Maybe I write too many posts about food, but hopefully it is of interest to you, and it is certainly a big part of my life, since I cook everything from scratch 3 times a day. Just today I felt completely successful at creating a new recipe that Josh really enjoyed. The best part is that I made it entirely from ingredients found in the local market!
We have been thankful and surprised at the variety of food we can find here in our new town. We especially like “Hoobsa” – a Sudanese round, flat bread that we can make into pita style bread and cook grilled cheese and pizza or heat up with butter in a skillet. (The butter and cheese come from N’Djamena –Josh buys in bulk and we store it in our freezer.) There is also regular French-style baguettes and another bread that we think is similar to a heavy dinner roll in the States. We eat roasted, salted peanuts often as a snack and oatmeal and scrambled eggs almost every morning for breakfast unless I’m in the mood to whip up some pancakes or biscuits. My house helper knows how to make peanut butter and even fried okra, which made me very happy a few days ago! We can buy pineapples, apples, bananas, oranges, watermelons, guavas, and mangoes in addition to tomatoes, carrots, onions, greens, lettuce, canned green beans, canned red beans, canned corned, various types of dried beans, rice, couscous, pasta, stew beef or ground beef. You pay a little extra to get it ground right in front of you and they add some spices to it as they manually grind it. There is also a restaurant that makes tasty rotisserie style chickens, but we usually buy one per person because they are very scrawny chickens.  We have heard of another restaurant that sells French fries, occasionally pizza, and some other good things, but it takes at least an hour to get your food so we haven’t visited there yet. A couple things we have decided we are not interested in trying include fried grasshoppers and the fish that gets transported in from…who knows where?! We are in a land-locked country 12 hours’ drive from the capital, so the fish thing is just not that appealing. Can you blame us?!