Have You Had Breakfast?

I'm not entirely obsessed with food (maybe?), but I do like to eat, and a good portion of my job is to feed people.  And they have to eat all the time, like three times a day, so much of my struggle at this point is figuring out how to put food on my family (thanks forever to George W Bush for that turn of phrase). With luck, I need to make reasonably healthy, fresh food that my children will actually eat, in reasonable enough variety that I'm not super bored making the same stuff all the time. So yes, I make it harder than it probably needs to be, but I like the challenge of doing anything well, and there does seem to be a unique heart-tummy connection. When I make their favorite foods, I'm not only nourishing my children physically, I'm also loving them in a tangible way. That's a widely accepted thing, right? There are foods that make you feel better because they're love-foods, and there are certain meals for everyone that make you feel immediately at home. 

That's part of the problem with moving to a new place; it's hard to recreate the best homey comfort foods when you need them most. I'm lacking either ingredients or tools or space or energy to nourish my children and myself with the foods we need most. My son keeps asking for meatloaf, and I'm still about three ingredients shy of being able to make it so that it will be "right" for him. I know that Singaporeans attach great importance to food, too, and I suspect in time the things we already live here will become similarly important comfort foods (one day I'm going to tell you about Nasi Lemak, the perfect meal), but for now I spend most of my time figuring out how I'm going to get the next fruit/veg/protein/carb combo sourced and served. When I get that combined with comfort, it's just pure bonus. 

In that interest, I do have some fancy new appliances in my fancy new apartment, and though I'm excited about them, I'm also a little intimidated by them, as you might be able to tell by my ("fancy") sneering.  

I did, after all, have to make an appointment to get a LESSON on how to use my fancy new appliances (and how to pronounce Miele--they said "mee-lah," in case you, like me, have been going around for years not saying the name aloud to avoid embarrassing yourself but pronouncing it "myell" in your head), like I've not been using a dang oven my whole life.  For a moment, my natural arrogance almost took over and induced me to try to use them before I had the lesson, but luckily my practicality kicked in; these things are useful but complicated, and I certainly would have damaged something irreparably.  After my lesson, I made myself some coffee, and the other night, I roasted some veggies in the oven(I do have a stove, but the gas for one burner isn't on yet, and the other two burners work by induction, and I don't yet have pans that work), but the time came for me to tackle that middle entity.  It's a steam oven.  

I guess they're a thing here; the Miele lady who gave me my two-hour lesson (mostly about the very extensive and very loving cleaning processes for each very fancy appliance) was super excited about how well it cooks rice, and she showed me how I could use it to cook an entire meal.    She suggested fish, and though I could happily eat seafood every night, my family mostly desires more substantial proteins, so I had to get creative.  My college roomie's mother had taught her to make Chicken Adobo years ago, which I learned in turn from her; it's a recipe with not too many ingredients that I've made in the crock pot at home, and I guessed that anything you can make in a crock pot you can make in a steamer.  So I double-checked safe cooking times for chicken, guessed at which of the 4 million unfamiliar and minimally-labeled-in-English vinegars in the grocery store might taste good, blindly grabbed a local green, and set off to make a one-appliance meal.

So, to use the steam oven, you turn it on, fill the tank with water, set the timer, and let it go.  It takes three or four minutes the water to boil, and then, as you might expect, it fills with steam and stuff.  I put the rice in a big tray with water on the bottom, then a few minutes later added the oddly-cut but still recognizable chicken thighs with Adobo recipe stuff in the middle, and a few minutes before the timer went off put my unfamiliar but fresh-smelling greens on top.  I did something new, it was easy, and praise be, all the pans for the steamer go in the dishwasher, which this apartment also has, and for real, I couldn't be happier.

Even better, we all ate piles of fluffy rice and sweet-bitter crunchy-tender greens contentedly.  It wasn't complicated or Insta-worthy, but it was so good.  And here's the power of food; I could have been sitting in our freshman-year dorm room in front of the mini-fridge, snacking on chicken straight from the ziploc bag it came in from home or at the baptism party of my god-daughter, where my roomie's Mama had made a whole pot of Adobo and I probably ate seven pieces or more.  That salty-tart chickeny flavor hit my tongue and I knew there were people in the world who love me.   I know it would have been better had I browned the chicken, I probably needed to add more garlic, and I'm not yet Mama enough for anything I cook to be THAT good, but I made that flavor for myself and my own babies and made a new place a little more home by filling it with that love.  Even with a fancy appliance.