Our Blog - Our First Cooked Meal

Although I call this our first cooked meal blog, it is more of a blog that discusses the pros and cons of attempting to cook a meal in a kitchen that is really small .. like 3 feet by 6 feet .. and has only 2 burners. But I'm going to start with an interesting thing about this apartment.

While the apartment is only 38 sq meters (SMALL!), they have done things and bought things that work to utilize space within such a small apartment. One of these things is the skillets that they have. If you think about skillets, they tend to take up a lot of space since you have the skillet and then the longer handle. Here, the two skillets that they have provided for us have removable handles, so that the skillets can be stored in a smaller area. Here is the skillet part:

and the handle part.

Now, we are going to put it together. On the right & left sides, there are little buttons which "opens" the handle fastening part. You slide that over any part of the skillet.

Then on the bottom, where my index finger is, there is another button which you push in, and that "closes" the handle fastening part and puts the two pieces together

Et voila! (French for .. and there it is!) .. a full skillet ready to be used. When you clean it, you basically just press the two "open" buttons and the handle then comes right off and you can store the two pieces separately, saving space.

The other challenge here is that there are only 2 burners, and they are close enough together that if you use the larger of the two skillets (which we tend to), you can only use one burner at a time. So the timing of things has gotten to be a bit of a challenge. Here, we did a white fish (whiting I believe is what it is called, which isn't really sold in the US I don't think) that is pan-fried and then topped with a tapenade of diced tomatoes, mint, and basil. We served it with a side of fresh, steamed green beans. We steamed the green beans first, then cooked the fish. Unfortunately, we then had to nuke the green beans for a minute or so to get them hot again.

In ended up okay, and everything tasted great. We are planning to try different types of fish .. many of them that we can get here are not available in your local Harris Teeter or HEB .. and lots and lots of fresh veggies that we can get at the local market.