31 days: bread and visitors

There are days when I hardly cook at all and days when all I do is cook. Yesterday was the former. And by the time I had been to the market and the mitumba (used clothing market) where I was called, "Beyonce" (in what universe do I look like Beyonce?!), proposed to, and generally taunted I had no energy left for a blog post! I usually avoid mid-day market and the annoying people at the mitumba were a bit out of the ordinary. Anyway, culture-stress, yuck. Today was better.

I had big plans to make bread, until the power went out. I decided instead to post about the challenges of cooking around power outages. Immediately after taking this picture of the electric meter on the back porch...

 ...the power came back!

See the tiny red light in the second picture? That means we have power. Bread was back on the menu.

I made a couple loaves of honey wheat bread with some sprouted grains in it and had just finished kneading the dough when some visitors arrived. It hadn't risen the first or second time, but I didn't have much to offer the visitors so I formed a little of the dough into a small loaf and popped it in the oven.

The little loaf was really beautiful, but I didn't cook it long enough so I ended up slicing and toasting it to get it a little further along. I served this to the visitors with bananas and chai. I am horrible at making Tanzanian chai. I had Elizabeti show me once how much sugar to put in, but still no one ever seems to like it when I make it.

After the rest of the dough had risen I made my big loaves. They turned out pretty well. It has taken me a long time to make good bread, but I think I've finally got it down.

I made some sour cream and thawed some meat and Carson came in and took over dinner. He was craving Mexi-Melts. I'm not sure if I've ever had one so I figured it was safer to let him do it. They were wonderful.

And probably the cutest thing in my kitchen today.

Silas was really mesmerized by my apron!