My Recipes, Tried and True

Five years ago I couldn't really cook. When we moved to Africa I was SO clueless. Sometimes I'd serve rice with fried onions (?!). Or I'd just serve popcorn. That's all. Learning to pop that in a pan with oil on the stove was enough of a challenge for me. And once I served Mike a whole boiled potato. That's it. He sat on the couch and ate it like it an apple. (Yeah, he loves to tell that story.) I really had no idea what to do with a big pile of fresh vegetables from the local market. I'd look at it and just wonder how in the world I was supposed to make dinner out of it all.

I have come a long way since then and I often get asked what I cook in Africa. The answer is I cook all kinds of stuff... local foods, American foods, international foods and all those foods mixed together. I am no professional chef by any means, but it's been a fun journey for me. By now I have a collection of recipes that are tried and true. You know, the ones that you eat again and again and again and again some more.

I plan to start posting them here and put a collection of the links to those recipe posts on a new tab.

My Recipes, Tried and True

I am hoping you might enjoy the eclectic collection as it grows and also I am hoping that this means I can stop carrying around odd bits of paper that I scribble the recipes out on before I leave my house in Africa to travel each year in case I have a hankering for our fav Czech crepes, lentil and rice burritos or wacky cake along the way. I can kiss my bits of paper goodbye and the recipes will all be on here for good.

My fav recipes are most often completely from scratch and they never require fancy ingredients, cause we just don't have even some basic ingredients readily available, let alone anything fancy. They're also almost always vegetarian, cause when we moved our budget was perty tight. We didn't want to pay for the 'nice' meat from the supermarket and we weren't big fans of the more affordable meat that had been hanging on a hook in the open market covered with flies all day. So we learned to eat beans and vegetables instead. And now we're just accustomed to it.

Tomorrow I'll post the first tried and true recipe! Although fun pics to go with will have to wait until we're home and settled again...