Fabulous shopping frenzy for future food shenanigans

It must be said: I can’t cook. Or, more accurately, I don’t cook. The very few times I try, the result is usually edible at the least, so that’s not the problem. It’s the looking up a recipe, buying ingredients, finding pots and pans and cleaning up afterwards that normally keeps me from preparing actual meals.

Now, as of August 1 I’ll be living on my own for the first time and I won’t have a car or the money to go buy truckloads of frozen food. Instead, I’ll have a fresh market right in front of my doorstep every morning and a cute, albeit tiny, kitchen all to myself.

I’m gonna have to cook, is what I’m saying. And for that, I need some basic equipment, the first load of which my mom and I bought at Ikea yesterday.

I tend to be a little anal about color coordination and detailed decoration in my living space and so all I bought is either white or stainless steal or made out of glass because I couldn’t decide on a decent color scheme. This, I realized, makes everything look pretty damn boring when put into pixels but, I promise you and myself, it’ll look great once it’s thrown in with the rest of my stuff.

These are my new pots. One small one and one bigger one. One for pasta and one for pasta sauce. Like I said, this shopping spree was all about the basics.

This is my new silverware and by silverware I mean forks and knives and spoons and little spoons that look silver and shiny but they only made me pay 13 euros ($20) for a 24-piece set so I’m guessing it’s not the real deal.

I should probably spend more time studying photography techniques than running around buying cheap silverware because the lighting in this picture sucks. The tops aren’t actually pitch black like that.

I bought an eggbeater (which is a weird word, is it not?) and a can opener which will probably save my life. I’m living at home and live off pasta. I’m living by myself and live off canned ravioli. Not that much of a change but I’m gonna need that can opener. Of course tons of other spatulas and whatnot are still missing. But have I mentioned that this time we went for basics only? Hence, the can opener.

I needed dishes as well and this was when I about dove onto the floor and cried and screamed and beat the floor with angrily chrunched fists. I could not for the life of me chose a color or a shape or an amount for each individual plate-like dish. Ikea doesn’t actually offer that many different types of dinnerware but I couldn’t decide.

So I ended up taking this very basic set that includes six big plates, six small plates and six soup plates (also great for pasta!), all in snow white. Don’t you just love shopping for basics? Once I gave in and decided to do this the simple way, I had a blast.

Then, I bought these two pot holders because I was desperate for some color and my mom just dug this beautiful nostalgic Casablanca tin-plate sign out from behind other dusty reminders of her past that I’m going to hang in the kitchen:

See? Look closer! Actually, don’t look too close and the colors match! My pot holders and my Casablanca sign are color coordinated! This is going to be Heaven’s Kitchen, seriously. Except that I need some kitchen towels that combine the red-red from the sign and the brownish-red from the pot holders. Then, it’ll be really perfect.

The sign, by the way, is 80cm by 50cm (32in by 20in) and although I’d like it even better if it had Humphrey Bogart on it instead of Ingrid Bergman, I’m very much in love with it.

Maybe, to add more red to that perfect red-black-brownish-greyish color scheme, I could fill these new wine glasses with some excellent, expensive red wine and put them on the white shelves that run along my new kitchen walls. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be incredibly inappropriate and roll-your-eyes ridiculous? I’d say so, yes.

I also bought these cereal bowls and because I was getting tired of having everything in white, I went for glass with these. I have always wanted glass bowls and now that I have them I just want to rip out the paper paddening and pour in diced peaches, sliced strawberries and fresh, cold milk.

That’s it for the kitchen stuff. I’m going back for a second round later this month. There are still so many little things missing!

But yesterday, I also bought this lamp. I love buying lamps and I loved the colors and the pattern used for this one’s shade.

One of my new rules as a fresh home owner (pah, I wish!) is, ALWAYS HAVE ENOUGH LAMPS. Honestly though, lighting can turn the ugliest places into a homey living space and I can already see myself kneeling down next to this tiny specimen of a light source in a pathetic position, trying to decipher difficult texts about cultural changes in mid-16th-century European cities. This lamp might just be one for the feeling and not for practicality.

This is actually a huge bedspread to cover up one’s silly Simpsons cheap Ikea bedding but I’m going to try to use it to cover up the hideous fuzzy-pink couch my landlord is leaving behind. I can handle fuzzy and I could possibly handle pink but fuzzy and pink is taking it miles to far. For the time I live there, that couch is going to be cotton-colored.

Now, for the last piece of things I purchased for the new place: a mirror I found in a cute little store in Dortmund. It’s kinda small and I’m not really sure where to put it yet. But it’s pretty, no?

I’m off to fix myself some sort of late lunch or supper out of pasta and a can of peas and carrots. My understanding of cooking, it’s sad really. This household’s organizational skill when it comes to grocery shopping, however? Yeah, it’s a regular master-minded wizzard.