Not so ovenless anymore....

 Well, I held out for almost six weeks without an oven, thinking if the Chinese do it, so can I! But in the end, I gave in.... just too many things I wanted to eat that I wasn't able to cook with just 1 stovetop burner. Although what we have is hardly an oven. It's more of a toaster oven on steriods. The front door isn't insulated, nor does it seal closed--there's a huge gap all the way around so hot air spews right back out. Funny how back in the States everything is made in China, and the quality is fine. Seems like the dregs and rejects are sold here...and not just in regards to ovens.... But so far I've made baked potatoes, brownies, sourdough bread, and apple crisp and it's been such a treat to have "Western" food!

So does this mean I have to rename my blog?

In other cooking adventures, I tried a Chinese BBQ pork recipe--it's soy based rather than tomato and uses Chinese 5 spice (cinnamon, star anise, fennel, cloves, and Sichuan pepper). The 5 spice here smells (and tastes) FANTASTIC! There are five flavors in Chinese cooking--sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty and  the 5 spice is a mixture of these tastes that supposedly balances the yin yang of food. In the end, the flavor was good, but it was pretty salty on account of all the soy.... so I'll have to play with it a bit next time for better yin yang ;-) I made scallion pancakes (think Chinese naan) to go with it, which were pretty good, and we think they can stand in for burrito shells when we're dying for Mexican food in the (near) future. (We'll be running to Mexico Lindo in Melrose whenever we're back in the fall!). So to hide the saltiness of the pork, I decided to make Chinese pork buns. We scoured the grocery store and bought a white powder we were praying was baking powder (it had a picture of pork buns on the package, so we thought it had to be it!). It was not. The dough was very strange from the get go, but I continued on. I think they were the grossest thing I've cooked in my adult life. I have no idea what our 'baking powder' was but the dough was rubber and had  a residual taste and smell of bleach! Blech! So in the end we broke them open and just ate the salty filling I'd been trying to disguise....