Soup from a Can, Cake in a Box

I’ve posted about this before, but after recently preparing two Thanksgiving dinners in a foreign country, I have some new reflections that I want to add. So, weekly update, here we go!

Cooking in a foreign country is, not surprisingly, an interesting experience.

You can’t always buy what you want — either because it doesn’t exist where you live (e.g. sweet potatoes) or because the shop doesn’t have it (either because it’s poorly stocked or because everyone grows XY or Z themselves and therefore has no need to buy it in a store). Or you might not be able to buy it because you don’t know the word for it and all the food in the store is behind the counter, which means you have to know the word if you want to ask the cashier to get it for you.

But even if you can buy what you want, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to cook it without any complications. My first year of cooking here was complicated by the fact that I had no oven. Then, last year, when I was preparing to go cook Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house, the staff in my dorm asked me why I wasn’t cooking a turkey in the dorm where I live. I explained that it was because I had no oven. To which they replied “Oh! You can use the oven in room 1103.” Surprise! Turns out there had been an oven the whole time…but it’s located in the central wing of the building, down a labrynthine series of corridors, through a bedroom, in a tiny, windowless little closet that also inexplicably contains a sink and one shelf. It’s not exactly the kind of oven you feel warm and cozy about. And it only has two temperatures: lukewarm and blazing hot. But it gets the job done.

So I have access to an oven now, but it’s still more complicated to bake a cake in that oven than it would be to bake a cake in an oven that was actually located in my kitchen and had more than two temperatures. And to add to that complication, said cake needs to be baked from scratch.

And that, my friends, is what makes cooking here so much more interesting than it was in America. I don’t necessarily “like” it more and I don’t really love cooking to begin with. But I’ve really enjoyed learning how to make things from scratch, putting things together that I’d only ever dumped out of a box before. It adds a feeling of accomplishment to sitting down with a group of friends to eat a meal that you all contributed to — whether that was by procuring spices or items from behind a counter in a foriegn language, or by peeling countless potatoes/carrots/beets, or by mixing things together and cobbling together recipes to get the best approximation of something from home that everyone really misses eating.

So, in honor of my Ukrainian-acquired cooking skills and my third Thanksgiving in Ukraine, here’s a list of things I can now make from scratch without blinking twice.

• Pancakes
• Bisquits
• Cornbread
• Split Pea Soup
• Chicken Noodle Soup
• Borscht
• Vegetable Soup
• Tortillas
• Chocolate Cake
• Stuffing
• Gravy
• Spaghetti Sauce
• Chili

And add to that list anything that includes eggs (with the exception of Spanish tortilla. Haven’t quite bothered to master that yet…but it’d certainly be worth trying!).

I guess none of those things are particularly impressive things to be able to cook from scratch, but I’m still proud of myself. And that’s mainly because those are all things that, when I prepared in America, I prepared at least mostly from a box or a can. Now I can say that I know how to actually make those things, not just pour them out and mix them with a can of water.

That’s not to say I won’t revert back to my former can- and box-mix preparing ways when I’m given the opportunity (upon my glorious return in about 9 months…), but I’m glad I at least know how these things are supposed to come together and could do it myself if I wanted to. And there’s something to be said for that, in my humble opinion.