Hello again. It´s been a while. Again.
I´ve been away, actually. In Japan. Which is pretty much Shangrila foodwise. At least it was for me. So much good food. I really, really enjoyed my stay. Perfect University (Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku), perfect friends, new and old (thanks and I miss you, you know who you are), perfect life as an exchange student. So carefree.  Everything good except for the kitchen of my floor in the dorm I stayed in. That was ... gross. So gross that I didn`t even want to cook my spaghetti there. So: hardly any cooking for me. Not cool considerung that I had access to a gazillion new things I could have tried out. Funny veggies and funny fruits, strange noodles, fishies I have never seen before or after, great meats (the beef, oh, the beef!)... But, well, can´t help it, right? 

I came back home, reluctantly and very unhappy, in march and of course I cooked. Actually my kitchen was one of very few things I was looking forward to. 

Of course there are other things for me here, now that I´m back. I had to get my job back (successfully achieved, that), I´m gathering books and reading things for my bachelor thesis that I´ll have to start writing soon, I have to start thinking seriously about what I want to do afterwards... Unsurprisingly my thesis will be about food. I will have to read books about japanese food and watch TV shows about it. Inspiration galore!

In the meantime I hope I´ll be able to cook. New stuff. Good stuff.

Here´s some of the stuff I made lately (mostly fails so no recipes):
For Easter I tried some good old yeast... stuff. Traditional german Hefezopf, sweet braided bread. 

It was a drag. First the dough wouldn´t rise. I decided to just ignore that and still get on with what I was doing. I braided it, let it raise (unseccessfully) again, then bake it. And boy did it grow in the oven... Suddely I had this giant... whatever! I was not happy.  Apart from being not the most attractive thing I´ve ever baked it also was kind of dry. Not really bad when it came to the taste but also not very good either. I´ll try again.
Then I made Purin. Japanese style steamed Custard Pudding. I got the recipe from my old japanese teacher (I miss you, Satô Sensei!) and it always worked great. But. While in Japan I kind of got addicted to something called "Morinaga Yaki Purin", baked Purin from the store. It was great so I wanted to try making baked Purin as well.
It tasted great. But looked... Well, you see, Purin has to be as smooth as possible. No bubbles inside allowed. My Purin was all bubbles. I will get this to work (I bought these little purin forms in Japan so I´ll just have to) and once I got it right you´ll get the (really easy) recipe here and tell you all about how to get bubble free Purin.
Last thing: Omlette. There´s bacon and peas in there but no secret. Just eggs, scrambled, salt and pepper. It just looks good, I think.:D
Oh yeah, I bought a camera. First day in Japan, I got to have a new DSLR. So I´ll try to take pretty pictures of food from now on. For those interested: it´s a Nikon D3100.Not very fancy but it does what I want it to. Yay.
Once again I´ll promise to write here more often. I´m aiming at once a week because if that worked out in Japan, it should work out here.
So: See you next week. ^^
Thanks for reading.
a*