These days, it's pretty easy to try any sort of cooking you desire, whether it be some outdoor grilling or molecular gastronomy. However, while most cooking techniques, recipes and flavors might be at our fingertips, there's one new cooking spin decidedly out of our reach -- space cooking.

I don't know about you, but when I think of eating in space, my mind is awash with thoughts of freeze-dried foods and utter blandness. But these days, things are a little different. MSNBC has posted a great interview with Sandra Magnus, a NASA astronaut who spent months working -- and cooking -- in the station way out there in space.

We might complain about small kitchens and poor equipment, but we have nothing on Sandra, someone who put together dishes like mesquite grilled tuna without gravity, relying on duct tape to keep ingredients and tools from flying away, using a mere meal warmer to cook her dishes. If the latter might not seem like a big deal, chew on this: The warmer would only stay on for 30 minutes, and it would take 4 to 5 cycles inside just to make cooked garlic and onions. That's 2 to 2.5 hours.

Methinks Sandra might be the most resilient cook out there. I'd like to see "Iron Chef" or "Dinner Impossible" take her on in space!

[Via MSNBC]

As anybody who's ever gone camping can attest, cooking in an unfamiliar environment can be a real chore. Pre-planning meals, carefully choosing ingredients based on weight and convenience, and foraging for fresh ingredients can tax anyone's patience. Add in a forgotten spice or a broken cooking implement, and you have a recipe for misery.

Still, as hard as it can be to find oneself on the trail with insufficient foodstuffs, these miseries are nothing compared to the total annoyance of floating thousands of miles above the surface of the earth, trying to cadge together a palatable cuisine out of preserved Russian and American meats and veggies. While the space program brought us delicacies like freeze-dried ice cream and Tang, it is also responsible for sausage in a tube and irradiated bread!

But, as Astronaut Sandy Magnus demonstrates in this blog, the possibilities of space cuisine are limitless ... as long as one packs enough dehydrated sausage and sun-dried tomatoes!