Просто Так...

The blog title means "just because". It's my new favorite phrase.
It's my answer to every question of "why must we do this?".
Just because.

My life is pretty uneventful lately. In fact, the most noteworthy event in the past month was my attempt at baking cookies.

Here's how it went:
I used a cake pan instead of a cookie sheet, because it's pretty hard to locate a cookie sheet in Ukraine.
I used vanilla flavored sugar instead of vanilla, because that's all there is.
I used a coffee mug as 1 cup and based everything off of that.
I don't have teaspoons of table spoons, but the literal translation of the Ukrainian word for small spoon is teaspoon. So I assumed that it was close enough.
A potato masher works just as well as a mixer.
I have several bags of chocolate chips (sent from America), but I didn't want to use them on my first attempt at cookies. I settled on m&m's.
m&m's, however, are almost nonexistent in my town... really. I walked to every store that I could find but no one had them. One store, however, had peanut m&m's. I bought all three bags that they had.
=Let's expand on the fact that m&m's are a new candy to Ukraine. Really new. There are now tv commercials and billboards and all sorts of advertising. It was surreal for me when I shared the cookies with my colleagues and they told me that they had never eaten m&m's before. Ever. They had seen the ads, but that was all. Never eaten m&m's? It's so hard to wrap my mind around that fact. But then again, I'd never eaten fish head stew before I came to Ukraine... so there is that.=
So, I set my oven to 5. It doesn't really have a thermometer on it and 5 is in the middle. I figured it would be hot enough, but not too hot. For reference, when I bake my grilled cheese sandwiches (so much easier than frying them), I set my oven to 3. I can't see a noticeable difference in the size of the flames between 3 and 5(it's a gas oven), but my kitchen certainly felt hotter.
I mixed and I mashed.
The recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag said to let the cookies cook for about 10 minutes. I don't think that 5 was hot enough though, because I cooked them for about 15.
A few burned because of the inconsistent heat in my oven, so I ate those right away.
They also had a bit more of a cakey consistency(chewier... like brownies. Maybe too much flour?).
All and all, the cookies were a success. I ate maybe three of them, and the rest were devoured by my colleagues at a picnic the next day. They thought they were fabulous.

My oven, however, gave me some trouble. Setting 5 seemed a bit too hot for the oven itself and the knob didn't want to turn off. And it was too hot to touch.
I wrapped my hand in a towel and yanked on the oven knob, and it eventually gave. The oven is off, it cooled down, it still works.

I Promise a bigger post in the month of October.
I've been in Ukraine for one year on Tuesday.
Whoa.