What would Julia do?

I really enjoyed the movie Julie and Julia, about a New York blogger working her way through every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I don't know anything about Julia Child's life except what was in the movie, but the scenes of her  triumphing over the chauvenists at her cooking school by determindly chopping PILES of onions were really memorable.  If you haven't seen the movie and you have any interest in blogging, cooking, or adjusting to a foreign country--which you must, or you wouldn't be here!--go watch it.

My own experiences of cooking in a foreign country have not yet achieved any measure of success. Last night I made a disgustingly runny, salty stir-fry.  It's too bad, too, because stir-fry is a favorite dish for me. I dug in as soon as I slapped it onto the table, only to be quite disappointed. 

Part of the problem IS that I'm a measurer: I know the basics of cooking, but I've never had that feel for it that lets people add a little of this and a little of that and produce something delicious.  True, I can probably count on both hands the number of meals I've ever cooked, so I'm expecting to some day make up in skill what I lack in instinct. But, in the process, my lack of measuring cups and spoons has made for some disatrous meals! You might ask, why don't you just go buy some? Because we don't have measuring cups and teaspoons in, well, cups and teaspoons.  Convert, you say? Unfortunately, cups and teaspoons are a volumne measurement and grams are a weight, so the conversion process is not foolproof. And believe me, at this point I need something foolproof.  The saltiness of my failed stir-fry was a direct result of a person who's craving east Asian food adding soy sauce ˝to taste.˝ I'm surprised we didn't both have isntant strokes from the sodium!

The translation process isn't foolproof, either.  To make the stir-fry sauce, I needed cornstarch.  I asked Kristian what cornstarch is called here, and he said škrob.  Before I went to the store, I checked the online dictionary for alternate translations, which has saved me at the grocery store in the past, like when I was shopping for chicken broth and couldn't find any in the can. One alternate for škrob was kukuruzno brašno.  So I went to the store, inspected the baking aisles closely, and no škrob.  But Huzzah! There was kukuruzno brašno, which translates literally into corn flour.  On the same aisle they had polenta and cornmeal, though (Croatians love their corn), so I figured that kukuruzno brašno must actually be different from those things. When I got it home, it was yellowish, which did not seem right, but hey, americans overprocess and overrefine everything, so I tested some in water, and it thickened into a kind of paste, so I figured it does work as a thickener, but I had used too much.

When I made the stir-fry, though, it wouldn't thicken.  So I mixed a bit more of the brašno in a little cold water and added it.  I did that twice.  No dice.  Evidently kukuruzno brašno can be used for making a grit-like paste, but not to thicken stir-fry sauce.  Oh well, live and learn.  There's got to be some store in this town that has škrob.

But tonight I'm going to just buy a jar of pasta sauce.  Which, incidentally,  is called ˝Salsa˝ here.