Touching Raw Chicken and Other Feats of Incredible Bravery

I think raw meat is disgusting. Just seeing someone else deal with it can make me dry-heave a little. One time my mom made me rinse off salted pork to put in something she was cooking for a holiday once, and it was traumatic to say the least.

I was content to just cook myself vegetarian meals and eat meat while out at restaurants while in France. But alas, I found myself missing chicken as it's not the most popular meat item here. So I caved and bought some raw chicken filets to cook.

I asked Miki for some cooking advice. To my dismay, he told me that I would have to touch the chicken at some point. I didn't accept this and looked up recipes online. I found a simple one for chicken paprika with mushrooms that I followed somewhat. 

I opened the chicken package. Took the chicken out with my hands. Cut off the fatty parts (which are harder to distinguish from the meat than I thought). Rinsed the chicken off. It was a transforming experience, I have to say. It was actually a little fun. I felt like a real person. 

I put paprika and garlic onto the chicken before putting it into hot oil. I let it brown a little then I covered it with big pieces of onion and mushrooms. When it was done, it was pretty delicious (if I may say so myself).

My first chicken dish and I didn't even poison myself!

I was sure to clean the kitchen well so I didn't poison any of my hall-mates either, as I hope (and assume) they do for me.

As evidenced, I have been attempting to get a little more sophisticated with my cooking in the dorm. In my defense, it's hard to make a masterpiece meal with one pot, one skillet, and one cooking utensil.

But here are some more things that I've made! 

I've spared everyone the pictures of my many sandwiches. 

Lentils and rice with ham:

Either the rice or the lentils were under-cooked a little, but it was good. Protein. 

 Stir-fried zucchini with pesto sauce and pasta:

Corkscrew noodles make it fancy.

Stir-friend eggplant: my first time cooking eggplant which was a little under-whelming

I added onions plus green AND red peppers. 

More zucchini: This time I decided I wanted to make fried zucchini like you can get in Italian restaurants at home. However I only decided this once I had already started grilling the zucchini in my pan. So I added more oil and sprinkled pancake mix over it. It was pretty weird, but some pieces actually turned out to taste like real fried zucchini! The other pieces just tasted like zucchini with a lot of olive oil...

Don't worry, the suspicious black juice in the pan is just from mushrooms. 

As a side note, it's really easy to find out which grocery items are really American and not popular here. An excellent example is pancake mix. I bought a big box for about 3 euros, which isn't bad. But then I opened it and discovered that it had just two packets inside, that were portioned for like 5 pancakes each. Zut alors.