Food & no liquor

When I came down here I thought I'd be living in a homestay and have some Argentine parents who would cook me dinner every night, but that didn't come to fruition so instead I've been learning to cook.

I honestly can't remember what I normally cooked myself in Tucson, but I think my culinary repertoire consisted of rice, some times rice with chicken and if I wanted to spoil myself I'd cook a steak.

When I tried pulling that same shit here I was laughed at by my roommates, who always cook themselves meals that I would consider extremely elaborate, and by extremely elaborate I mean more than rice-and-chicken variations.

When I first moved in I made myself some rice and my roomate looked at me and said, "You know Justin we're not in a third-world country, you can eat more than rice."

Then the next day I made some pasta and my great Dutch friend (who has since moved out) said, "Justin! You eat so fucking unhealthy," as she not only was making fun of my shit culinary skills, but my propensity to say "fuck" as well.

When I first got here I was also eating steak five to six nights a week just because it was so cheap, but now I've kinda figured out how to make some decent dishes.

I still have little-to-no cooking skills, but I've figured out that if I combine everything I know how to cook into one meal it turns out half-way decent.

My current favorite meal consists of rice, sautéed and seasoned steak, mushrooms and fried eggs. This is obviously nothing more than me combining my normal breakfast with dinner and leaving out the Frosted Flakes part, but the meal is pretty solid.

Here is a picture of my dish from a couple weeks ago, before I realized I could combine it with my breakfast.

And here's the first WPM recipe:

-- A bunch of white rice

-- 2-3 fried eggs

-- A lot of steak, I cut it up into small pieces and only cook it for about 90 seconds (it's became a hobby of mine to see how raw I can eat the steak down here).

-- A decent ammount of mushrooms which you sauté with the steak, but sauté them for longer, in whatever kind of cooking oil you can steal from your roommates

-- Salt, if you want it authentic Justin Adler style, add gratuitous amounts of salt to every part of the recipe and then add some soy sauce at the end for good measure.
-- For some reason it just taste better if you prepare it while listening to R. Kelly, for this platter I was feeling particularly inspired, so I bumped "The World's Greatest."

Here's more food-related notes:

-- I generally eat dinner around 8:00 because I find that my "salty steak rice delight" goes great with the 8:00 episode of "House." Then usually my roommates will cook food up later so I'll get down on their dinner, which is always better than mine, two hours after I just ate my own dinner. I'm not sure how I lived the first 21 years of my life with only one dinner.

-- Because my friend Matt is just the trillest kid ever, he decided to buy two cow brains becuase he'd never eaten cow brain before and Buenos Aires is as good a place as any to begin eatting brain.

After watching Argentina tie Paragauy in the World Cup qualifiers, a couple friends and myself went over to Matt's place to dig in on some cow brain.

He let them sit in water all day to make removing the membrane easier, so I helped Matt peel the membrane off for a while until I got bored and decided to be lazy and hang out with my friends in the family room

We then played Gin Rummy in the family room and listened to Luther Vandross, while Matt prepared and fried the cow brains.

Finally Matt brought out a platter of fried cow brains and we all sat there, listening to Matt sing along to every line from "Welcome to Jamrock" while eating cow brains for the first time.

Verdict: pretty decent, nothing great, very weird texture, good with soy sauce.

-- I've somewhat adjusted to Buenos Aires social time, but it's still consistently amazes me. Last week my house dad/landlord, Jorge, invited all the guys in the house out for dinner. We didn't end up leaving our house until 10:00. Then we finished our dinner at 12:30, to which the 65-year-old Jorge proposed we go out for some drinks. We eventually returned home at 2 a.m. on a Monday night.

-- I always thought the movie "Super-Size Me" was retarded because if you eat anything everyday of the week you'll probably die. That being said I'm waiting to O.D./enter the Guinness Book of World Records for eating Frosted Flakes every day.

I am a serial cereal eater, who lives with a French guy named Cyril, which has nothing to do with the story other than the fact that I wanted to use the same sound three times over. Unfortunately the only American cereals sold in Buenos Aires are Frosted Flakes and Fruity Loops and Justin Adler doesn't do Fruity Loops.

Therefore I start and some times finish every day with a bowl of Frosted Flakes and the last day I can remember not eating a bowl was when I was in Rosario almost a month ago.

Kelloggs, if you're reading this, hit me up with a sponsorship and by sponsorship I don't mean more "Kung-Fu Panda" stickers, I've already collected all six, thank you very much.

-- This has nothing to do with food, but to all my friends/loyal readers in Tucson, here's a huge heads up:

The National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation Science Friday will be on campus Sept. 19

The National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation Science Friday will be on campus Sept. 19. The program will focus on the Mars lander, and will be broadcast live from the UA Phoenix Science Operations Center from 11 to 1 p.m.

Guests will include Peter Smith, principal investigator of NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission and the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science from the University of Arizona. Students interested in science journalism or radio-news careers may be interested in being in the audience.

If so, please leave your name with April or Heidi in the journalism department's main office (Marshall Building, third floor). Seats are very limited, so please sign up only if you are sure you can attend. Please sign up as soon as possible. No reservations can be taken after noon Friday, Sept. 12.

I can honestly say that seeing Neal Conan host a live Talk of the Nation at UA was 9,000,000 times better than seeing Kanye West perform his Glow in the Dark Show. If you're in Tucson, go to this event.