Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.

I knew I was going to have to learn how to cook eventually, and I figured I'd probably do some basic stuff here... but geez, this is getting a little nuts.

The first recipe I made from scratch was a summer zucchini stew. First of all, before coming here I didn't eat zucchini unless it was in zucchini bread. My relationship with zucchini quickly became intimate in Sweden when Esther's mom sent blue-ribbon sized zucchinis with us. In every meal, if there was room to add zucchini, we did. That was the first time I introduced the family to zucchini bread (which was love at first sight) and they taught me that all it takes is a little garlic, olive oil, and pepper to make zucchini delicious. When we came back to Germany we still had two HUGE zucchinis left, so Esther asked me to make lunch featuring zucchini. I did an allrecipes.com search and found the stew recipe. Not only did I not have trouble following the instructions, I even felt comfortable enough to adjust the spices to taste. I definitely still need to learn which spices I like the best and how to combine them- I can do alright, but I would really love to develop my taste palette.

New recipe no. 2 was chicken piccata (not sure what that means, but that's what it's called on allrecipes.com!) and also went well! The helpful thing about cooking websites is that the people who leave comments give recommendations on how to alter the recipes. I was able to take some of the suggestions and tweek the recipe- and it was successfully delicious!

When I was in Austria (and yes, I WILL eventually get around to posting about that), Margarita served the most delicious pumpkin soup. Again, I believe pumpkin should be in pies and cookies... but did you know it can be an ingredient in savory cooking?! CRAZY. I told Esther about the soup, so she asked me to make it.

Fun fact: The baking aisle in German grocery stores leave more than somewhat to be desired. Not only is there no brown sugar (unless you mean raw sugar, which I don't), vanilla extract (you have to use vanilla sugar), evaporated milk (stay tuned), or bags of chocolate chips (there was ONE brand of chocolate chips that came in a tiny little box labeled "Schoko Töpfchen"- I had to trust by the picture that they were, in fact, chocolate chips)... but there is no canned pumpkin.

Moral of the story: if you want to use pumpkins, you have to make your own pumpkin puree. So I found a homemade pumpkin pie recipe that detailed how to puree the pumpkin, and I busted out my iPod and pureed me sum' punkin. It's actually very simple, and it makes me feel like Holly Housewife: kitchen rockstar edition.

With the beautiful fall weather, I was missing Northfield's apple orchard and wishing I could get my hands on some hot cider. I asked Esther, but she said she's only heard of the hard cider. I'm actually not sure how these people have made it through life without hot apple cider and pumpkin carving (Halloween is not really celebrated in Germany... something about the origins being "evil" or something like that...) but I'd like to do my part and make the world a better place, one cup of cider at a time.

The cider process is long, but it doesn't get difficult until the end. It calls for a cheesecloth to strain the liquid through, but one place said you can use a pillowcase. Esther just happened to have a bite-sized white pillow case that was the PERFECT size. I put half through a strainer first, and what didn't strain through I put in the pillowcase. Although it takes a lot of patience (which I may or may not struggle with) to get the juice out, it is very effective. Unfortunately, the insides of the pillowcase look disgusting when you're done. In the three hour process, the apples (complete with peel, stem, and seeds) turn to mush and become a little brown from the quality time spent with the spices. All I'm saying is that, when I was done, the inside of the pillowcase did not look significantly dissimilar from the contents of a fiber-fed baby's diaper. I'm just saying.

While Esther, Frank, and Sara's kindergarten teachers all found it really tastey, the kids were less than impressed. I over-did it with the cloves, so now I know that next time around I will use half the amount. And much more cinnamon and sugar. Duh.

Ah yes, and the evaporated milk. Well, I'd like to make pumpkin pie at some point and I need evaporated milk! I looked, and the store doesn't have it (because that would be helpful- you just can't count on these grocery stores for anything that is in standard American baking and cooking) so I looked online to figure out what exactly evaporated milk is. Turns out, you can make it yourself... so it looks like next time I have four spare hours (ha), I've got me a date with milk and a saucepan.

I asked Esther if I could make a traditional dinner on Thanksgiving, so I'm really looking forward to that. I'm not too worried about mashed potatoes, but learning how to cook a turkey is a different story. I'm actually not sure where I'll be able to get a turkey... I hope I don't have to go farm fresh- Simon has already figured out that the chickens we see on farms are the same ones we eat, and sometimes he eats around the chicken because he feels guilty. Which I find frankly impressive that he put that together himself.

Oh, and last night I whipped up 1700 grams of pumpkin puree so I can make pumpkin cookies when I have time and still have some left over for soup or something else pumpkin-y delicious.

You have my permission to be impressed.