Now We're Cooking

It's been a while since I've posted, and it's definitely not for the lack of things to talk about, but the fact that I still don't know when I'll have my internet up and running. It's currently slated for mid-November at the earliest, and you have to remember I put my order in on the first week of September. I keep telling J, we should have moved to Germany or somewhere you don't need Internet. The good news is that I've become very Zen about the whole thing, and I'm actually okay with checking my email once every two weeks.

Anyway, since I'm at home with no phone/Internet to communicate with friends and family back home, I've had to reach deep inside for inner resources to keep me amused. No perezhilton.com? Fine, I'll cook something. It keeps me busy, and J gets something yummy to eat - what's not to like?

Only thing is, the food here is a little different. Tastes a little different, looks a little different, and is oftentimes called something different. The berries here taste more like berries, I don't know how else to put it. And the strawberries are a lot smaller. Cottage cheese is a little more salty and sour than I'm used to, and beef tastes completely different since cows here are grass-fed while US cows are corn-fed. Chocolate chips come in different shapes, they're little squares. As for different names, most things you can figure out. For example, an eggplant is called an aubergine over here, but you know an eggplant when you see one. Same thing for zucchini (courgette). It's the stuff in the packages that gives me the trouble.

So I've made the following assumptions on the very scientific methods I've employed, namely shaking and examining the product's container while furrowing my brow and muttering to myself under my breath:

Cornstarch = Corn powder
Corn syrup = Liquid glucose
Pouring cream = Coffee creamer
Whole meal = Whole wheat
Baking soda = Bicarbonate of soda
Maple syrup = Golden syrup
Molasses = Black treacle
Lemonade concentrate = Squash
Bacon = Streaky bacon
Stevia = Illegal here

And then there are things that you have to find out:
Baking powder is 1/2 the strength of US baking powder so you have to use 2x as much as the recipe calls for
Converting cooking temperatures to Celsius - I cheat a little since I have an oven thermometer
Converting teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups to grams and liters
Brits like to put sausage where Americans like to put bacon - basically in everything

The other thing that's giving me a lot of trouble is calculating nutritional values for servings of various food. The common measure is per 100ml or 100g of the food item. The problem is that I have no idea what 100ml or 100g of something looks like. My measuring cup helps me out with the liquid measure since it helpfully has both units of measure printed on its sides, but I can't seem to convince myself that I need a food scale. So I have no idea how much calories or nutrients I'm consuming. I'm taking the cheater's route, and I just look at the full weight of the entire package, and just divide it by 100 ml/g to come up with some ballpark figures. Normally, that's fine, but I've resumed my clean eating regime after a two month long free-for-all, and this is tripping me up a bit.

I know that a woman's body is capable of processing no more than 30g of protein in one sitting to develop muscle, which translates to about 4 oz of the protein of your choice. After that, it's all Greek to me. Or should I say British?