I’m totally lying. Neither of these were Spanish. They just aren’t quite normal.

The only worthwhile thing I did today, besides spending a little bit of time looking at universities and emailing professors, was cooking.

I went to the supermarket at El Corte Inglés today, the huge (expensive) department store, because I wanted to get some things that they didn’t sell at Carrefour, which is in and of itself a monstrousity. (Although the one by me is a “Carrefour Express,” and smaller than many of them.) I bought baking soda (which was by the spices, rather than being anywhere near the baking powder, which is with instant puddings; at Carrefour, they sold baking soda with cosmetics), and a bunch of chorizo (which, by the way, is the best kind of sausage I have ever had; I’ve known this to be true for years, and it’s nice to get it easily here), and a few other things (like a Weissbier, and some cheese).

After lunching at 16:00 (yeah, I know), I decided to make cookies. We had a baking sheet, of the sort that fits into the oven, but it was filthy and as though it was mostly used as a drip pan, so I went out again and went to the chino (yes, that’s what they call convenience stores here; yes, it’s racist) a block away and bought steel wool, as well as a few other cleaning things I’d been wanting, and cleaned the sheet pan so I could use it.

Now the thing about making cookies is that I don’t have a measuring cup here, much less one with US units on it. Nor do I have a scale. (I’m going to buy one or the other before the end of the month, I’m sure. I just need to find my way to the supply store I read about a few days ago.) So I was kind of doing these things by eye. Google told me that 5.3 shots were a cup, so I found a drinking glass that was roughly one cup. All in all, I think I measured things pretty well. They don’t sell brown sugar here, not in supermarkets, so I used white sugar only; I didn’t have vanilla extract, either. And obviously, I chopped up a chocolate bar to make chips. But otherwise, I had everything I needed; the dough tasted more-or-less right. But when I made the first batch, they were crispy and flat, more like a sort of butter crisp. Very tasty (except for the ones that were burnt), though. So I lowered the temperature, and none of the rest of the cookies burned — but they were all flat and crispy.

I looked at Clotilde Dusolier’s awesome list of conversions and equivalents, which she made when she was writing a cookbook for release in the US, and she says that a half-cup of butter (1 stick in the US) is equivalent to 113 grams of butter. But I’d used a full thing of butter here — 250 grams — so 20 grams extra. Which wouldn’t be that bad, except that I’d probably used less flour than I should’ve, and so the cookies were melting into crispy messes. Delicious crispy messes, but nonetheless.

At 21:30 or so, I made dinner. I was going to make a stir-fry, and I put up rice in our rice-cooker (yes, we have a rice-cooker; hooray!), and then I realized that my mushrooms had gone bad. I had an eggplant, but a stir-fry can be two items, but never just one. So I fried the eggplant with garlic and onion, added an egg, and then chopped up a bit of chorizo and added it in. It actually ended up being really tasty atop rice, with a bit of soy sauce. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised, but it was a nice unexpected outcome.

Very good. Russel is playing Passion Pit, so I’ll leave you with the video for the song he just put on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVstHPhaJ6M