August 2008 Archives

Sometime in January or February, my friends Thomas and Marissa and myself had a brief, not-entirely-serious discussion about making a decent dinner once a week. Toward the end of February, it came up again and we determined to do it for real. The first week, Tom took charge and we made steak au poivre with buttered red potatoes. It was a success and that settled it.

Since February 28th, we have made dinner at least every Friday. A few weeks were exceptions, when Tom or Tom and Marissa were out of town and for Tom's birthday. From February until June, we had an uninterrupted stretch of fifteen weeks. We didn't even break for the week before or after finals. The system was as so: every week, one person would take charge, deciding what we'd make and directing in the kitchen. We rotated so that everyone had their own weeks. The whole thing worked out beautifully.

We all made an attempt to expand our repertoire of recipes and of kitchen skills. We all had a couple weeks where we made something familiar to us but it was usually a recipe the others hadn't used before. Though there were a few times that things went wrong in not-nice ways, not a single week ended in a bona fide disaster. Everything was edible, everything was delicious. And even when things got expensive, the cost was split three ways. I don't think anything ever cost more than $12 a person and when it was that much, there were always copious leftovers. This week, our eighteenth and (for the next nine months) final, was mine. I made pasties at a cost of $12 a person. Each pasty was large enough that no one ate more than one. The recipe claimed to make twelve but the filling portion of the recipe is easily large enough to make another six. There will be leftovers for a while.

For a couple of months, I've been tossing around the idea of compiling all of the recipes we've used and making a small recipe book to give to family and friends (and to use ourselves). I'd like us to talk about our reasons for choosing the recipes we did. And of course, we now have our own notes to add to the recipes. (Make only two thirds the amount of filling the recipe calls for. And feel free to halve it.)

I think the most interesting thing about the adventure has been the reactions I get when I talk about it with others. I think a lot of people are surprised that three twenty-something college students are willing to get together once a week, no matter how tired or busy they are, and sit down to a good dinner they've made themselves. And that we've been so willing to try new things. Before we started, we were much more heavily reliant on eating out or a few recipes without much effort, thought or originality. I think we were hardly alone in that. Now though, we're much more likely to pool our resources and make something nice, even if it isn't complicated.

Going on exchange has proven to be a learning experience even before I've left the country. As mentioned in my last post, I'll be spending nine months in Cork City, Ireland attending University College Cork. For those who don't know me, I'm from Missoula, Montana, a small town in the western United States. Proper preparation to leave the country has required a great deal of care and research. I figure someone else might benefit from my efforts.

I take a prescription medication. It is a controlled substance in both the United States and under a United Nations treaty. However, finding information on the legal status of the drug in Ireland has been very difficult. A great deal of googling turned up nothing on Irish schedules. A call to the Irish consulate in San Francisco yielded a recommendation that I check http://agriculture.ie/, but said department appears to have nothing to do with drugs. A call to the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C. yielded a phone message telling me to email what appears to the email address of a single person working in Customs. I've emailed them and I'm awaiting a response. I suppose the lesson here is to keep calling around and researching until you can get some information. Additionally, I've acquired a letter (on official letterhead) from the prescriber of my medication. I would really rather not run into hassle in Customs.

Dealing with electronics and other electrical appliances has been an experience. In the US, current comes in at 120V with a frequency of 60Hz. In Ireland, it's 230V with a frequency of 50Hz. My research has indicated that it's possible to buy a converter that will deal with the voltage difference but that there's no way to convert frequency. I'm fortunate: all four of the electrical devices I plan on taking with me (a laptop, a cell phone, a digital camera and an electric razor) can accept a range of inputs. All are 100-240V and can accept either 50Hz or 60Hz. This makes my task much easier. I only need an adapter to change the shape of the plugs that I have.

I must admit some laziness. After researching what I would need, I simply went down to my local department store and poked around until I found an adapter set. I purchased the Targus World Power Travel Adapters set. Admittedly, it's compact and looks well-suited to travel. However, the plugs are ungrounded (the earth pin on the UK/Ireland plug is plastic) and thus unsuitable for more sensitive electronics. To my credit, I read the package but it said nothing about this on the outside of the plastic and the plastic earth pin was not visible without opening the package. I'll need to return this and hope the department store is forgiving. Fed up, I hopped online and searched around. I need a grounded plug but not a converter. I eventually settled on the Samsonite grounded United Kingdom plug. It's specific to my purpose and is cheap enough that I can buy a few to plug in more than one of my devices at the same time. Hopefully this will serve me well.

As with most ventures, money is an issue. At one point, I had to wire money to Ireland to pay for housing. The financial institution I've been a member of for some time is very small and local and couldn't deal in foreign currency so I had to start calling the banks. Wells Fargo, despite its size, was unable to do anything in another currency. A smaller regional bank was able to do it just fine, though. The wire transfer went through the Bank of New York and, because it was in another currency, they charged no fee. (The regional bank still charged me, though it was significantly less.) There were two snags with the transfer. The first was that the bank required an address for the beneficiary and none had been provided. Google to the rescue. If you have to do a wire transfer, find this address before you go in. The second was that it was after 2PM and the bank wouldn't send out the transfer until the next day so an exact amount couldn't be fixed on the currency exchange. I didn't leave enough leeway in the amount I put in my account. I had checked the exchange rate online before going in but due to the (relatively) small size of my transfer I wasn't able to get an ideal rate. The transfer was about $100 more expensive than I'd anticipated, with only a couple of dollars attributable to change in rate. Provide a fair bit of wiggle room here so that there are no delays.

Finally, a smaller tip: I briefly had a scare where I couldn't find my passport. In the US, you can show up in person to a passport facility and ask for an expedited passport. It takes two weeks (as opposed to the usual four) but costs a bit extra. If you lose your passport a couple weeks before you're set to go, this may be a lifesaver.