Food

We posted two weeks ago about food. You know where we get food but we haven’t told you what we eat. Well that is pretty simple. Rice and Beans! Ok we eat more than that but it seems like that is the only thing we eat. For breakfast we have tea or coffee with fresh local milk. For most people around here that is all they eat for breakfast so we had to be creative. Bananas are abundant around here and we have found local peanut butter and a good bakery so our breakfast has expanded in the past few weeks. For lunch we have rice, beans, and some kind of greens. The greens alternate between fried/sautéed cabbage with tomatoes or fried/sautéed lettuce with onions. The only flavors to add are onions or salt. For dinner it is what ever we have left over from lunch. This is all made with a few items. A charcoal stove that is about 1 foot high that looks like two bowls put end to end. Then we have a few pots and one frying pan and a wooden spoon. That is it. We are gone from the land of fridges, microwaves, ovens, toasters, or anything else modern. Cooking like this can be very challenging. What happened to Easy Mac, spaghetti, and toast? Here the first challenge was trying to light the stove. This takes 20 minutes. If you manage to get it lit you now try cooking with limited ingredients with one temperature stove. I thought we could handle pop corn. We had cooking oil and kernels so I thought this would be no problem. The first attempt we couldn’t even get the stove lit. The second try only about ¼ of the kernels popped and these were only half popped. Who knew how great jiffy pop was? We have given up and are now buying pop corn from a local women in town for a bag of for 8 cents. Mama Sofia is now teaching Courtney how to cook. This involves Mama Sofia laughing at Courtney and taking over so lunch isn’t ruined. So far Courtney has learned to make Ugali, rice, and veggies (even though Mama Sofia thinks Courtney chops the veggies too big). Each day is an adventure!