Cooking is somewhat of an adventure. We have to clean most of our dishes each night (before and after cooking) because its so dusty here and the monkeys get into everything. And I am cooking over 2 small, very unstable cooking stoves. Last night I was trying to do too many things at once and I dumped half of our dinner on the ground. Oops. We have one small table that we use for chopping, dicing, and cooking. It gets very crowded quickly. Also, as soon as the sun goes down, there are suicidal beetles that like the fires of the stoves and fly into them. One night I had 10 dead beetles around my stove! Yuck!
I’ve been experimenting with different recipes here. There have been some great recreations and some not so great. I’ve had to figure out the recipes and then translate them into what is available here and all this from memory. I learned how to cook from my mom who adds a little of this and a bit of that depending on how she’s feeling that day J It drives Tim crazy because he’s one who will write descriptions for each step of the recipe. I’ve tried Vodka Pasta which I’ve made a couple times at home and its amazing (I’ve used Pioneer Woman’s recipe called Pasta ala Vodka and its excellent). Erin bought some vodka and so I decided I’d try the pasta sauce. The grocery store didn’t have heavy cream, so the closest thing to it was buttermilk. And the tomato puree was very different tasting that at home. So, it was a little funky and somewhat chunky thanks to the buttermilk, but everyone was gracious and ate it anyways. One total win for Chels’s cooking was Beef Stroganoff. Usually at home I use those little McCormick packets, but they don’t have those here so I got creative. Again, there was no sour cream so I substituted Greek yoghurt. And I found a seasoning packet for Brown Onion Soup. Those together with the beef, mushrooms and onions tasted EXACTLY how it was supposed to! Amazing! But, the best by far happened mostly by accident. We found some strawberries and decided to have fondue (Tim partook of the strawberries, not the chocolate). So we bought some Cadbury chocolate bars and Lauren put together a double boiler and we had chocolate fondue with strawberries and marshmallows. It was really good but there was a lot left, so I decided to put the pot of chocolate into one of the coolers. When I opened it the next day, it had turned into some of the best fudge I’ve ever tasted!
Here’s what we did:
2 big Cadbury Milk Chocolate bars
about 3 Tbsp Oil
about ½ a cup Milk
One big pot with water. Add 4-5 rocks and set smaller pot in the water. Place contraption onto fire. Stir occasionally and taste often J Enjoy with strawberries or delicacy of your choice, then cover and put over ice for 12 hours. At which time it will be the best fudge/icing/ganache stuff you’ve ever had in Africa. Seriously.
~Chels
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