Clearly, I was not meant to be a vegetarian.

It is not that I dislike dishes made from vegetables, it is more that working without meat (which I have not yet found a good source for) leads to some questionable substitutions.  I swear I have had stuffed cabbage before and liked it.  It certainly was not stuffed with lentils.

I embarked on a dinner journey too late in the evening to reasonable begin making stuffed cabbages and pasta sauce from scratch.  The sauce had to be made because many of the commonly available brands have chili in them, or they appeal to a flavor palate that is very different from mine.  I was pretty successful at making the sauce.  Good tomatoes are easy to get, as is tomato puree, and that with some caramelized onions and garlic, along with various dried spices, makes a pretty decent tomato sauce!  I discovered the first time I did this that the sauce was extremely acidic, but I thought that might work well with the sweetness of the cabbages, and I threw some raisins in for good measure.

Since I don't have access to ground beef, I decided to stuff them with a mixture of rice and lentils.  This, of course, meant pre cooking the rice and lentils, which took another half hour.  I also don't have any broth at the moment.  At the very least I have to make some veggie broth soon, because plain rice and lentils is not, to me, an appealing combination.  I was already a couple hours into this process, and I decided to soldier on - after all, the sauce was good, and I do like cabbage.

De-leafing the cabbage started off well.  I was able to get about eight leaves off in tact.  The recipe I was using called for 12, but it wasn't going to happen, plus, I had a feeling I had already exceeded capacity on my casserole dish.  By the time everything was baked, I was well beyond dinner, but, from the outside, things turned out well.

It is not so much that they were bad, as that they were not worth nearly 4 hours of work.  Lentils are not meat.  But I will take them for lunches anyway.

On the plus side, I was able to use the copious amounts of leftover rice and lentils (still no way to measure things!) to make "fried rice."  This was much more successful.  And faster :)

The Perils of Eating Out

While there are many places here I can't eat, and I do cook most meals for myself, every once in a while, it is nice to get dinner at one of the good hotels.  They generally understand allergies, and the menu is extensive.  There are, however, some interesting legal hurdles when it comes to leftovers ...

When at first you don't succeed ...

So, baked goods right off the bat may have been a little ... ambitious.  For the second round in the oven, I decided to cook something a bit less sensitive.  Eggs are easy to get here (although, again, they are much smaller), as are veggies, so frittata seemed like a good bet.  

Don't they look cute in the pie pan?

Cheese was the challenge here.  Amul has started making a "gouda," but I think it tastes more like cheddar (think Kraft cheddar).  It is, however grate-able, so in it went.  I also decided to put some "pizza cheese" which comes in a big block wrapped in foil on the top.  Mostly because I wanted to see how it worked.  In future, I will probably stick with the gouda. 

This went much more smoothly than the cookies.  No burning, no batches ruined!  And I got a delicious several meals out of it!

Why measuring things (and cooking temperature, and the kind of flour you use) matters ...

Priority one for me was getting an oven.  Turns out I put almost everything I cook in the oven.  Getting an oven wasn't hard.  (Getting it hooked up, and properly installed, and making sure it couldn't melt anything or set anything on fire, well, that's another story).

To inaugurate the oven, I made cookies.  They look good don't they!

Of course, I didn't take pictures of the poor, unfortunate "test" cookies.

In the end, they were tasty, but much cakey-er than this recipe usually is.  The likely culprits:

1. Oven temperature.  I converted to celsius for the oven, but the temp gauge isn't incredibly detailed. 
2. Ingredients.  I had to make a few substitutions so I could use things I could easily get here, but by far the biggest issue might be the flour.  All purpose flour, this was not.  More research required.  Also, I'm pretty sure eggs are smaller here.
3. Measuring.  Ok, this is probably it.  I don't have measuring cups or measuring spoons.  They are proving ... challenging ... to acquire.  So in my enthusiasm, I eyeballed it.  And halved the recipe.  And needed to substitute for several things.  But not really knowing how much baking soda is in you cookies?  That's definitely not going to yield the optimal result.