Level Up!

This is the tale of a sidequest:

First step, rally funds. This was tricky, because the exchange rate is never pretty, but I managed to get together some pounds to head out to Tesco with.

Next, at Tesco, I got to run around and select from whatever was leftover. It was six in the evening, you see, and the large parade of Monday shoppers had come and gone. It turned out that I was missing a green pepper, tabasco sauce, worchestire sauce, french onion soup, and red pepper - I think that was it. But all other gumbo ingredients were purchased, and some were finagled. The only sausage they had there were British, breakfast, cumberland sausages, which was not what I needed. The only chorizzo they had there came in thin slices! So, I bought some cumberland sausages and made due. But, I did get two secret bonus items!

Extra Virgin Olive Oil - why settle for less when the oldest in the world drinks two glasses of it a day? It's supposed to work wonders for almost any and everything in your body

Quinoa: (keen-wah, like Quina!) a super-food that Clay von Carlowitz got me on to. It was tucked back amongst other healthy foods at Tesco, and I checked the bag out. It can be substituted in for pasta or rice...hmm... Aquired Quinoa! ::Zelda item song::

Next, loaded with groceries, I began to return home, but made one final stop at the Co-op to look for a green pepper, and there it was! Aquired Green Pepper! ::Zelda item song::

Alas, when I got back, I got back late, and had to go make buckeyes with Ken, which was an amusing and rewarding experience in its own, but a complete and utter side-quest to my already important side-quest of making gumbo! I got to eat some though, so it was all good - you throw a buckeye in front of a roving Griffin, and he'll stop to eat it. It works much better than sylkis greens or kupo nuts.

But, once they were finished, and even though it was 11 p.m., I went about making my chicken-sausage gumbo. At first I thought I had too many vegetables, but then a sauteed them, and they shrunk. Then I had to deal with the cumberland sausages, which aren't meant to be cut up before they're cooked so they kind of squirted around. I managed it. Then there was cooking chicken, and I'm a huge freak about salminella, and how I don't want to get it, so that was interesting. And I almost set off the fire alarm with all the smoke in the kitchen, so once all the ingredients were cooked I stopped and waited for probably 5 minutes and just vented the kitchen.

Then came the making gravy from powder (because NO OTHER GRAVY EXISTS IN ENGLAND), and straining out all the little chunky bits that didn't want to disolve. Then I split the soup contents into two pots cause there was too much, so I had to halve everything I was doing. There was this awkward phase where I was putting a little gravy and then a little cream of mushroom soup for the broth, then stiring. And it was all working, until I put the soup in first, and when I went to strain the gravy chunks, I left the strainer on top of the just-plopped-in soup, so I had this gravy-soupy mass stuck to the bottom of the strainer, it was all quite amusing. Then stuff started sticking to the bottom of the pan, it was crazy.

Then I cooked the quinoa. An interesting experience, because quinoa, when it's cooked, looks like this. It's crazy! It has naturally occuring swirls in every bite! And it fills you up right quick, especially when served with chicken-sausage gumbo on top of it, which turned out to be AMAZING.

And I know this sounds absurd, but the sheer act of cooking in the kitchen for probably something like 3 hours, followed by the discovery of quinoa being good, followed by the even better discovery of the gumbo being good, has really made my, well, not life, but week, at least. I don't often get things right - I get things close enough to good, or acceptable, or something, but there's aren't a lot that I can claim to have done outrightly right. This gumbo was right, because it was tasty. And I'm kind of ecstatic about it.

Level up!