Ok, I have two "life awesome"s and one "life terrible." My "life awesome" is that a neighbor decided to open up a little vegetable store (with a few other staples) just 50 meters from my house! I can see the store from my kitchen window. I was so excited. Seriously. Great news.
And now, for the "life terrible." There's no natural gas in the whole city. Which means no nice gas stove for Mully. And, microwaves are non-existant here, I'm back on my little charcoal grill made out of milk cans. Major terrible. Same thing happened around this time last year. At least this year I'm not nine months pregnant when the natural gas goes on hiatus. Let me tell you, its no fun hovering over a little charocal grill stirring chicken 'n noodles while baking your own little bun in the oven (the little bun now known as Isaaq Yuusuf:). Which again reminds me that my friends here are way cooler than I'll ever be, because they use the charcoal grills all the time, pregnant or not. And finally, to end on my second "life awesome" I can make bread. Like the kind with yeast in it. The really delicious kind. I've been eyeing a dutch oven online for Papa Clarkson to bring from the States for a while now, but then once I saw it weighted 16 LBS (!) I had second thoughts. That's a big portion of his allotted lugguage allowance for his flights. I could cram in a lot of other good stuff for those 16 pounds. So I grabbed a friend and we headed down to the market area downtown and scoured for sometime that might resemble a dutch oven, and were incredibly disappointed. I wanted the good cast iron double as a shotput kind. We couldn't find anything but cheapish flimsy pots. Yuck. And, then I found something that would proabaly be classified as an aluminum dutch oven, not nearly as fantastic as the cast iron dutch oven, but I thought I'd give it a whirl. And you know what? It makes awesome bread. I'm so excited. I've mostly made oatmeal bread, a recipe from my favorite and faithful More With Less cookbook, but I've also made. Shoot, forgot what else I made. Whatever it was, it was really good. Oh, that's right coffee cake. It would make my Poppers proud. It was delicious. Handsome hubby and I enjoyed some on our date night last week. And, I can even make some pretty great breads on the charcoal grill with it. It's actually probably a bit easier on the charcoal grill even, don't ask me how (hubby did, and I could quite figure out why). Perhaps, I'll even get around to posting some pictures. Ok, hugs!