Cooking in Kapsowar (and more!)

I am quite enjoying cooking while we are living here and have discovered a lot of new recipes. While I do really miss the grocery store (I do in fact have dreams about it and spend some time day dreaming about all the aisles and selections during the day but I digress . . ) there is still a lot of cooking to be done and I am excited about these new finds.

• Homemade Granola! Oh so good. I made it once in Chilliwack but have found an even better recipe here.

7 cups oats
7 cups corn flakes (I just used two and substituted 2 cups of bran,and 3 cups of oats)
3 cups chopped cashews (I used ground nuts, i.e peanuts)
2 tsp cinnamon
2/3 cup brown sugar
¾ cup water
1 cup oil
2/3 cup peanut butter
¾ cup honey (I did not have honey so I put in ¼ cup oil and ½ cup brown sugar)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
**I also put in some raisins and last time I put in dried apricots.

Mix oatmeal, corn flakes, nuts and cinnamon. Heat together in a pan, sugar, water, oil, honey, peanut butter and salt. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Stir into dry mixture. Bake at 325 for 50 minutes or until golden brown. Stir every 15 minutes. Cool. Store in airtight container.

Here is my granola just out of the oven. Please ignore my very messy stove top.

Me typing while I admire my granola.
• These banana bran muffins are great and so are these cream puffs. I just make pudding and have that as filling.

• One thing about cooking here is that we have two separate garbages. You have the garbage to burn and the food scraps garbage. Needless to say the food scrap garbage gets really gross and smelly. Last week it was so smelly I couldn’t stand to open it up because I couldn’t hold my breath long enough for the smell to go away, (You can read about my weird relationship with smells here.) so I put the garbage outside. An animal got to it and there was garbage all over our back patio. I told Marc that I would clean it up since I was the one who left it out there (he did offer though). Here is me in my full cleaning gear.
• We have chai tea and a travel mug! (No I did not cook these but they are food related and this is exciting news for Kapsowar!) Kari (an oh so fun nurse from the US who left this week and I really miss her) gave us her travel mug and some chai tea. All tea here is called chai but it is regular tea. She brought some actual chai tea with her and gave me her left overs. Here I am with my tea bag! (While I was taking this picture my milk boiled over on the stove. Oops!)
• I made my first curry the other night. It was coconut chicken curry and it was amazing! I am excited to try more when we get back to Canada. Last night I made a mango salsa with onions, tomatoes, avocadoes, pineapples, mangoes, corn and some spices. It was great wrapped in chapatti. We had some graduates from the local children’s home over for supper and we had a wonderful time. We showed them photo booth on our computer and while they were amused by their warped faces they were also very scared. Here are some pictures from last night.

Here are some extras for you.

This is the lovely Mary who I mentioned in my last post. We were trying to get her to smile in a picture but she wouldn't until Marc and I kept repeating kiberrberr (the kalingen name for ringworm) and she thought the way we said it was so funny she couldn't help laughing.

Here are some of the local kids playing in the freshly mowed grass the other day. Marc went out and played with them and got these great pictures. They really enjoyed looking at their crazy faces after.

Despite my best efforts I cannot relate these last three pictures to cooking but I could tie it all together with the phrase, here's what's been cooking in Kapsowar lately! :)