One of my favorite things in the past week of being in our house has been the cooking. It’s a challenge, but I love it. It’s been fun to go to markets, discover new items, guess what vegetables & herbs are what, and then find recipes to work with various items. I really love visiting the little vendors and finding all sorts of veggies at wonderful prices. Just down the road from our house, I got four potatoes, two limes, six small tomatoes, and a head of cabbage for a dollar yesterday! It’s also been fun to learn what’s in season and how to work with those things together. We’ve also found the meat here to be a good price, which Stephen is thankful for.
The hardest part is that we only have one burner and a rice cooker to work with right now, but we’re hoping to add a large toaster oven before too long that I can use to make breads, cakes, casseroles, etc. It’s been difficult to get the timing right on everything with only one burner, and keep it hot with fans blowing everywhere (knowing you can’t turn the fans off while you’re standing over a hot stove). Even so, I still really love the new items, instructions in another language, etc. Our Karen teacher, Lavender, also taught us how to make chickpea tofu the other day, which is absolutely wonderful (Stephen even liked it!). We ate quite a lot of chickpeas in the states, but I’m finding even more wonderful recipes here.
Oh, and by the way: it’s getting hotter each day now. This can’t be good.