Improvising

In September, I moved into a new apartment. It's a lovely, tiny little place with lots of light, high ceilings, and comically slanted floors. Over the past month, my roommate and I have filled the place up with a healthy mix of Ikea and familial cast-off furniture, stuffed the bookshelf with everything from Anna Karenina to Season 9 of Friends, and, after many hours spent talking to tech support, finally got our internet up and running. Amazingly, it's starting to really feel like home.

But it's been a hell of a process. Especially in the kitchen.

Our kitchen never felt particularly empty, just rather mis-stocked. When we moved in, we brought a lot of non-essential dishes and gadgets with us. We had a crystal sugar bowl, a purple eggbeater, a viking hat cookie cutter, a couple of pastry brushes, half a cocktail shaker, and a sushi mat. We also had a grand total of two forks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of kitchen MacGyvering over the past month:

Knives:
Up until a few weeks ago, the only knives we had in the kitchen were butter knives. This got to be problematic rather quickly, since things like potatoes and onions don't take too well to butter knives. After sawing through a few vegetables too many (eggplants were especially horrible), I gave up and scrubbed down the blade on my leatherman. We've since sprung for a basic set, but for a good month, my cutting board looked like this:

Microwave:
After a summer where I was either too hot or too busy to cook much, suddenly not having a microwave was a bit of a shock. But I'm starting to not mind so much. It means that I have to take more time with my food, which to me is the same thing as taking more time to take care of myself. It also means I'm more likely to spontaneously throw something together, which sometimes ends in disaster, but can also sometimes end in something magical and delicious and new.

That said, it's still on the list, mostly because some days I just want to be able to make nachos in two minutes flat.

Oven Thermometer:
I was worried about this one, since I like to bake and wasn't really sure how that was going to work out with a blank dial on the oven controls. After a bit of fiddling, I resigned myself to the fact that there was no way I could tell the actual numerical temperature without a thermometer. But I did manage to work out three very vague and unscientific categories of warm, hot, and very hot. As long as I regularly checked up on whatever was in the oven, I could just leave it until it looked done. And miraculously, it turns out that was all that I needed.

Rolling Pin:
So a rolling pin doesn't really count as a necessity. But once it starts getting colder, I get a little antsy if I can't make apple pie. I tried a few things as a substitute. First was the water bottle approach. This worked reasonably well, until I thought about all the places I bring my water bottle and realized that, even after a good wash, I don't exactly trust it to be clean. Next I tried a soup can, but found that the edges cut into the crust. Finally I settled on the trusty Trader Joe's wine bottle option. Cheap, delicious, and practical. What more can a girl ask for?