My Overseas Kitchen

I'm not someone who loves to cook.  However, we have to eat and so I spend a fair bit of time in the kitchen.

In our remote location, packaged food is expensive and availability is sporadic; this is particularly true for chilled and frozen items.  So we do a lot of cooking from scratch.  To make it easier to feed the family, I have a lot more gadgets and appliances than I would if I lived in my home country.  Let me introduce you to some of them:

The first is the water filter:

Although the rain water that we drink is clean, it might not be so pure after it's landed on our roof and poured through the gutters.  As well as drinking the filtered water directly, we also use it to make milk from powder. (Boxed UHT milk is a special treat ;-))

Beans (eg black beans, navy beans) are cheap; we eat a lot of them!  But it's a challenge to cook them at 5000 feet, especially if they are already old by the time I use them.  This is where the pressure cooker comes in.  To make baked beans, I soak the beans overnight and then cook them for 25 minutes in the pressure cooker:

Sometimes I'll throw potatoes, carrots and chicken into the pressure cooker for an easy one-pot meal.

My rice cooker originally belonged to a Japanese family.  Fortunately a previous owner translated the labels into English:

Rice is cheap and easily available.  We eat it; we feed it to our friends; when dog food becomes unavailable, we feed it to our animals.  I'll also cook rice in the oven, in the pressure cooker or, of course, on the stove.  (Yes, we do have a regular oven, microwave and kettle in addition to these other gadgets.)

Friday night is popcorn and smoothie night for us.  Unpopped corn and bananas are cheap and plentiful so, with the assistance of the blender and popcorn maker, I can put together a cheap and easy meal:

There are challenges living in a community where people come and go so often.  An advantage though is that used items often come up for sale when people leave!  This how we obtained the appliances in the above two photos.  Many appliances sold by other missionaries were originally bought in the US; this means that a transformer (the large, clumpy, metal thing) is needed to run them. 

Other items we've acquired over the last 12+ years include a tortilla maker, waffle maker, sandwich maker, immersion blender and slow cooker.  All of these help me keep producing food in a place where I can't just pop something into the oven at the end of long day.

Living In The UK: Things I Love

It was great to spend five months back in the UK this Spring.  Here are some of my favourite things:

1) Seeing the friends and family who live there.  I might get in trouble if I didn't put this as number one; but it really does come first for me!

2) Complete strangers understand my accent and vocabulary.

3) Being anonymous when I go out in public.

4) Almost anything I need is within walking distance.

5) Being able to walk to the shops at 10.30pm.

6) I can buy pasta for 30p, baked beans for 25p and crisps for 7p; I even found some 17p toothpaste reduced to 3p!

7) Meat comes with instructions for how long to cook it.

8) I can travel alone to places I've never been to before (yes, I realise this one may sound strange).

9) I can catch a train to almost any place I'd want to go (unfortunately it costs more than 30p though).

10) We live next door to a library.

11) We live opposite a fish and chip shop.

12) Our church has a fantastic children's programme during the service.

13) I don't have to cook from scratch.

14) Hearing my children speaking more like me :-)

15) English villages are beautiful.

16) Clean tap water.

17) It's never too hot or too cold to go outside (though I may have contested this back in March, when I was quickly reminded what 'cold' feels like).

18) Free medical care.

19) Fresh milk.

20) The enthusiastic welcome of friends, family, small groups and churches.

21) The Puzzling Place Museum.

A Success!

We have an Easter tradition of eating lunch with a family who are good friends of ours.  With last month's disaster fresh in my mind, I was keen to plan our part of the meal very carefully.

My plan wasn't written neatly, and by the end it had got too wet to read...but it worked!  We even ended up arriving for lunch 15 minutes early.  What a difference from previous years, when we arrived stressed, grumpy and late.

Pizza-Making for the Organisationally Challenged

"Agh - the play starts in 25 minutes!" I exclaimed last night, between bites of pizzas.

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mehmetali uslu

mehmetali uslu

It seemed like a simple plan: A kind friend was coming to babysit the girls while the rest of us went to the high school play; I'd planned a simple meal for us all to eat before the play started.

I had been able to buy ready-made bases and sauce (woohoo) so all I had to do was throw on some toppings and cheese, put it in the oven, and then cut up some salad to go with it. 

This is what really happened:

Although I came up with a time that I planned for us to eat, I didn't fully consider how long it would take to find and chop up the toppings and grate the cheese.

I also didn't think that I might not have enough time, while the pizza cooked, to chop up the salad and clear and lay the table. 

