Jamie's BD party

Jamie had a birthday last week, and we celebrated with some friends on the weekend. Jamie enjoyed having helpers to make his birthday pizza! Each of the three boys got to help make one pizza, and we all enjoyed eating them!

spreading out pizza dough on a pan

adding cheese topping

adding meat topping

Our four hard working bakers!

I tried to make a creative cake for my hunter: chocolate frosting for dirt, yellow colored coconut as hay bales and remnants of corn stalks in a field, with a little blue-jello river running in the corner and two elk borrowed from one of the boys...all that's needed is the hunter!

Jamie and Thad exstinguish 33 candles in one blow!

After the kids went to bed, the adults got to play games and eat popcorn…but I was having so much fun I forgot to take pictures of that part!

cooking

Thad eating his breakfast sandwich with a fork!

"I'm so glad I have a husband who doesn't mind being in the kitchen," I told Jamie the other day, "otherwise we'd see a lot less of eachother! Feels like we spend a lot of our time cooking."

We've done a bit of creative cooking over the last couple of weeks. Two weekends ago (July 23) was Remembrance Day (sorta like Memorial Day) so we had a 3-day weekend. I decided to do something special for breakfast, so we make breakfast sandwiches which came out quite well! Jamie made up the fluffy buttermilk biscuits, and cooked us up some egg in little round pans we found in our cupboard. I made some little sausage patties from pork mince and spices, which we topped with a slice of cheese and combined with the egg on the biscuit. Thad ate his with a fork, because it was too tall for him to bite!

Jamie likes to make plate-sized pancakes...and I'm glad to eat them!

This past Saturday we had our regular pancake breakfast, but with a few substitutions. We can't get buttermilk (and use powdered milk), so we normally "make" buttermilk by adding vinegar to the milk--our normal substitution. This week we had a couple more on top of that. Our store was out of eggs, so we tried an egg substitution recommended in a recipe book (baking powder, water, & oil). They seemed a bit more crumbly than normal, and not quite so fluffy, but still came out pretty yummy...for not having any egg.

We usuallly make our own "maple" syrup by bringing equal parts brown sugar, white sugar, and water and then adding some maple flavoring. Well, our stock of brown sugar is getting rather low, and I thought the price in the store was a little high to use it for just regular cooking--so we tried another substitution. We mixed white sugar with treacle (which I understand to be like molasses) to make our "brown sugar", before we used our brown sugar to make syrup.

None of these were too wild and crazy, but we felt like we were having a lot in one meal!

"maple" syrup made with sugar and treacle...and a little maple flavoring

dehydrating

Because VITAL takes place in the warmlands along the coast, the cool weather vegetables (carrots, capsicum {also known as green pepper in the States} zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes) are hard to come by. And when you do actually find them, they are usually rather expensive and sad looking. SO-after talking about it with Liz, who you may remember helped me out with the buy for the October module, we decided that the thing to do was to plan ahead and purchase these veggies at the market in Ukarumpa, dehydrate them, and bring them down to Alotau when I come for the course.

January was my trial run, and I think that it worked out really well! I made one really big trip to the market and purchased loads of carrots and capsicum, and also some zucchini, cabbage, and potatoes. I borrowed a nice large dehydrator (about 10 trays tall),

and spent a little more than a week, with the dehydrator running pretty much the whole time (and me washing, peeling and chopping). Here are some of the results of that venture.

I spent a lot of time on carrots. Many of the soups we make at VITAL call for about 20 carrots—not the foot-long carrots that we get in the States, but little guys, usually about 6 inches long. In the market at Ukarumpa we can get a “heap” of about 10 carrots for 1 Kina (a little less than 50 cents). At the store in Alotau, a good price would be 2.50-3.00 Kina for 5 carrots. In the picture below, I tried to show what 20 carrots looks like washed and bleached (we bleach almost everything purchased at the market to kill bad germs), then chopped in a bowl and ready for the dehydrator, and the final result--dehydrated carrots in a sandwich bag!

I also dehydrated a few zucchini—they are a really nice addition to chicken soup. As you can see, this zucchini is a little longer than a standard sandwich bag. It probably cost about 2 Kina in the Ukarumpa market. At a store in Alotau, it would sell for closer to 9 Kina.

Cabbage is also an ingredient in our chicken soup recipe. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out (and sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the final product!—next time) but it worked! In the square bowl at the back, you can see the sliced pieces of one cabbage—when dehydrated, it just fit into one sandwich bag. At the front, on the dehydrator tray, is zucchini that has been cubed and then blanched in boiling water (I guess blanching is supposed to stop something inside the veggies, and make them keep longer when dehydrated).

I think that my favorite was the potatoes—they looked really cool all dried up! But, they were the last ones I did, and in my packing haste, I didn’t get a picture of them either. Anyways, in spite of all the time spent bleaching, peeling, chopping, and blanching--I think that the whole thing was a big success!! It was SO nice this module not to have to spend time hunting around Alotau stores looking for nice specimens of these veggies, and knowing that I saved so much on the price!