14 DAY TRIAL // For those of you who can't sleep at night because you keep tossing and turning in your beds wondering what cooking in space would be like, here are a couple of videos showing astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti preparing two of her favorite meals.
Be warned though, this astronaut's adventures cooking aboard the International Space Station will probably make your perfectly ordinary kitchen back at home seem like a pretty boring place.
She doesn't use plates, the ingredients all float
Since there is no gravity to hold them down, the ingredients European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti uses to prepare her rice, mushroom and chicken tortilla and mackerel and quinoa tortilla simply float around her.
To keep them in place and actually manage to eat them, the space explorer must use cream to secure them to the tortillas. If she didn't, she'd have to go hunting them down around the makeshift kitchen aboard the International Space Station.
As explained by the astronaut, tortillas are the preferred alternative to bread when it comes to cooking in space. This is because tortillas aren't quite a fragile as bread slices and don't leave crumbs that might cause all sorts of trouble.
Even so, it sometimes happens that bits and pieces of astronauts' meals float away from them. These leftovers are either pulled towards ventilation grids or found by fellow space explorers while going about their daily routine.
“It [the runaway food] will get pulled towards a ventilation grid and be cleaned up on the Saturday morning cleaning round. Alternatively, it could make for a tasty snack for someone as it floats past,” Samantha Cristoforetti says.
There are culinary perks to living in space
It's not easy living far away from home aboard the International Space Station, and food is known to help people feel better and put them in a good mood, so astronauts are allowed to take a few of their favorite foods with them.
Most of them pack treats that remind them of their home sweet home, just as astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti did turmeric chicken, rice, mackerel and quinoa. Yes, we're basically talking about comfort food, which the European Space Agency agrees is important for psychological reasons.
