a dog sandwich. français style.

Recently, I wrote about my foodie ways -- specifically about running home with a warm fresh baguette. I love eating. I really love to eat. My only problem is... I can't cook. I'm awful. And living alone has been a painful realization of that fact.

I have a somewhat, er... "limited" kitchen. In my apartment hunt, I decided that the apartment had to be furnished because I wasn't going to buy all new furniture just to give it away less than a year later. So, le busca apartment is indeed furnished, but very sparsely -- in the kitchen, it had a mini-fridge and two hobs. That was it. On my similarly limited budget, I bought plates, mugs, cups, silverware, a few utensils, a kettle, a pot and a toaster oven that Kyle and I named the trinosaurus after a very amusing retrieval story, which I'll refrain from telling because it's really not that funny except to me. And maybe Kyle too.

la petite cuisine

So, I've been trying to figure out how to cook. But not how to cook well, just how to cook, y'know, to stay alive and stuff. Mostly my meals consist of some combination of frozen vegetables, potatoes, pasta pasta pasta, cheese, eggs, chorizo, and an obligatory baguette and somehow I put all the elements together and try to make something, er, edible.

I discovered the other day at the Carrefour that you can buy 10 saucisses de Strasbourg for a mere .89¢ -- saucisses de Strasbourg, my friends, are basically hot dogs. And I had a wonderful realization! A little backstory: back in San Diego, my wonderful roommate starting buying veggie soy Smart Dogs from Trader Joe's and she used to nuke them for a few seconds, wrap them in a piece of whole wheat toast and douse them in ketchup (and spicy brown mustard) and I, not having any creative cooking talent, fell in love with the appeal of eating something hot and delicious and quick. Thus, the dog sandwich came about and we loved it. We would come home from our restaurant jobs on Saturday evenings, veg out on the futon (chaise lounge style) with our aprons still on, feet sore from running around all day, watching some crap like The Real Housewives of blah blah blah with a dog sandwich in hand. So. Very. Nice.

Anyways, seeing these saucisses de gloriousness, I came home and created a french version of it -- that is, a dog sandwich in a delicious french baguette. I added some scrambled eggs, sprinkled with some cheese and ketchup and felt a little sad, a little happy, mostly nostalgic. Damn.

I won't make dog sandwiches a new staple, don't worry. Before I left, my mother gave me an old cookbook called Cooking in a Bedsitter which is ancient but amazing and made specifically for use in very small kitchens, like mine. So I don't plan on suffering from malnutrition anytime soon.

Thanks, Sum. I miss your dog sandwiches.