An American lost in a Czech kitchen.

While living abroad I miss a lot of things: food, family, friends, food, and other stuff. It's really difficult to not have comfort foods when you're so far from the people who are always willing to give you hugs. Or cook for you. In times like these, you have to rely on yourself to create the little things that remind you of home but I underestimated how difficult cooking your home favorites can be when using foreign ingredients.

I take the example of cookies. I agree with my cookie-fiending friend, Mladen: cookies are the best. They're small enough and not over-powering sweets. When I was living at home in the U.S. I would make cookies all the time. I knew which ingredients I needed, which brands I trusted, and I could be in and out of a supermarket in 10 minutes tops (checkout lines, you know?). Here in Czech is an entirely different story. There are so many types of flour. I know there are things like, cake flour, rice flour, unbleached, bleached, whole-wheat, white, etc. But here in Czech I am totally lost. From what I understand the most common flour is wheat flour (so far so good) and they come in three different textures (uhh...okay?). There is smooth flour (hladka mouka), semi-coarse flour (polohruba mouka), and coarse flour (hruba). I have no idea. I have been using the smooth flour for a majority of my time in Czech which has been fine for making pancakes and bagels but my cookie batter is a puddle and after baking they are flat and the chocolate chip cookies I made last night had the texture of a cake. The taste is fine but the texture is all wrong. I had the same problem while attempting (and failing horribly) to make some seemingly simple nutella cookies. I'll be honest, they looked like flat, crispy poo. They were delicious but if I were a more cowardly eater, I wouldn't have touched them. I finally came to the conclusion that the smooth flour must be for cakes but also more for thickening sauces. After Googling it, lo and behold, my reasoning proved correct. So I tried to research which flour would be more appropriate for cookies and have turned up with no answer. I'll ask around but if that gets me nowhere I might have to buy the other types of flour and try each one. As far as the chocolate chip cookies go, I ran into other problems: chocolate chips aren't available so I bought a bunch of chocolate bars and chopped them into pieces, brown sugar for baking is hard to find but luckily I did find at the health food store, and vanilla extract is hard to find. In most supermarkets I've found some vanilla syrup but it smells artificial and is really sweet. I did find a really small bottle of extract without alcohol at the health food store I frequent but it was a little expensive (a little over $2) for about two teaspoons worth.

In other news I went to Jummah at the masjid here in HK and met some Malaysian sisters who understand my chili plight. I think a lot of Europeans don't really like spicy food. They gave me a little info on where I could shop for ingredients and drum roll, please...I CAN BUY HALAL MEAT FROM THE MASJID! Life is good. I am always cautious of meat that is available in supermarkets. I don't know how they were killed, what the meat might be mixed with, and a bunch of other factors that make me want to avoid the whole situation. This is awesome news to me because I have bought chicken from Tesco a few times but have mostly been living off of tofu or tempeh. I can't really afford to buy chicken now but once I get paid at the end of the month, hello feast! Chicken, welcome to my belly. I am constantly surprised I'm as skinny as I am seeing as I am always thinking of my stomach.

So who wants a cookie-cake?