I guess I wasn't really prepared for the variety of food available here. Yes, you need to bleach your raw veggies before you eat them, or cook them for a while to kill whatever might be living in them or on them, freeze and sift flour, but when it comes down to it, one can make all the staples here - from scratch. The grocery store shelves look bare (just starting to come back now after the war), so if you take two of something, for example cocoa powder for chocolate cake, you might be taking their entire stock. I had an egg salad sandwich on whole wheat bread with cucumbers yesterday and a baked potato, homemade tomato sauce on eggplant and carrots today. What we can't get here is made up for the yumminess of local food. Sorry about my spelling. This isn't research :-)

Ragu d'inyame - inyames are like potatoes. This dish has a tomato base, beef, chunks of inyame, and its orange. Sometimes people add in green beans, carrots, whatever.

Sauce Arachide - its a peanut sauce, smooth, and creamy, with beef, on rice

Sauce Gratin - its a sauce made from palm nuts and oil, very rich and creamy, with beef, on rice

Sauce Legume - like a veggie soup with beef, on couscous (Angelika adds butter and raisins - yum!)

Footoo - pounded inyames. It looks like a roll that is still just dough. You use it like an ehtiopean sourdough pancake to pick up food.

Attieke - its like sticky couscous, made from a root plant, served with a salsa sauce with tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. You make it into balls with your hands and eat it with fresh killed chicken.

Eggs - you go to your neighbor, you ask for eggs, he gets them from under the chickens, you don't refridgerate them.

So, things are a little different here. As long as I stay healthy and don't gain weight, I guess I can eat yoplait apricot full fat yogurt instead of my stoneyfarm natural organic fat free french vanilla, I can use sweetened condensed milk in my coffee instead of milk and sugar, and I can still cook apple crisp in my gas stove.

And there runs a gecko across my floor. So much for thinking american...