Foodie

It has come to my attention that I am sliding very speedily down a slippery slope towards being a real live "foodie".

How this happened is slightly mysterious. I've spent 20 years of your life using kitchens for nothing more exciting than a simple pasta sauce. I cooked a total of 5 or 6 times on my gap year (restaurant food is SOOO GOOD and SOOO CHEAP in China). The biggest thing I made last year was a Mars Bar cheesecake. And yet, suddenly, I'm making meal plans and marinating foods. MARINATING. Incidentally, I did just look that up. Marinate is a verb, marinade a noun. I am officially marinating chicken in a tikka marinade. Oh, and when I say tikka marinade, I mean spices and juice I put into a bowl with chicken, not a bottle of stuff. I have also taken to buying beans and then SOAKING them and buying peanuts and SHELLING them in order to GRIND them in order to put them in a mixture with SPICES and make a food out of them... sure, that recipe was a slight disaster but the diagnosis remains the same. I am a foodie.

It gets worse. After getting back to the house at the beginning of this term, I decided to reorganise my stuff into one "small" corner of the cupboard. This small corner turned out, at the time, to be about a quarter of the cupboard that six of us officially share for putting non-refrigerated and non-canned foods in. Phased for but a second, I then went to Tesco's last week and ended up with another several bottles of different herbs and spices. Oh, and cider vinegar. And balsamic vinegar, and gram flour, and... you get the point. The point is that I have taken in a big way to Cooking, with a capital C. I have no idea how this happened, and I have no idea why other people don't do it, and therefore I am handling it in my usual gracious way of denying any sort of difficulty or oddity in the situation and just thinking other people are a bit pathetic for not being able to marinate food. (It's not actually that hard to marinate a food though. Just saying.)

This is, of course, going to get even faggier when my veganism kicks in for Lent, although I'm still cautiously optimistic about how well I'm going to cope with it. There are certainly plenty of recipes I can make, although it might descend into curry and potatoes by week 3... I cling to the hope that vegan chocolate will be awesome and tide me over.