Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Learning to cook, all over again

So, two of our kids have been begging for mac n cheese.  My hubby and those two kids are big fans of Kraft Mac N Cheese, but that is not sold here.  So, I thought I'd make some mac n cheese from scratch.  It wouldn't be like Kraft, but maybe they'd be happy with it.  I haven't made it for years and my recipes and cookbooks are still waiting to be delivered here.  I searched online for a recipe, but what came up first were all metric recipes (I searched on Google Australia).  Metric would be fine but I have no idea how much 50g of butter is and have no scale for measuring it.  So I searched again and found some more recipes, this time in standard measurements.  No problem I thought.  I started boiling water and preheating the oven, which for some reason only went to 250 degrees.  How was I going to cook something at 350?  I just set the oven to high and went about my way.  I finished the mac n cheese and put into the oven to bake.  After a very short time in the oven, a light went off in my head and I realized that the temps on the oven were Celsius!  Oh crap, I yanked my mac n cheese out, but it was already very crisp on top.  I cooled the oven down to the proper temp of about 175 and continued baking.  Of course, I was trying to be on the ball with dinner for once.  While it was baking, Jay emailed to let me know that we were eating out with a couple people from work.  Oh.  So I then had to cool down the mac n cheese all the way and put in the fridge for the next day. 
We ate it yesterday with pork cutlets, veggies, and pineapple.  It wasn't very good.  I will need to find a different recipe and next time make sure that we are eating at home. 
On a related note, the pork cutlets were great.  Meat selection in grocery stores is very different from the US.  There is only a small amount of pork available.  Beef is about the same but not labeled at 93% lean or anything.  Chicken is much smaller than in the US.  There is also a huge selection of lamb (Jay loves, but I do not), mutton (never tried it), veal (no thanks), and kangaroo.  Yes, I said kangaroo.  There is also a little ground turkey for $10 a kilogram.  All the meat here is healthier than in the US.  No hormones and most things are free range. 
I'm sure that I get the hang of it.  I will just need to make a cheat sheet for the temps. 
On a different topic, the kids' beds here are not twin beds.  They are single beds.  Single beds are a fair bit smaller than twins.  What this means is that all the twin bed sheets and bed pads won't fit.  Boy, am I glad that I used some of our weight allowance to ship them.  Geez. 

1 comment:

  1. Alton Brown does a good Mac n Cheese and I follow a blog: Cooksterella, a friend of a friend. She is in the Netherlands and uses the same measurements that would be commom in AU...she also includes a link to a conversion page so you can make do either way.

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