Home Cookin'

I've just begun to try my hand at cooking in our new home, and so far it's been OK. Nothing spectacular but edible nonetheless! Chicken is easy to find and easy to cook. Oh, but you should see the price of ground beef!! When we went to the store to look for ground beef and saw a package that looked about as big as 1 lb. (maybe) for about $10.00 we thought it must be some kind of "special" ground beef. Nope, that's just what you pay here for it! I guess we'll be eating lots of chicken, huh? Rice is easy to find and easy for a lot of people - not so easy for me! Of course, when I picked up the bag of rice to cook it the other night I looked for directions, and there weren't any. Women around here just know how to cook good rice! I think it's in the genes!! Maybe once I make a few friends they can show me how to do it the local way. And tomatoes are easy to find - in lots of forms, so I cooked spaghetti last night. I made the sauce "from scratch." No, I didn't have to peel the tomatoes and make my own paste or anything like that. I just had to add all of the seasonings. I used this really thick tomato paste stuff - well, I didn't know it was that thick until I opened the can. It's like double the thickness of what we would call tomato paste in the US. I doctored it up as much as I could and added a can of regular diced tomatoes, but let me tell you it wasn't Ragu!!! And it made a lot, so we had leftovers tonight. I'm not sure what we'll do with the rest of the leftovers - maybe some of the stray dogs might like to taste my spaghetti sauce!!

The best thing we've found in our new home is that if we put 30 "cents" in a bag and hang it on our door at night, our doorman will deliver fresh bread in the morning. Add a little butter and honey and ummmmmm ummmmmm good!!!

Oh, this has nothing to do with food, but we ordered some furniture for our "living room" today. It's red (well, more like crimson maybe) - not what we would buy in the US but our local friends will love it (we've been told). It will take 3 weeks to get it ready - we can't wait to have something to sit on!!

Happy cooking!

PS - If you have any hints on successful rice cooking or good "from scratch" spaghetti sauce recipes send them my way.