SEPT. 19 - COOKING DISASTER

Tuesday was an ultra-slow day.  As my nephew said, the blog should be called "Traveling like a Sloth". We were both worn out, and I had super swollen ankles, unlike anything I've experienced before.  - took a pill from 2020 (from a hospital stay) that I happened to have in my huge medicine bag, and hoped for the best. 

We managed to do the bags of laundry we had been accumulating. The instructions of the apartment said we could only use the utility room from 2-8 PM, so we missed a day. And then when we tried the next day, it was being used by another tenant. Then we found out the printed instructions were incorrect. It was that it could not be used from  10 PM to 8 AM. 

If you are familiar with European washers and dryers, you know that doing the laundry isn't a quick one-and-done task. The machines are very small, and most cycles run for ages. We managed to complete two loads with only a few mishaps. 

Late afternoon we started dinner preparations. There was no measuring cup. I used my teacup to measure the rice, rinsed it seven times (the way I learned from Elizabeth Chong in her Melbourne cooking class years ago (and have been obeying ever since). Found a pan with a lid. We figured out how to start the stove. There were no instructions, and many buttons, which you had to know when to hold this button down before pressing  another, and turned on the rice to boil. I asked Ron to come and help turn it down, as I couldn't figure it out. Apparently, neither could he. I covered it and  set a timer for 15 minutes to check. When I went to check, it was boiling over. It ended up a HUGE MESS, compounded by Ron setting the hot pan on the plastic cutting board. WE SHOULD HAVE HAD A PICTURE. The only redeeming fact is that he didn't put it on the formica counter!!! The Fissler induction pan not only had plastic stuck to the bottom, it was thoroughly burned inside. In the morning, I looked up Fiissler, and found that replacing it would be about $90-100. An expensive chicken curry meal! (But steel wool comes to the rescue a few days later.)

This kitchen was not the one he should have chosen to whip up one of his culinary delights. The stove top is directly next to the sink and there is hardly any counter space.

By then we had no appetite, but the chicken curry with veggies turned out tasty over what we could salvage of the burned rice.

Folding the laundry and working on Blog

After finishing the laundry chores, we settled on the balcony and called it a night.