International travel has always been exciting- seeing and learning about new places, landscape, culture, language, food and ways of living. Since the pandemic took us by storm, leisure travel has come to a halt for most of us. Kitchen activities and baking activities have, however, seen an upside and many people have started to cook more variety of foods and have carved out their sense of adventure from the world of international cooking.

I would previously cook new foods after I had eaten them elsewhere.  But I would avoid cooking up something that seemed daunting – time consuming, complicated or needing too many new ingredients and steps.  In these pandemic times, however, I find myself excited to try my hand at this category too, minus the hesitation or selfdoubt. 

Substituting ingredients is exciting too (which you luckily don't have to do with baking kits and meal kits), much to the horror of my family who feel convinced that if a recipe is not followed to the 'T' the final product will be unpalatable but I like to experiment with cooking and use what is readily available – within limits- therefore avoiding unnecessary wastage and an urgent run to the grocery store. Experimenting with different ingredients makes cooking fun for me!! And certainly adds a twist or two to the final product dished up. 

Talking of fresh ingredients- grocery lists, that were a thing of the past, have now become an essential item of my daily activity. We have been doing curbside grocery pickups for most of the pandemic months, and the couple of times we went into stores recently, without a list, we got carried away and came back with much more than what we went in for. I felt overwhelmed as it meant creating extra space to place all the new items (like trying sweet potato muffins)!! So much more time and effort spent doing so. So its back to the grocery list for me. 

While the family is happy with all the old and new foods being dished up by yours truly, I get happy trying foods made by someone else. I have used the Home Baker kits at such times and everything I made turned out real good as the recipes are uncomplicated, and all the ingredients needed are right there in the correct proportions. I don’t even need to substitute anything!!!

Onto figuring out what new foods to make this week so the items can be added to the grocery list- so I won’t need to substitute.  Or so my family thinks!!!