Above; My attempt to make a stir-fry with noodles and vegetables. I can not cook. This is an understatement. I can burn water. I get nervous if there is more than one pot boiling or sizzling at the same time, and my repertoire of recipes (or lack thereof), at best, consists of spaghetti with tomatoes, spaghetti with pesto, spaghetti with x ingredients. The only thing I think I am pretty decent at throwing together would be raw foods like salads, and making sushi by hand. Living where I am living at the moment, making sushi by hand makes no sense when there is cheap and good sushi on every other street corner. I want to get better at cooking so the people around me will not die from boredom and spaghetti, so if you have some amazingly simple recipes you think I would be able to toss together, I would love to hear about them.

This is obviously not my food. Yesterday we went out to a Spanish tapas-restaurant, and this blog seems to involuntarily turn into a food-documenting blog. I swear, that is not my intention. We had mussels in a clear white broth.

And mushrooms and ham.

Asparagus and ham. I love asparagus, but since I have to steam them to eat them – my fear of cooking puts a small downer on my love.

Shrimp, fished up from a little fish-tank by the entrance of the restaurant.

And cheese. A pretty mediocre cheese plate, compared to the cheese at the standing wine-bar we were at just the other day.

I always get happy when the menus have pictures, so I don’t spend 35 minutes trying to decipher the menu.

And this guy was right outside the entrance to the restaurant. The Spanish place was ok, but the portions were pretty small and the cheese plate was mediocre, so we went across the street to…

The standing wine-bar! It is such a cute little place. It doubles as a liquor shop, and the standing wine-bar is at the back of the liquor shop.

I am shooting like a paparazzi from the hip, only to realize that I shot the beer section in their fridge and not the wine-section.

We actually bought a bottle of Cava to take home. I generally do not like Cava that much, but this one was pretty decent.

Funny story. Quite a few months ago, when we were living in another apartment, these Japanese cartoon-porn magazines were dumped in our mailbox. At first we thought someone just put them in the mailbox for fun, until we realized that it was actually written by hand on the yellow one especially for me. I was wondering if it was the neighbors or someone close by who had seen me or thought I was making noise at the apartment, but it turned out it was two Japanese friends of us that had biked by our apartment and dropped the magazines in the mailbox as a joke. We just found them when we did a clean out here today. If anyone would like me to ship some nasty Japanese cartoon-porn to them in the mail, let me know asap. Haha.

Today was a quiet day. We went shopping in Shinjuku after dark.

And ate the most delicious butter chicken curry.

And went for coffee, where I ordered a Mocca “grande” and it was much bigger and much chocolatier than I expected ♥