Skills to learn...

For the past four years, I have not regular access to what people would conventionally call a "kitchen". Not that I was an exceptional cook before that. In Grenada, after a semester on campus with a stove top, I got my wonderful little apartment that featured a propane stove that my former Peace Corps working friend had to show me how to use, the oven was too small for almost anything, and two of the burners worked. The settings on those burners was "large open flame" and "No large open flame". Could make the hell out of some old fashioned popcorn though.

Moving onto Brooklyn, I graduated to a surprisingly similar gas/two burner functional half kitchen, which my roommate used enviably, but I mainly lived off of takeout, both as a function of kitchen size and laziness.

Now I live in a large three bedroom house that has a ginormous kitchen with an electric (gasp) stove. Roommate 1 cooks like a mofo. Like "Oh, these peaches are about to go bad and bazam restaurant quality pastry." I also have a yard now so the first thing I did upon having access to a vehicle was buy a grill because if there's one type of cooking I can do it's "Char things over fire" (thanks, Grenada!).

So I'm finally trying to cook quality food. I am pretty pleased with my blackberry cobbler and tonight, upon being too lazy to stop at the Piggly Wiggly (yes, really) on my way home from work, concocted a stir fry out of rice noodles and pale ale (no sherry) and it (drumroll) didn't suck!

I consider this further evidence of my whole "medical school delays maturity" hypothesis. By next year, I'll be buying car insurance and all matter of other things that most people master around age 25.