The perils of cooking in a different country

As you can see my kitchen is top of the range

Allow me to preface that with 'when you have absolutely no culinary skills whatsoever', which means when I try to cook things it doesn't always go exactly to plan.


So I was making vegetable noodle soup for lunch today and being the genius that I am, I assume that the best way to go about this is to just put everything in boiling water until it's not raw anymore. Surprisingly it turned out alright. I don't know where the potatoes went though, just noticed the soup got a bit thicker. :D But hey, it was edible so that's what I'm aiming for.


Needless to say I've had quite a few adventures in my kitchen. For example when I try to cook things and it ends up turning into something completely different. The most embarrassing was when I thought it would be a great idea to toss an egg around like a tennis ball. Before I knew it, there was yolk all over my shower, it was hilarious. I know what you're going to say, "You shouldn't play with your food", but where would be if we listened to common sense? Life wouldn't be as fun, that's where we'd be.

Boil me or I'll eat your face

But I've yet to address the actual topic of this long-winded post. The perils of cooking overseas. Obviously, if you can't read what you're cooking that's a problem, but when you kind of understand it, it can be incredibly confusing. My case in point. The picture on my left is of some cheap noodles I bought at the supermarket and as I mentioned before my cooking ability is more than limited, but I still read the instructions. In the bottom left of this packet it says boil for 3 minutes. Not so hard right? WRONG!

There were some other instructions as well. I thought to myself why on earth does it say ゆでる前水洗い厳禁？ That's right, washing the noodles before boiling them is strictly prohibited. Why is that? Is there some kind of monster hiding in the noodles and if you don't throw it straight into boiling water, it'll pop out and drink all your beer? What if you really want to wash your noodles? Clearly I've bought a very strict brand. I was worried because I've bought this type of noodles before and washed them before but the previous brand gave me no such warning. I've yet to see any noodle monsters, or experience any explosions in my gastro-intestinal system.

Now obviously, the logical answer is there is a considerable gap in my knowledge of noodle based cuisine, so if anybody has any idea, I'd really appreciate an explanation. At least this isn't as awkward as the time I was in the supermarket and couldn't work out where the potatoes were. I was looking right at them, but it didn't have potatoes written on the sign, so I asked an old lady. "These look like potatoes, smell like potatoes, feel like potatoes, but I can't find the word potatoes! ARE THESE POTATOES!? WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS ARE YOU RUNNING HERE?" She looked at me like I was crazy and said rather frankly... yes, those are potatoes. On closer inspection, they were indeed potatoes. POTATOES