In my kitchen

Lately, in my kitchen, I have been…

:: thinking about that other kitchen a lot. Each time something drops out of my very limited storage space and each time I have to move things around to create workspace on the tiny counter I think ‘just wait until we’ve moved’.
I’ll build a big pantry and if that counter isn’t big enough, I’ll just add something else to work on (I’d like a big butcher block that I can still move around).

:: wondering if it’s that prospect alone that brought the fun back in cooking

:: experimenting with spices I found in the supermarket

:: inventing new dishes that we loved very much.
The one pictured above: I combined diced bacon with a (big) yellow bell pepper, a sweet potato, and a leek, added two teaspoons of the shawarma mix and let it simmer until the veggies were soft(ish). Ate it with rice. Simple, but so good!

:: writing it all down for when I lack inspiration

:: enjoying making coffee with my mother’s old coffee set. She got it when she got married, but it was in her cupboard for decades, because she uses a machine now. She decided to get rid of it when she and my father moved to a smaller house, but I like making coffee like this, so I took it with me to Curaçao.

:: trying to work out a way to stop eating gluten. (I didn’t test if I am celiac, but my grandfather was and my brother and two of the girls are, so it’s a family thing). I was doing great at breakfast (I have been starting the day with two boiled eggs for years now) and dinner (at home, that is. When we eat out I still have to tell myself pizza is not doing me any good), but lunch was hard. Basic Dutch lunch is just some slices of bread, usually with butter or margarine and topped with thinly sliced cheese or meat (ham, sausage, bacon) and we actually prefer to lunch like that.
I already ditched the butter and the cheese (dairy – got that from my mother’s side of the family), but oh, the bread! I love bread so much). My problem is that I can’t eat glutenfree bread, because it usually contains soy (allergic to that) and sugar (I have hypoglycemia). T. eats rice cakes instead of bread, but those have a high glycemic value and my blood sugar went off when I tried that. So now I’m on arepas, Columbian cornbread. These are prebaked from the supermarket, but I plan to try and make them myself in the future. I like how they taste and I can even prepare them in advance when we take lunch to the house.
I’ve been eating arepas for a week now (and thus I’ve been almost gluten-free – I ate a wrap for lunch on my birthday – for a week) and I think my body likes it.

What’s going on in your kitchen?

If you have followed Soulemama in the past, you may realize that posts like this are very much inspired by the way she used to blog. I’ve been missing her blog more than I should (get a life of your own, M!), but a few weeks ago I realized that if I want ‘old-fashioned’ blogging to continue, I’d better start with my own blog and write the kind of posts I want her (and some others who have gone missing) to write. 
So, I’m not trying to be a copycat, I’m just inspired by her blogging and I’m hoping to channel what I miss since she stopped writing into my own blog and into my own way of recording my life – if that makes any sense. I fear it doesn’t, but I wanted to get this out in writing just once. 
Oh well, carry on…