I've been surfing sites for easy dinner recipes and alternatively, Flickr for inspiration and other things. Then I stumbled over some sort of application site that generated all of the tags I've used for my photos at Flickr. It was interesting to see them. More interesting was the fact that several of the words were very large, and others very small to denote how often I use them.

As for the recipe action, I've decided that enough is enough and I can't go through the rest of my time in the Arctic by eating stuff like Instant Noodles. So I decided to look at what ingredients are available to me in this little town and see what I could possibly make out of them.

I found a few recipes for Ziti, which I totally have on the brain but no actual Ziti noodles so that will have to wait until I can order them. Last night's dinner consisted of chicken, cream of mushroom soup and sour cream over egg noodles. Sounds kinda gross all typed out like that, but it was really good. And even though I had to stand there at the stove, actually cooking (and kind of bored by staring at the cupboards), I was happy that I got to eat something I had actually made.

I also made some fried bread (called scone by us Indians...and remember, only other Indians are allowed to call themselves Indians) which I brought to work with me, this morning. I know the Inuit make their own form of Bannock (scone/fried bread) but I figured mine might be different.

My cooking fried bread is usually a 50-50 thing. It can go either way. I might add too much flour, or too much water, or forget the baking powder, who knows. But sometimes it works. Last night was one of those nights. Well, I thought it was pretty good.

No real cooking tonight. Just reheating leftovers, and making this mexican layer dip thing for the weekend (a non-cook dish that I used to make all the time). Also, my old roommate and I are going to mass produce perogies this weekend. She knows how to make them, I'm just along for the ride (for help and company). Seems like a good alternative to my usual laying around-doing nothing sort of Saturday afternoon.

My idea is to start cooking a bunch of stuff on the weekends that I can reheat during the week. Healthier stuff than the Instant Noodles, and real meals so my mom can stop worrying that I'm existing on rice, etc whilst living up here. Emboldened by my moderate success of dinner last night, I think I can actually make myself learn how to do things correctly and (hopefully patiently) in the kitchen.

As for Flickr, I'm trying to make my photography better and want to be inspired by *something*, anything, so I've been looking for assignment groups to join. The idea is that if I have an assignment or homework to complete, that I will be inspired to take more pictures. For instance, I haven't uploaded anything to Flickr in almost 3 weeks. I used to do it daily. I want to do it that way, again.

The weather is calling for a huge winter storm for Hall Beach starting tonight and lasting all through the day tomorrow. Apparently, 10 to 15 cm of snow and Winds gusting at times to 70 or 80 km/h which will create near-zero visibilities in blowing snow. I mostly copied that from the weather page *grin*. We already have snow on the ground here. We had a nasty winter storm last Sunday which made my entire house move with every wind gust. It doesn't really bother me. As long as I can stay inside.

Still with me?

Labels: Arctic, Arctic Circle, cooking, food, photographs, photography, weather