Cooking and food related stuff

 {salted peanut butter cookies}

{vanilla ice cream sandwich}

 {Chinese supermarket}

{miso, sambal olelek, sesame oil, bok choy, kimchi, sprouts} 

 {roasted pears}

I use cooking as a distraction from school, bad weather, bad days at school, feeling lonely.
It's gone great so far; I did a handful of recipes, new recipes.

I have to admit I'm really psyched about this Chinese market located not to far from my home. I just feel a bit intimidated, cause they have loads of stuff and ingredients and I've been trying to narrow it down to a few recipes to do.

I've mostly been cooking recipes from one of my favorite blogs out there: Orangette. Molly, the writer is awesome. I mentioned her a while back, as she has a podcast I listen to now and used to listen massively at home in Iasi. Molly has a couple of recipes there, Asian inspired, and I gave those a try. I have no photos, cause I forgot to take any but be sure they were good looking and pretty delicious. The recipes are: Soba Noodles with Peanut-Citrus Sauce ( I did not use soba noodles because I'm not a big fan, at all. They are made of buckwheat flour and have a distinct smell and taste that I just think takes over. I used regular noodles from my Chinese store) and Kimchi Fried Rice, which was deliciously garlic-y. These recipes made a couple of servings so I was able to eat them several times on weeknights and did not have to cook every time a whole new thing.

I did this cookie recipe and these roasted pears last weekend. The cookies were good, I shared them around. People were pleased.
The pears deserve a whole new paragraph. Like seriously. They were just wonderful. If you have the chance I urge you to do them as soon as possible. I was planning to cook them on a day/weekend like this: cold, rainy, miserable. But instead I did them on a sunny and breezy afternoon and they were just as good. But imagine cooking them on a lousy, cold evening. We all know pears are hard and require a fair amount of chewing, but this way of cooking makes them like pudding, so soft, so vanilla-y, caramel-y and they will make you eat them all at once. I did ten halves/ five pears and they barely made it for me to eat them the second time. Next time I'll do more of them, and maybe share them, maybe.

{natas}

{ espresso shot}

{roasted chestnuts - pretty common here}

A bit on Portuguese food habits.
Given Portugal's location and all that stuff, I was expecting people here to be eating loads of fruit and vegetables, sea food ( they do, a lot) like it's sister Mediterranean countries: Spain, Italy. But they don't really. Not that much. I mean, they do have loads more exotic fruits and veggies and sometimes a trip to the supermarket can be an exciting adventure, but at least in the house I live and at the school canteen, people are eating fat, greasy foods. What is up with that?
From what I've seen at school, I've recognized a pattern. School courses start at 8-9-10 am and at 10-10.30 they take a brake - the professors and students also. They get coffee - (they drink these petite coffee shots with sugar, which I can't understand. They are really into their coffee) and maybe a pastry and they smoke a cigarette or two, do a bit of socializing.  Then they go back to their course and at 1 pm everybody stops what they're doing and they get lunch at the canteen(some bring their lunch from home and heat it up in the microwave). The break is an hour long. They eat - pretty slow, talk, have a coffee and maybe dessert at the end and then some more smoking. Then at 2 pm everybody gets on with some more classes. And this is what I find very difficult to do. There were times when I almost fell asleep in my chair. You just slump there and try to concentrate. It's hard to pay attention after the siesta you've had.
All in all, as you've noticed, I prefer cooking my own recipes rather than trying out their stuff. At least for now.