(I am having trouble uploading pictures, so the pictures with this post will be up in the next couple of days.
So our biggest new development is that we bought a small grill. And I mean small, but its big enough for us. They call barbecuing "braai'ing" here and they are serious about it...even more than us. They do meat well...they have all of the regular stuff, but then they have ostrich, springbok, kudu, and their sausages come in these huge sausage spirals and are awesome. Then they have biltong which is similar to jerky, but way way better. What they don't do though, is hamburgers on the grill. They look at us like we are crazy when we suggest it. So we are teaching the country about hamburgers on the grill. Oh and they have awesome ketchup, but they don't put it on hamburgers. They obviously don't really understand the true beauty of a grilled hamburger with lots of ketchup. Then I have really been missing an oven. There is something in me, given to me by my mom, that makes me neeeeeeed to bake. And also neeeed to eat sweets. They really go hand in hand, but I can't here without an oven. Then I read about baking brownies on a grill. I thought, you can't really screw up brownies unless you just completely burn them. So using chocolate chips my mom sent me (one of the few things you can't find here even though nestle seems to own the place), I mixed up some brownie mix and we put it on the grill. Well, apparently you can screw up brownies. I have included a picture. The bottom half was charred and I thought we could just eat the top half, but unfortunately, instead of a sweet chocolatey taste, it tasted like sour smoke. That was a huge disappointment.
This weekend Matt has been score keeping for the South African National Flyfishing Championships. I asked him how you keep score and he said he didn't really know. So I hope they taught him. He has been out fishing a few times with some of the team members from around here and he has been fishing really well and they are all impressed with him. As soon as we get our car back, I will be able to go and I am guessing there probably won't be a weekend that we aren't out fishing. I told Matt he better watch out because I'm pretty sure that I'll be better than him soon.
I went to this big expo this weekend downtown called From the Earth. It was really cool. I included a picture that is art made from sprouted seedlings of different vegetables and such. It is the silouhette of Table Mountain. It was beautiful. Anyways, it was an agricultural expo and I went to talks on cooking and growing mushrooms, making cheese, worm farming (had to meet our fellow vermiculturalists), and organic growing. And I bought a lot of nice food--cheese, honey, reduced balsamic....and I found brownies---they don't do baked goods here as well as we do, but the brownies were better than my grill brownies. The other picture is an orchid at the expo. They had a whole beautiful collection of orchids that I had never seen before.
The other picture in the set is of a puzzle we just finished. It was an awesome puzzle, but we got it used and cheap, which explains the piece that was missing.
So our biggest new development is that we bought a small grill. And I mean small, but its big enough for us. They call barbecuing "braai'ing" here and they are serious about it...even more than us. They do meat well...they have all of the regular stuff, but then they have ostrich, springbok, kudu, and their sausages come in these huge sausage spirals and are awesome. Then they have biltong which is similar to jerky, but way way better. What they don't do though, is hamburgers on the grill. They look at us like we are crazy when we suggest it. So we are teaching the country about hamburgers on the grill. Oh and they have awesome ketchup, but they don't put it on hamburgers. They obviously don't really understand the true beauty of a grilled hamburger with lots of ketchup. Then I have really been missing an oven. There is something in me, given to me by my mom, that makes me neeeeeeed to bake. And also neeeed to eat sweets. They really go hand in hand, but I can't here without an oven. Then I read about baking brownies on a grill. I thought, you can't really screw up brownies unless you just completely burn them. So using chocolate chips my mom sent me (one of the few things you can't find here even though nestle seems to own the place), I mixed up some brownie mix and we put it on the grill. Well, apparently you can screw up brownies. I have included a picture. The bottom half was charred and I thought we could just eat the top half, but unfortunately, instead of a sweet chocolatey taste, it tasted like sour smoke. That was a huge disappointment.
This weekend Matt has been score keeping for the South African National Flyfishing Championships. I asked him how you keep score and he said he didn't really know. So I hope they taught him. He has been out fishing a few times with some of the team members from around here and he has been fishing really well and they are all impressed with him. As soon as we get our car back, I will be able to go and I am guessing there probably won't be a weekend that we aren't out fishing. I told Matt he better watch out because I'm pretty sure that I'll be better than him soon.
I went to this big expo this weekend downtown called From the Earth. It was really cool. I included a picture that is art made from sprouted seedlings of different vegetables and such. It is the silouhette of Table Mountain. It was beautiful. Anyways, it was an agricultural expo and I went to talks on cooking and growing mushrooms, making cheese, worm farming (had to meet our fellow vermiculturalists), and organic growing. And I bought a lot of nice food--cheese, honey, reduced balsamic....and I found brownies---they don't do baked goods here as well as we do, but the brownies were better than my grill brownies. The other picture is an orchid at the expo. They had a whole beautiful collection of orchids that I had never seen before.
The other picture in the set is of a puzzle we just finished. It was an awesome puzzle, but we got it used and cheap, which explains the piece that was missing.
Sounds like its all coming together with the grill and the worms - who knew all you really needed to be happy was a grill and some worms!
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