O, harro thar.

So he made me do it. My husband, that is. And I guess other people, too. The masses have been waiting and I can't but deliver. Ohyes.  I own a blog now. I am no longer special, I suppose.

Does it matter who I am? Hm. Okay. My name is Ines and I am about to turn 17. I repeatedly do so, but only every once in a while I get to, say, celebrate my second anniversary of my 17th birthday. Looks like one of those is coming this year. Cool. Or not. Who cares. I am married to a guy, an American guy at that, and we live in this tiny little town in Minnesota. Mankato. It's one of the biggest towns in the state, yet I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be something anyone would randomly stumble upon when looking up a map of the US. Or any other map, for that matter. We own a house, insanely big for my Croatian standards (have I said I was not American, but instead an imported cow... err, legal alien?) and we live with a cat. She decided to move in with us last year, the day before Thanksgiving. I guess that's what you get when a pot of soup is being made by an open window. So, she's a cat. Like, you know, a regular one. White-gray-orange... a lot of fur (that she sheds regularly), four legs and a strange affection towards dental hygiene. Weirdo, she is.

Ok, back to the point, just in case I had one.

So I've been here for two years and some months. All legal. It took us a while to get all that paperwork sorted and pay all the fees, but here I am. Do I like it here? Overall, sure, I do. But no more (or less?) than I would like it somewhere else. There are pros and cons, ups and downs, but one thing is constant - there is no food here. Sometimes I find reasonable replacements, but rarely ever do I enjoy what is put in front of me. So I mostly cook from scratch.

Will this blog be about cooking? Likely. But also about other things. Any and all, whatever comes to mind. I do warn you, however, that my train of thought is pretty hard to keep track of. Ohwell. I don't like labels, so I'll try not to dedicate this thing to anything in particular. I do like cooking and I do think food is important (oink), even moreso when you do your best to live on limited calories. If I can't have it all, I at least want to like what I get, y'know.

To make the long story longer, let's start with a bowl of chili. I cooked chili for Derek today, just because he asked nicely and I am known for my own levels of, well, nice. He even found a recipe online that he wanted me to follow (hey, I just can't follow recipes, that kind of thing is against my religion). So I went shopping and I spent another fortune on a pound of grass fed beef - we eat (un)reasonably small amounts of meat, so when we do, we deal with these grass fed guys. Or, well, the grass fed guys' remains.

I forgot where the recipe was from; it doesn't even matter. I tweaked it a little bit - left out some cayenne pepper because we don't particularly like it and I didn't have any lying around (of course it didn't even cross my mind while I was shopping). I did not add sugar, I never add any to my tomato-based meals. The rest, I did mostly the way the recipe suggested. Except that I had to cut the quantities down to some reasonable amounts. Originally, they wanted me to cook for ten people.

Then I didn't fry the meat in a skillet and/or frying pan. I refuse to destroy my meat that way. Why destroy? Because in these lands, I can almost never find ground beef that still has some life to it (yeah, I get it, there's no life left...). It's lean and dry. So when you put it in a skillet and burn it, it's even more dead than it originally was. So I sautee my meats. Ground beef-like meats. And I did tonight, too. Along with onions, a teaspoon of oil, some water and a small red bell pepper grown in my own little amateur garden (which consisted of one potted bell pepper and one potted half-dead tomato plant). This tasted good. Then I added some chili powder, oregano (?!) and ground cumin. Ok, here I started getting a little bit suspicious and unsure about this whole deal. Cumin = hummus. Hummus = big, neverending love. Beans only sometimes get even close to that level of affection. Still, I threw in some tomato sauce and a can of red kidney beans, along with a can of pinto beans. I even drained and washed both batches. Yay me, for following the instructions.

It cooked for a while and that was it. It looked lame. Way too much meat. It tasted - meh. Like any other chili I've ever tried. Cheap chili from cheap restaurants. It didn't even have that homemade flavour. I don't think I'll cook this again. I prefer my mom's version of chili con carne, with or without carne, for that matter. It's a completely different meal.

So, yeah. Here's a rather poor picture of my tonight's creation. I only had my phone camera handy. We did buy a brand new Canon EOS the other day (boastboastboast), but we're still waiting for a new SD card to show up at our doorstep.

P.S. The whole layout is still in the works. What I like the best just doesn't work with the title color. The title color won't let me change it. Something ate my profile information in the process. Aliens landed somewhere. Etc.