In the US we’d just finished remodeling our kitchen, so as to give ourselves some space. If only we’d realized how little space we’d be getting ourselves into when we moved to the UK! Yes – the cutting board is currently occupying roughly half of the available prep-space on the counter. That cutting board is an industrial strength model, too, which just adds to the fun, when you’d like to move it aside to use the space for something else!
We’ve managed to bake a little bit, though, despite the small space and despite the strange flours and even stranger yeast, and we’ve also had to call the repairman for the oven. The oven, you see, is a convection oven … and has possibly been used by us more than it was used by the previous tenant (the owner’s daughter, while she was in college). So, although it appears to be a brand new oven, the fan seizes up when the oven comes up to temperature, after sounding like a small airplane for around 15 minutes. It then goes through the airplane noise again as the oven cools down – something which takes considerably longer than heating it up.
As soon as we figure out where to have our film developed (I know, promises promises) we’ll have some better pictures – including at least one of T’s cake made from the leftover “chocolate breakfast drink mix” left to us by the previous tenant. It was a strangely chocalatey concoction, but was also quite vegan and quite good!
We’ve also managed to find a store which stocks peppers with a bit of actual heat to them! We are quite pleased at this discovery. To those who are unfamiliar with the UK, shopping is either done at a super-mega-monster grocery, or it’s done in these bizarre little shops, each of which may stock a few hundred items at most. The shops which stock fresh items may stock 30 items, in a space probably as large as the average small kitchen. Thus, locating peppers has involved poking our noses into roughly half a dozen little shops along our regular walking routes. In the search process we’ve found plenty of bizarre sports drinks and worthless knick-knacks, of course, as the ubiquitous 7-11 analogues abound.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Small kitchens are such a bother for foddies like ourselves.
For hot peppers, an Indian grocery store might be a good place to look…