I gave no consideration at all to the 'putting everything away' aspect that would ideally have happened between finishing the meal and leaving the house.

I didn't stop to consider the importance of having the meal on the table at the specified time, given that we had to be somewhere by 7pm.

I also didn't think about all the small jobs that needed to be done before we could leave the house, many of which could have been done earlier in the afternoon.

We did make it to the play on time, but not without stress and panic on my part!  The hour before leaving for the play certainly wasn't a relaxing one, or one in which I had time to focus on the friend who had joined us for dinner.

I considered the contrast between this stressful evening and other recent evenings when we've had friends over for dinner.   When we've had families over for dinner in the last few months I've been careful to plan out my time so that things would run smoothly.   I've actually come away from the evening feeling happy and relaxed about how well everything came together. 

The more simple the event I'm working towards, the less likely I am to plan out my time carefully.  And the greater the potential for disaster!

Planning out my time properly is important in so many situations.  I'm slowly learning that.

Last time we were in the UK, I remember how difficult it was to get the children out of the house and into the car.  There were bags to be packed, socks to find, shoes to be put on, nappies to be changed, hair to be brushed.  The list seemed endless.  

Again, I found that I had to plan carefully and be realistic about how long everything would take, even for a trip of an hour or two, or I'd find myself running terribly late. 

The older I get, the more I learn about myself.  It's all useful stuff!

You won't find me on the Great British Bake Off

On two occasions I tried making cookies from scratch.  The first time, I pushed them too far into the oven and watched them burn in the fire at the bottom.  The second time, I think something went wrong when I mixed the butter and sugar together; in any case, they didn't work.
 
I think I may be the only expatriate woman around here who doesn't bake.  Though I certainly appreciate my friends who do :-).  Other than the doughnuts which we eagerly buy at market each week, there is no opportunity to purchase cakes around here.
 
I have a couple of exceptions to my 'no baking' way of life:
 
A) I sometimes make 100% wholemeal bread rolls with the help of my breadmaker (which I think I may have broken last week...).  We can't buy nice-tasting bread here and packed-lunch options are limited, so it's very helpful to have bread rolls that my family will all eat.
 
B) If a member of my family has a birthday and I haven't managed to talk anyone else into making a cake for them, I will somehow get involved in that process.  Usually Andrew makes the cake, using a box mix with some interesting added ingredients, and I do the icing.
 

Yay for our dinosaur cake tin, which so far as been used three times.

This is why I don't bake:  

1) Baking is not fun for me.  I know at least some people enjoy it.  Many people apparently also enjoy other activities which require some degree of co-ordination and artistic interest; for example painting nails, putting on make-up or doing crafts.  Not me.
 
2) It takes me too long to find the ingredients in my cupboards.  This leads me to believe my time would be better spent tidying my cupboards (something I find more enjoyable and satisfying than baking anyway!)
 
3) If I took time to bake, I'd have to give up something else in my life.  I don't want to stop resting or working, and I certainly can't afford to give up tidying!
 
4) In the culture I grew up in, a store-bought biscuit (Americans: think Oreo...or even half an Oreo with no cream) was considered a perfectly adequate snack.  So it's hard for me to find the motivation to produce anything more extravagant for 'snack' purposes, knowing that I could just purchase a packet of Oreos (which thankfully are available here).  I'm finding there are a range of other snacks I can send to events such as school parties that don't involve baking.
 
5) If I attempt to bake, I end up with flour and sugar all over the place, as well as dirty pots and pans that I might not get around to washing very quickly. The number of ants, cockroaches and rats and are roaming in the vicinity, eagerly searching for food, make this particularly dangerous.

6) I already have to cook mostly from scratch, due to the limited availability of ingredients.  I don't feel the need to spend any extra time in the kitchen.

Green omelet anyone?  I don't think I'll be starting a food blog anytime soon!

So, baking can leave me 1) unhappy 2) frustrated  3) unfulfilled  4) unmotivated 5) overwhelmed with mess and 6) kitchened-out.  Rather than feeling that I should bake more, I can see now that the world (and particularly my household) is probably a happier place when I avoid it as much as possible!
 
Please don't think that I have a low opinion of baking overall, or of time spent baking.  I greatly appreciate the efforts of people who make the baked goods that I love to eat.  I know baking can be great way to love and bless other people.  Life would be a lot less exciting for me if I never got to eat homemade baked goods.
 
But that doesn't mean that I personally have to be involved!