Slow Food

For those of you who have jumped on the “slow-food” concept, that is the story of my day to day existence. For example, today I have made pesto pasta, cooked chicken breasts to put on top of the pesto pasta, cut up mango, apple, papaya and oranges, have bread dough rising, and have made deviled eggs and it is just 11:00 a.m. Not that this is a crazy amount of cooking, but it is more than I was doing in Virginia, and I cook a lot. I had forgotten how long it takes to clean and bleach all of the produce and we currently have ONE cooking pot in the house, which makes cooking take a bit longer ---- of course only one burner on our stove top works, so at this point extra pots would do no good!

I am getting up in the morning and making breakfast before the kids and EJ leave the house, usually around 7:30. I clean the kitchen after that and then mosey around, putting things away and organizing and alphabetizing the few things we have here, then start lunch prep. Kids and EJ come home around 12:30. Max is done with school every day at that time, and half of the week Olivia returns to school at 3:00 after coming home for lunch and rest/siesta. After everyone feeds, it is back to clean up and unfortunately I am still at the stage; one week in, of worrying about what I can make for the next meal that everyone will eat.

The grocery stores have everything that you could want, however, they all close from 12:30 – 4:00 or so each day (except one, that happens to be the furthest from our residence), so planning ahead is important. And, while there are all of the ingredients you could want to cook from scratch, you can’t just find the ingredients to make typical American dishes. Sure, you can find all of the ingredients to make lasagna – but then you have to “find” the two hours and desire to assemble the lasagna and just like in Addis, while one grocery has ricotta cheese, the other has the good ground beef, so you make multiple stops to get the ingredients for one meal. Not complaining, just the facts. Food is quite expensive as everything is imported; I paid $25 for a kilo of sliced ham the other day. There are two French grocery stores that have very normal items and incredibly expensive cheeses and meat and there is one “Arabic” grocery store that has a large selection of some scary and some normal products and then various other stores that have a little bit of everything, including one that is open 24 hours a day. There is a bakery downtown, Tom Thumb Bakery. The bakery has fluffy croissants and pain de chocolate and pain de raisins, which the kids devour as if they are brownies.