Food & rations

Food has been a worry for me before i came here. "Where would i find halal food? would i have to go vegetarian?" are the few questions poping through my head a few weeks ago. About halal food, i think theres not much worry on that part since there are a few Turkish supermarkets and restaurant's around my area. However there are not many of them near my office. There are some but usually my colleagues and i choose to go elsewhere because kebabs are not a good idea of a proper lunch. Kebabs are impromptu meals. A proper lunch is the most important thing of the day and you can only afford it during lunch hours where the dishes are cheaper compared to dinner which is utterly, insanely, expensive. A typical lunch dish is usually 5-6 euros and a dinner dish might cost you up to 19 euro (more than RM80).It is also a good idea not to order drinks because u will be quick to notice that there is something wrong with the menu when it displays 1.6 euros (about RM7) for a 200ml bottle of coke. U might be offered beer once in a while (its cheaper than soft drinks) but u'll learn how to say no in a polite manner real quick, since u will have a lot of practice. But, if u happened to somehow accidentally order a drink, just pray that they misplaced your food order. If this happens, although it might take some time to finally get your order, they will usually give the drink for free or some form of compensation since they make u wait. Happened to me once.
Now you might be thinking what do i eat at these German restaurants? Well for me there are usually a few choices...U can go vegetarian and just eat salads or u can be an organic unisel organism by eating organic foods or u can also be a spaghetti-junky by eating spaghetti that does not contain meat in it, which i found out that there are a lot of them. There is also an option to be a fisherman's friend where u eat seafood. I have listed out these options because I had already made these relatively easy choices. I can ask my colleagues what the dish consists of but basically its a trial and error in the taste department, since my colleagues couldn't really say if its a delicious dish or not....in this situation a concept of "try it first, if u don't like it, don't order it again" has proven to be adventurous and risky yet quite effective. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes u don't. yesterday I ordered something vegetarian, of course with no meet, but it turned out to be an organic soup with some organic microorganism floating in it. I didn't really enjoy it. But today i got lucky. this restaurant faxed its menu to my office, and we decided to go there. Well, i was quite happy since they were serving a seafood dish with salmon, calmari rings, and lotsa salad and olives (i don't like). It was quite good, and i didn't expect any restaurant to have a seafood dish since the sea is so far from Mannheim. The fish would have to swim upstream to the Rhine river to get caught and end up happily on my plate...
Cooking...hmmm. well we bought a frying pan on the first week so we could cook some food on it, but we didn't want to buy a pot..yet, since we wanted to se how much our salary for this 1/2 month before we bought it.. it costs around 14 euros for the cheapest....so we decided to wait till next week when the gaji masuk, takut nanti we got the pot but no money to buy things to cook in it...haha. Earlier, I mention that there are Turkish supermarkets around my area didn't i? Well for some reason each time i come to buy some chicken to cook there are so many people and the fact that not many turkish immigrants know English, i always end up buying processed meat such as sausages... Don't worry they all have chop halal, just that its not from JAKIM..(Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia). Still OK lah. However, not having a pot to cook in really limited our creativity. We only have a rice cooker...and cooking seems to be more and more routine by the day. Thats why i came up with nasi rebus and kettle boiled eggs... well, thats me......U cant give me a routine job, ill always make it "un-routine".
Speaking of food, my rations of maggi mi and instant Brahim's gravy has almost depleted. However i still have a tonne of Seri-Aji fried rice powder (chemistry formula : S2A5OH) which i will conduct experiments with. I hope to get a PhD in Food Chemistry majoring in Powdered Gourmet Masterpieces. I also still have Tom Yam paste and Sup Tulang spices which i couldnt use in absence of a cooking pot (not to mention beef tulang or ekor). but i will be cooking em for my colleagues soon. Oh ya, do you guys know the type of fish that McDonalds use for Fillet o Fish? well, those fish are quite cheap here and i uualy a bag of 1 KG(8-10 fillets) for about 3.5 euros. so i have been cooking fish for the past 2 weeks...even had a Fish BBQ the 1st week which was quite lame coz we didnt have salt, pepper or any flavoring for that matter. but the XP was good enough.



enough of food....makes me miss Pak Ali punya fried mushrooms... However as a conclusion, i can say that i have adapted to the food by now....actualy i never got any problems whatsoever.. didnt feel as if i have to adapt to anything.... anyways i think i should be sleeping now, so im signing off for now...

tchuss....