Culinary matters.

Food on this trip has been a pretty new experience for me in many ways. First off, I'm doing all my own cooking. Yes, I've cooked for myself and even the rest of the family before, but that was either at home or when I had a meal plan: letting someone else cook was the usual state of things, with self-feeding being an elective. These days, if I want to eat, I'm either cooking or eating out... and the latter isn't particularly cheap.

So far, that's working out rather well. I've stocked my kitchen cabinet and my shelf in the fridge reasonably well, though I'm perpetually discovering little things I don't have. Enough time using my parents' kitchens has me a little startled when I'm reminded, again, that one does in fact have to buy salt if one expects to use any. It's a bit embarrassing -- I thought I had more sense than that. The absent-minded Alexa strikes again.

Secondly, the food selection here, while mostly familar, has a few stumbling blocks. Not everything has the names I'm used to. Capsicums were easy enough to decipher, as that's the genus name for the bell pepper; but what's a sultana, and why is there no ground beef? (It's a light-colored raisin, and the meat isn't ground, it's minced. Silly American.) Even when the names are familiar, surprises may still be in order. It wasn't until I'd gotten the honey home that I found out it wasn't liquid, but creamed, as seems to be the default here.

Then there's the comedy of errors that comes of an American trying to cook using the metric system. I'm used to beakers marked in milliliters, but measuring cups? And how am I meant to measure out 200 g of pasta without a scale? The price of produce and meat terrified me at first, until I finally realized that $20 a kilo isn't too bad when a) a kilo is 2.2 pounds, and b) NZ$1 is about US$0.65. Ha.

Finally, there are the issues of availability. In the US, an out-of-season fruit or vegetable can still be had fresh, for a small premium. Here the premium is considerably larger, and the stocks rather smaller. It was a bit of a shock at first (green peppers are out of season! How will I get my veggies?), but I'm adapting nicely. A girl can eat quite well on the in-season produce: carrots, spinach, potatoes, kiwifruit, oranges, kumaras (sweet potatoes), things called silverbeet and swedes that I haven't gotten the courage to try yet, even true yams (which are not to be confused with sweet potatoes, and which I also haven't tried). Besides, everything's still available canned or frozen, should I get desperate. Ha.

That's how it's all been going, really: at first a shock, but then adaptation. I'm picking up the new names, getting a feel for the metric measurements, and learning to cook in-season. Who knows -- I may even get a few uniquely Kiwi recipes before long.