Cooked a version of the curried squash and pear soup that I've previously chronicled, only this time I used fresh ginger instead of powdered, a different variety of pear (usually I use French aka red pears) and a couple of squirts of sriracha sauce. Oh, and beef broth instead of chicken, because the chicken was frozen and would have taken too long to defrost.
The cooking utensils that the hotel sees fit to provide are wholly inadequate. The saucepans are very, very thin, so they heat unevenly, and food burns and butter scorches extremely quickly. The cutting board is a flat block of very soft plastic. The knives can hardly be dignified by that name -- they are all serrated, even the "chef's knife" and "paring knife", and they're thin and light and awkward as hell. I have blisters from both. The vegetable peeler broke into two pieces inside of thirty seconds of use on a butternut squash. I ended up using one of my crappy pocketknives to peel and dice veggies, which is not the purpose for which it was designed or intended, though it worked better than those tools which were obsensibly purpose-built.
Though I can hardly afford it, I'm thinking of going out and buying a chef's knife and/or a santoku knife and/or a chinese cleaver sometime this week. The current situation is wholly unacceptable.
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