Daily Report: Cooking With Gas

I'm starting to take an interest in cooking. One of the things I didn't count on when I moved out to Jasaan would be the difficulty in keeping myself gastronomically entertained: The local market has few ingredients, and the local grocer has an incredibly poor selection. The few restaurants in town have almost-acceptable menus, but it seems that most days (or rather, always) they are "sold out" of the majority of things I would order.

Of course, one can drive into Cagayan de Oro to purchase things, but that is a fair trip and while bringing back takeout is a nice event, doing it more than a couple of times per week is tedious.

So, I've taken an interest in cooking my own food. After conquering my mother's BBQ chicken recipe, I leapt with both feet straight on to pizza. From scratch.

So, on Friday night Epril and I went to CDO and bought flour, yeast, tomatoes, spices, and mozzarella cheese, and on Saturday I made enough dough for 2 pizzas and a nice batch of pizza sauce.

Since it was also Inday's 14th birthday, it was also decided to bake a cake... although we used the instant cake variety. I did buy confectioner's sugar though to make icing, as that seemed quite easy.

So after kneading and stewing and mixing and pouring, I went to turn on the oven on my new range: Nothing. No gas was getting to the oven. First time to use it, and it was already broken. I was once again the victim of the "everything I buy is a piece of shit" situation. (We called the La Germania appliance corporation, and they promised to send a repairman. We'll see, but I'm doubtful.)

Fortunately, the whole impetus for this undertaking was the fact that Mike Bird has a pizza oven that he bought back from Australia, which has been sitting forgotten at his house for 4 months. We brought that back to our house and fired it up.

The pizzas came out fantastic. Chocolate birthday cake: Oh hell no.

Anyway, what I'm actually thinking of next is to make my own mozzarella cheese. Water buffalo milk is the best milk for mozzarella cheese. There are lots of water buffalo around here, although I've never seen anybody milking one. I'll bet that I could make mozzarella cheese using water buffalo milk for a quarter of the price that I paid for the cheese ($10 per pound) I bought in CDO. (They sell mozzarella cheese-making kits here. Based on the photos, it seems that one gallon of milk makes about one pound of cheese.)

Actually, making the pizza entirely from base ingredients, I could make a 16-inch cheese pizza for 50 pisos... $1. I'll bet those would sell well at a profit. The place in town that sells this god-awful 8-inch pizza using Velveeta, pineapple, and hotdogs (but no pizza sauce) sells theirs for 120 pisos each.