Successes and Failures

Wow, I didn't realize it has been nearly a month since I last posted. A week later after I posted last, we went to another city for 10 days. It was warm and sunny there with low humidity. Meanwhile, it'd gotten downright chilly and rainy back in our city. When we returned, we were completely unprepared when we stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac. I froze in seconds wearing only a thin shirt and thin short-sleeved cardigan. As soon as we retrieved our baggage, I opened my bag and put on another cardigan and two scarves. It took us an hour and half to get home from the airport (we took the subway and then the metrobus) and we were freezing. The sad thing is, I didn't even own a coat yet. I got rid of my coat back in the States because it was 6 years old and the lining was getting shredded. After we'd been home for two days, we hustled out and I bought a coat on sale. I'm ready for winter now.

The city we were in isn't exactly a vacation spot. I'd originally described it as desert in my newsletter (just not the conventional desert with sand dunes) but I wish I could retract that. It's not a desert; it's simply barren. The mountains are barren, rocky, brown dirt. They're still beautiful in their own way. The view from the plane as we were coming in for landing was gorgeous with the cliffs, plateaus, gorges, and peaks. The valley that the city is nestled in is flat and wide with the Euphrates river running through it. It's not a lush green valley though, even with the river. There are groves of fruit trees everywhere but as far as I can tell, there weren't a lot of natural, indigenous vegetation. The climate generally stays dry. It was an interesting place. I think you should be able to click on the pictures below to enlarge them.

After we returned from this city, we hit the ground running by returning to language training, doing laundry, catching up on things, series of doctor appointments, etc. We were already exhausted when we returned to our city but we really ran ourselves ragged by the time weekend came rolling around. We shut ourselves in our apartment all weekend and did nothing but eat, sleep, nap, read, watch movies, etc. I think now we have recovered and we're back to our kind of normal. I say our kind of normal because what's normal about living overseas?

Did I ever tell you that we have a convection oven? Not gas or electric. I'm not quite sure I know how to use it. There are no words on the oven, just pictures which I am deciphering and trying out. The other day, I was cooking a pumpkin in the oven (no canned pumpkins to be found so I make my own pumpkin puree) for a couple of hours and turned off the oven when I was done. A little while later, I kept smelling the oven which has a slight distinctive smell when it's turned on. By nighttime, the smell was strong. I reached to open the oven door to check the interior and nearly scalded my hand. The handle, the oven door, and even the countertops were hot. The oven was still on even though the dials were turned off. The oven interior light and the indicator lights were off. We didn't know how to turn it off except to flip the breakers so G did. The entire kitchen was turned off - in other words, the refrigerator was turned off. We ended up running an extension cord to the refrigerator from the other room. After some false start with flipping the breaker back on (G managed to turn off the electricity to the entire apartment by accident and had to run downstairs to turn it back on in the, what I guess you would call the master electrical box), we found that the oven didn't turn back on. Problem solved. Or so we thought.

A couple days later, I decided to make pumpkin muffins. This is how it turned out:

Scorched tops and uncooked middle. I checked the temperature dial and settings. It was correct so the oven temperature must've been off. Obviously, the oven is not working correctly now. I managed to salvage the muffins by cutting off the tops and baking the rest of the muffins again. They were edible but...eh.

Last night, we had a couple of nationals over for dinner. They wanted to try American food. We racked our brains and G suggested black-eye pea stew over rice, a Southern dish. I'd meant to make cornbread with it but forgot. I decided to brave the capricious oven and make a gluten-free apple crisp (what's more American than apple pie?) and it turned out delicious, which surprised me because I'd winged it after looking at couple of recipes. We served it with vanilla ice cream, naturally. Our guests had second helpings of everything and the apple crisp was a big hit with them. G treated them to a Coke float which was a first for them and made us laugh with their reactions. We tried to describe root beer to them (for root beer floats) but they had no frame of reference for that.

Now, the apple crisp turned out well because I watched it diligently so the top wouldn't be scorched and bottom undercooked. I may try and attempt pumpkin muffins again and station myself in front of the oven to watch them.

Oh, I wanted to share about grinding almonds into flour for my gluten-free cooking (the pumpkin muffins required almond four). After searching for some time, we found a coffee grinder which people have said they successfully used for grinding flour. Coffee grinders aren't in abundance here and they are expensive. I finally put my new coffee grinder to use. I chopped up the almonds and dropped them in.

Flour came out. Sweet! So I put in more almonds. Nothing more came out. After working at it for some time, I realized that I'd ground the almonds so much that it turned into almond butter.

Almond butter stuck in dispenser

Almond butter smeared on cutting board

Fresh almond butter is quite delicious but that wasn't the result I wanted. I managed to get some finely ground flour and some meal (differences in fine and coarse) before I gave up trying to clean the machine of the almond butter. The machine may have died an early death but I've set it aside to try and clean it before I give it up for good.

Nonetheless, I wasn't deterred. I pulled out my food processor and ground more almonds into flour. It does the job but not as well. Fine flour is required for baking so I used my flour sifter to sift out the fine flour and save the coarser flour for coating, meatballs, etc. My first almond flour went into the disastrous pumpkin muffin attempt above.

So, my lovelies, I hope this post catches you up with us sufficiently!