My friend Kathryn was visiting and we made black bean
soup. As I was dishing it up I said “I
really wish I had some cheese to melt on top of this.” She just laughed and said “That should be a
Peace Corps slogan.”
Sometimes I miss
being able to eat cheese, milk, and yogurt whenever I want, bake in a real
oven, or refrigerate leftovers, but for the most part I’m adjusting to cooking
in the campo. Or learning to cook at
all, you may be thinking if you remember the Green Chicken Incident of 2009… or
the Burnt Tomato Soup of 2010…
At first I was really into cooking things I had been used to
eating here: rice, rice with bananas, rice with a fried egg, etc. Then I went into a recipe phase: eggplant
parmesan, homemade onion rings – it was a tasty phase!
Now I’m in more of an experimenting/Rachelmakes shephards’ pie phase:
Rice, good. Beans,
good. Onions, garlic, cumin, cilantro,
carrots, celery, cabbage. Good, good,
good! What’s not to like?!
I also made my first ever batch of sauerkraut (with
pineapple!). People thought I was
absolutely crazy when they saw me cutting up all that cabbage, pounding it, and
then explaining that I wasn’t going to eat it for at least 3 days. When it was finished I received only positive
reviews. Lacking brats, I ate it on top
of rice!
I've been making banana bread and so a man asked me what
goes into it. I listed off the
ingredients which included one egg. He came
back and gave me two eggs saying that using two would make it better than just
using one. It reminded me of stopping at
my grandparents’ farm and my grandpa filling up a grocery bag of sweet corn for
me and explaining how I should eat 3 ears for breakfast, 5 for lunch, and 3 for
dinner. More is better!
Bought this fish off the back of a truck, cleaned it, and fried this baby myself! (Under the supervision of my neighbor of course...)
