Food Blog--pin it so that you can find the recipes later when you want them

With some blogs, you get one thing: advice on how to be a healthier person, advice on how to cook better food, advice on how to raise your children or have a happy marriage, advice on how to do everything you should already be doing if you weren't a worthless person who spends too much time reading blogs on the internet. Fortunately for you--this multi-tasking blog can do all of those things except for the one about children and marriage.  I recently did a health and wellness blog dealing with head and stomach pain. Usually this is a blog that just wants to help you be a better, less-annoying person. Today, this is a food blog. Bonus for you--I don't have to have a cheesy food blog name like "Crunchy Chili Cook Creations" or "From the Kitchen of a Genius." I just pick one blog name that no one who doesn't speak Indonesian will remember so that people are always having to ask me again where to find my blog and then horribly mispronouncing the name if they ever do remember it. Choosing that kind of name for a versatile blog like this one is essential. And now on to cooking--or photos of things that I cooked.

Repent eats bread shaped like a turtle--
yes, I made it. Or I shaped it anyway.

I am not actually famous for my cooking. In fact, it has been said that the food that I make is difficult for people to eat (Lexon has said it anyway). Many times the smell of my cooking has driven my own self out of the kitchen, but that is probably because I was using too much sheta, as they call ‘hot pepper’ in Juba Arabic. When you use too much, you can sometimes start a coughing fit, but the taste will still be good. Anyway, I do know that people are interested in what I eat out here in the wilds of Africa, or at least, people ask me about it a lot out of morbid curiosity, I guess. Or maybe they know that I usually eat chips and candy and diet pepsi for dinner in places where they stock nutritious food like that (As I type edits into this blog which I wrote several weeks ago with no internet, I am currently eating two travel-size/extra-large bags of gummy candies, a salted almond Toblerone, and a box of Ugandan chocolate with a Coke Zero, because--Health). And no, you cannot find those kinds of food here in Mundri. So I eat lots of bread that Esther makes, putting sugar and Blueband (butter-like substance made of chemicals that don’t need refrigeration) on them to make them extra-healthy.  I also make lots of pasta, since noodles are available and so is tomato sauce in tiny cans, even though this is technically spaghetti, which is a food that I wouldn’t choose otherwise. I used to make scrambled eggs a lot, but eggs have gotten expensive with the terrible roads blocking trucks from bringing in more products to be sold in our markets.

I didn't make this food, but it is one of my favorite things
to be served when I'm in the field--fried cassava and sugarcane tea.

Because of my constant concern for health and nutrition, I try to eat vegetables in some form every day. In Mundri, vegetables are onions, garlic, tomatoes, and that’s basically it since my garden got slashed while I was in Khartoum last time. So I chop them and fry them together and put them in anything I cook—pasta with tomato sauce, scrambled eggs with cumin (I don’t think you should ever make eggs without cumin), and most recently—mashed sweet potatoes.

Here is an old photo I meant to show a long time ago
of Repent and Baby making aseeda aka Blob.
I am posting it now because it has a small amount of relevance.

South Sudanese version of licking the spoon.
Relevance-none, but you can see our cooking utensils...

Here is a photo of my latest culinary invention. It is boiled sweet potatoes mashed with turmeric, mint, salt and pepper, fried onions and garlic, with peanuts I helped to plant and harvest sprinkled on top.  Oh, and also—there was a liberal amount of hot pepper poured on top of all of that.

Doesn't that look positively edible?

I thought it was a pretty genius recipe, but I don’t necessarily recommend you making that to serve for dinner unless you are in a place where those are the things that you have in your pantry and there are not many other options available elsewhere. But I do recommend the recipe I made up for putting pineapple chunks in my tomato sauce pasta. I don’t have a photo, but it was good because pineapple is good, and something good + something OK = something better than it would have been when it was just OK.

Finally, thanks to my time in Khartoum and Indonesia, I was able to stock up on some important foods like Indomie, nasi goreng bumbu, and kecap manis.  I’m hoping that these stocks will be replenished (Mom—you brought me more bumbu to Amrik, right?), so I’ve been extra generous with making and sharing these foods.

Here is a photo of Repent and Esther eating Indomie. After Repent got over the shock of the cabe (sheta), that I put in it, he really enjoyed it. He also drank a lot of water, which is healthy actually, so that all worked out well.

Indomie! Repent has already requested more several times,
even though you can see from this photo that
he was initially traumatized by the cabe.

Then later I had a party for a bunch of people to celebrate the opening of my new house. I planned the menu, which means that I planned mostly things that Esther would make. But in order to be a good hostess, I also made brownies and perkedel. The brownies I called ‘American cake’ and the perkedel I called ‘Indonesian cake.’ Though, perkedel is salty, not sweet. But it ended up being a big hit (except for with Lexon: “Amanda. The cake that you made at your party gave me diarrhea.” Since no one else had that problem, I’m sure it was something else, but Lexon is just as sure that I am to blame with my difficult cooking). Esther took some left-overs home to her mother, and Mama Esther loved the perkedel. So Saturday, after I helped Esther harvest her peanuts that we planted on the 4^th of July (that’s how THIS patriot celebrates), she gave me a few ears of corn so that I could make them again for her mommy.  The perfect day to do this turned out to be just two days later on Monday, the day that nothing I planned to do was going to happen so therefore a perfect day for spending the morning in domestic labor (washing clothes, refilling all water bottles, mopping the bathroom floor, cooking Indonesian food). An added bonus, Lexon and his irritable bowel syndrome were going to be out at his church for the Week of Witnessing. Also, he hates rice and there isn’t really a way to make Indonesian food without rice. I’m sure he got a filling meal of beans and blob from his church ladies that will hopefully not disagree with him (Note: I do love Lexon, even if he doesn’t have adventurous taste buds). Anyway, Esther and Repent loved the nasi and perkedel and they reminded me that they really want to go visit Indonesia where all the food is so good, and I should make that happen. I would love to take them to Indonesia, but somehow plane tickets from Juba to Jakarta and back are not cheap. I feel like that should be a well-traveled route, but airlines are stupid.

Looking good, Nasi Goreng!
Also, kecap manis + anything = YES.

In closing, here is a photo of the nasi goreng cooked over coals and Repent and Esther eating it. This time Esther told me it had too much sheta, but I had told her earlier to tell me when to stop pouring it, and so I think it is her own fault. Repent knew to bring a large cup of water with him to lunch, so he was better prepared.  And then he ate all the leftovers later to make sure that they didn’t go bad because there are children in America who are starving and he didn’t think it was right to waste food.

They always look so nervous before they eat anything I cook…
But they loved it.