Food and Cooking

For our food-loving friends, I thought this article was very interesting:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703312504575142911175155260.html?mod=WSJASIA_hpp_sections_lifestyle#

... food ingredients passed down as heirlooms, each generation adding its own flavor to the past. Isn't that wonderful? 

Cooking these days has been a challenge, and not completely satisfactory. Our kitchen has two burners, so I can cook two things at once - or three, if one is rice, because we bought a rice cooker. Here is a photo: 

and here is our Easter dinner in the process of preparation: 

We had pork chops and sweet corn - and rice, of course! 

Fresh vegetables on this island are expensive, and good ones are difficult to find - even durable things like onions suffer from being shipped to Guam. The grocery stores are stocked, but their stock is bruised, moldy, wilted and unappealing. It's another thing we'll have to get used to... in the meantime, we've done alright with frozen and canned vegetables - and scallions. For some reason, scallions grow locally and are available in the produce section. 

You'll notice in that photo that I have PAM spray olive oil - it was the only "extra virgin olive oil" that I could find! The store did have some regular (non e.v.) olive oil, from Spain, but I didn't want to take a chance on it... I have heard that cheap olive oil can be bitter and unpleasant. 

Meat is also a new challenge - a whole chicken is something like $1.80, on sale; and the stores stock meat from places that aren't the US - Danish beef? I don't know anything about it, so I have been avoiding it. But there are all kinds of interesting cuts - frozen beef's livers like dark red bricks, tripes and beef intestines and hog maws and parts that I can't even identify... and familiar parts cut into new shapes for new purposes. 

As we get more settled, we'll start to figure out what the locals do. In the meantime, I'd love to hear suggestions about meals to make with one pot, one frying pan, one rice cooker, green onions, and canned or frozen vegetables. Any ideas? 

UPDATE: per pound! I meant that a whole chicken runs about $1.80/lb, on sale. If a whole chicken were $1.80, we'd be eating chicken every night... chicken, whole chicken and nothing but chicken!