Day Thirteen:  It’s Kitchen Tour Time

This is the MoFo prompt I was the most excited about, because who doesn’t love nosing around other people’s kitchens?  So in the interest of fairness, I’m playing along too, and throwing in a smoothie to keep it breakfast-related.  This is where all the breakfast magic happens.  This is HH HQ.

We’ve only been living here for about a month.  We found it two days after we arrived in Prague, and moved in two days after that, which was better than we’d expected.  It’s the biggest, nicest kitchen I’ve ever had, and I love it.  It looks like there’s loads of space, but actually the sloping ceiling to the right means that we don’t get much use out of that area (and I will let you imagine how many times I bang my head on there every day).

The whole room feels really light and spacious as we have three skylights and a dining area as well.

Here’s the food, including my melted coconut oil – it was very hot for the first two weeks we lived here.  I’m still getting to grips with the shops of Prague and figuring out where to buy my essentials, but I think I’ve made a decent start at stocking up the pantry.

We brought quite a lot of herbs and spices over with us from Manchester so we could get straight into cooking.  Here they are all lined up and pretty.

And we have a great big fridge!  So big we haven’t got it fully stocked yet.  There’s a lot of bottled water in there, not that we are fans of it in places with drinkable tap water.  These are just bottles that we refill and keep chilled at all times to take on hikes, cool us down during the heatwave earlier and provide for us when the water supply cuts out.  This has happened a few times, most notably on Tuesday when our entire area woke up without water.  Dr HH felt vindicated for keeping water in the fridge at all times, and I felt vindicated for always filling the kettle before bed.  I can start the day without showering, but I can’t start the day without a brew!  Fortunately Prague has a great selection of dairy-free milks and yoghurts, and we always have a big pot of food for packed lunches and a pile of home-made, foil-wrapped snack bars to sustain us at work.  And chilled falafel, because I am a vegan.

All in all, it’s a great place to cook and eat and make breakfast every day.  The oven is my nemesis, though.  It’s the first time I’ve had an electric cooker, and I find it frustrating to use the hob, which is unbearably slow to change temperature.  The oven is the worst though, because the symbols on the knobs have completely faded, leaving us no idea what the settings are, or the temperature.  It’s taken some trial and error, a tepid shepherd’s pie and some singed granola, but we seem to be getting there.

Still, if you can prepare food without the oven in the summer heat, so much the better!  I brought my little blender over with me from home, and I’m very glad of it.  Here’s a nice summery breakfast smoothie, combining some good tropical flavours.  You just need to chop a mango, peel a banana, scoop in about 120g yoghurt (coconut yoghurt is best, of course) and pour in 2/3 cup of coconut milk.  Blend and drink!