New Recipes

Moving to a new house has meant getting a new sense of bearings and I am learning more about Lugo everyday. (meaning I only got lost twice this week trying to find my new house) I have also now determined the location of the four nearest grocery stores: Gadis, Mercadona, Froiz and Carrefour. I visited them all on Monday when I had the idea I would try making Spanokopita. It wasn´t even a Canadian recipe, for some reason thinking Greece was closer to Spain I thought it would be easier. The problem was that in my head I was thinking in Canadian terms and I have to remind myself: ¨Katie you´re not in Canada anymore´. The biggest problem was Phylo pastry which I never considered trying to make, but since I couldn´t find it I decided to use regular pastry instead. This would mean making more of an Empanada Spanokopita. The spinach was easy enough, but the Feta cheese was not. I stood in front of an amazing selection of cheeses carefully looking for the Feta. I started to have a bit of a cultural moment looking and thinking ´how is it possible that they don´t have Feta cheese ?´Phylo pastry was one thing, maple syrup is another but Feta cheese is European. Taking a second look I eventually found a small package and all was back to normal.

Then the next challenge was using the oven. The rolling pin problem was easily solved with a wine bottle, but I could not understand the oven. Usually Canadian recipes use Farenheit and ovens here use Celsius and similarily the conversion from cups to grams is not so simple, but the problem here was that all the numbers had been worn off and really a better description is that they have been painted over with black paint, but I cannot think of a reason for doing that. When one of my roommates came home he explained how to turn it on by adjusting three different dials and said to put it about half. Creative cooking at its best and the result was edible, but not what I had been expecting.

My new housemates must think I am a little crazy with all of this because I get the impression they don´t really cook.