Today was motivated by beef stew and mashed potatoes. Woke up late as usual thanks to jet lag , then the rest of the day was used to stock up on western spices for my kitchen.

This is the really steep road near my place that I was mentioning. Doesn't looks so epic in the picture, but I think it'll be pretty scary to park your car there. Have to park sideways so the cars don't roll downhill. The effort is motivated by the fact that at the end of 8 and 3 blocks there's a supermarket with good deals on it's food. And also I want to burn away those muffin tops.
Grace Cathedral, just at the end of that road.
My collection of spices and condiments as of today. Spent quite a bit to buy all of them, but I might as well since they don't go bad, and I'm such a good cook (OK,maybe my cooking so far has been passable only because 1) the condiments were good, or 2)pigs learnt how to fly) Btw, chili sauce here is not what we think it is. There's no chili of any type mentioned anywhere in the list of ingredients, and it's basically tomato sauce. Also, the soya sauce is like the illegitimate child between dark and light soya sauce that smells slightly alcoholic.

Organic food is quite a big thing here. And surprisingly some organic products might be cheaper than mass produced stuff, like the bay leaves I bought. Maybe the farmers here just use up whatever small piece of land leftover to grow some herbs and can sell them cheaply, or they are grown by semi amateur gardeners, under a union. Free range meat and other animal produce are also displayed prominently on the shelves here, unlike in Malaysia where it's always tucked in a small corner where nobody ever visits.
Then, time to rest my feet a little bit, and cook. Here's my beef stew(actually it looks more like vegetable stew, but I bought too much vegetables) Substituted stewing beef with ground beef, because I accidentally bought too much of it. That's the only type of meat I have in my fridge now, a pretty big packet of it.Also, it's probably one of the few types of meat I think I can cook without blowing up the kitchen. When I saw the array of meat on sale I went blank and chose the cheapest and easiest-to-cook looking one. Couldn't even judge how much a pound of meat looks like.

On the right is garlic mash potato bake, I found the recipe at bbcgoodfood.com. Substituted the Gruyere cheese for mozarella because I'm a scrooge, but otherwise it's actually pretty good. It was a good idea to add some salt to the mashed potato and use more breadcrumbs than stated too.
Where to tomorrow? Maybe I should see the farmer's market(the Saturday market is supposed to be bigger though, and I've no other food to buy) or the Museum of Modern Art (students from my uni are supposed to have free entry) It's 25 degrees celcius now, and it's nighttime. The weather forecast for tomorrow has shot up to 29 degrees.