas stoves and I didn't want to have my own to tell. Cooking on a gas stove is frightening! The fire that heats the food is only on the top of the oven. Therefore, it burns things easily, like the fries I made for the a lo pobro.

After our not so delectable dinner, we made terremoto for desert. It is apparently a popular drink in Chile. Like a lo pobro, it requires two ingredients: white wine (preferably from Chile to make it truly Chilean). Unlike in the States, you can find pineapple ice cream anywhere. While Anna and I were shopping, we asked a random Chilean what type of white to use for the drink and he pointed out almost every type. Was he an alcoholic? Who knows... but we decided on this really sweet white wine. Rhin. You know it? I didn't. I think that's why we bought it. I put three scoops of the ice cream into a normal sized glass of wine, but the taste of the wine was so strong. If you just took a swig with the froth of the ice cream, the pineapple taste was hard to notice. I thought it was best to eat it with a spoon. Maybe sometime soon I will order it at a local bar to see if there is a certain mixing technique that we didn't do.