Adventures in International Cooking

We are setting out to record our adventures and experiments in cooking in our Bloomsbury flat, an enterprise that reminds us of challenging culinary circumstances in the past.  There was the camping trip around Europe in 1970, in which we lived in a Sears canvas pup tent that was already antique at the time, and our sole cooking apparatus was a Camping Gaz stove purchased in Amsterdam, with my Dad's old Army messkit for pans.  R. became an expert at frying eggs; there was the meal of canned cassoulet cooked inside the tent during a rainstorm in Macon.  It was probably romantic, and fortunately not our sole source of sustenance, since we mostly picnicked at noon and ate cheap at restaurants in the evening. We will skip the story of mussels on the Dalmatian coast.  And then there was cooking on the seventh floor of Zona V in Moscow State University.  We had access to the communal kitchen (and the responsibility to take our turn cleaning it periodically), and an electric frying pan we brought along that worked fine on the peculiar 110 V current (thanks to the place being built with American lend-lease electrical equipment).  Our refrigerator was the double window of our room.  We could do a pretty good beef stroganoff with filet and mushrooms from a hard currency grocery store, and wonderful smetana from the collective farm market.  On less ambitious days, the frying pan could heat up a slab of ham bought at the MGU grocery, or a couple of scrambled eggs purchased on the way home from the library at the Army-Navy Department Store, Voentorg.  Our next trip to Moscow provided much more lavish cooking conditions: a gas stove with a rotisserie for chickens; a large refrigerator; a whole balcony for marinating jugged hare.  Although the builders had forgotten to wire the kitchen, once this was remedied, we were in business.
The problem in 1989 was not the kitchen, but the ingredients.  The miracle of perestroika had driven food supply underground.   There was very little in the regular shops:  our first foraging took us from an empty bread store to an empty grocery, save for a few packages of spaghetti.  Eventually, we learned to queue up for oranges on street corners whenever we found them; to shop in the Cheremushki collective farm market that was still going strong (but no longer); and once a week to trek across town to use our diplomatic coupons to buy Soviet goods like meat and flour that once were staples, but were no longer available on the open market.  (In a few months, the first of the western supermarkets, Stockmanns, would come to Moscow, but not in time for us.)
Later during that same year we rented a townhouse in Canberra, where the ingredients were plentiful (and unusually named - jaffles, yabbies), but the kitchen included a three-burner electric stove and a dubious oven.  There may have been a barbie in back, but we arrived in winter (two winters in one year!)  An oval Le Creuset casserole bought at David Jones was a lifesaver.

Now in London, many years later, we have at our disposal a mouth-watering array of foodstuffs from around the world, and the highest quality English products can be purchased weekly at the Borough Market. Our kitchen, however, is designed for the casual London visitor: two microwave ovens, a 4-burner electric hob with oven; and a minimal batterie de cuisine.  Our goal here is to document how we negotiate the adventure.