Journey to the Ends of the Earth

Our First Dinner at Home

So it's been a while since we've had time to post on here. It's hard to spend a lot of time in this internet cafe with the heat and only a fan blowing. Uploading pictures will be near impossible since only one computer in this cafe has a CD drive or an accessible USB port. We'll try to post pictures on our phanfare website.
Feel free to check there.
www.tothenations.phanfare.com

Last night we cooked our first meal in our home. We've been doing meals all together at MD's home/office and have been at the mercy of Indian food for the last month. It's been fine for Wilbur and Greg, but difficult for me since the smell of curry makes me nauseous. Hopefully this will only last the first trimester.

Since we set up our kitchen in our home, we thought we'd have a little houswarming and Sunday night dinner at our place.
On the menu: Chicken & Peas (Ana's favorite dish that her mom makes), Steamed Cabbage (Linda Kittlitz style), & Rice.

Here are all the steps that we went through:
1. Soaked the peas in the morning. (The peas here look a lot like beans and take soaking all day to become edible. They remind me of the peas we had in Korea that we would refer to as "Magic bullets")
2. Looked at pictures of a meal Linda Kittlitz made for us our last week in SF to figure out the ingredients for the cabbage dish.
2. Hopped on the motorbike with Mahadevan for a quick trip to the market down the street. (Even though the doctor in Delhi told me to stay off of motorbikes during pregnancy. Don't worry, mom and dad, I'll try not to do this often.)
3. Picked out vegetables and paid around $3 for a big bag full of produce.
4. Went home to start preparing as MD went to the wholesale meat market to buy chicken.
5. Called mom for help with her chicken recipe. (luckily Ana's mom is an early riser)
6. Cooked for the next 3 hours.

We had fun preparing the food and navigating around our small kitchen. We had to get used to having to work with 2 burners on the stove instead of 4 and cooking rice on the stove instead of a rice cooker. Wilbur said it felt like we were conducting a science experiment.

Our guests (except for 7 year old, Ricky, who is not used to food with such little spice) were all satisfied. Mahadevan gave the ulimate compliment and burped at the end of the meal!

It'll be interesting coming up with more ideas for meals in the future. There is limited produce and ingredients we are used to cooking with, so we'll have to be creative. We also don't have an oven or microwave so that adds to the difficulty. Let us know if you have any easy recipes or ideas. Our stomachs thank you in advance.

posted by Ana & Wilbur @ 6:39 AM