Cook, Pray, Eat

We are  finished with week 4 of living in Dominica and I haven't said a word about the food, restaurants, etc here.  Because it's a university town (and I use that term liberally) just like in the good ole US of A the restaurants are expensive so I have been cooking most of our meals....


COOK


To cook in Dominica (as with everything else here) is a little bit of an adventure.  First we will start off with the cooking appliances.  Oven/Stove - seemed simple enough - I had a gas stove back home and I actually prefer cooking and baking with it :) Oh what's this - a propane tank?!?!?!? Yep here we cook with propane - think of your outdoor BBQ there sitting on your back porch and that little bitty tank that you hook up to it - got the picture in  your head?  Now remove the barbecue and replace it with an oven/stove and you have our kitchen.  So here I am trying to figure out how to light the oven and stove as I wanted to bake fish (yes we get local fish right from the beach another adventure I watched the fisherman take a machete and chop off my portion of fish - awesome, gross (flies were all over the fish) cheap (only $8 ec  or $3 us per pound) and tasty).  Luckily our landlord was walking by and she showed me how to light the stove (no pilot light) and the oven).  Oh did I mention that she raised a glass covering that was over the stove to light the stove top?  Ok well she did but not all the way.....

So Kelsey and I are making one of our first meals together on the island and we did fish and rice for our friends.....we lit the stove, put down the class top and cook our meal...I think cooking over glass is a little odd, but it's Dominica so maybe they do things different.  We go on to cook several more meals on our lovely stove top and this particular night I begin my first attempt at chicken/veggie fried rice.  I have all of the burners going, I'm making chicken, I'm frying rice, I even added an egg, then I left the room to get some bug spray you get eaten ALIVE down here without it...and then it happens.............

CRASH, BOOM, BANG!!!!!!!  I run back to the kitchen and there is glass everywhere! 


PRAY

I now move into prayer mode.  What do I do?  How do I explain this to the landlord that we broke the glass?  Was the glass faulty?  Kelsey tries to phone the landlord and he can't get her.  However he runs into our neighbor - tells him what happens to which the neighbor replies "You COOOKED on the GLASS ?!?!?!" Funny thing....turns out the glass was just a cover for the burners, but our racks for the burners are about a forth of an inch higher than the burner itself and there were grease stains on the glass - leading both Kelsey and I to think you cook on top.  In our defense (sorry it's the lawyer in me) there was no way of knowing this information, we never had a formal walk though of our apartment, literally we moved in and have been figuring out how things work little by little (did I mention we have a switch that turns on electricity to heat the water for the shower?  That was a fun one to figure out lol.)

After cleaning up all of the glass, we try several more times to call our landlord with no luck - I had to get out of the house and they were showing a movie on campus (the only cinema here) and I couldn't look at or remind myself of how dumb I had just been.  In hindsight lifting the glass could make sense, but only in hindsight.  As we begin to walk back to campus (keep in mind Kelsey has been completely calm this whole time - I am married to the most patient man out there)  we see that our landlord is home, so we walk up to her apartment and say "Yeah we were cooking and the glass that was on top of the stove shattered...." to which her husband replies "Did you slam down the cover?" (now I'm thinking - these people are going to think we are sooooo stupid Americans now).  But instead we she was so full of grace and mercy and asked if we were ok and then her husband said they should just be able to reorder the glass for the top and that was it...we were on our way!


EAT


So we finally were able to finish the fried rice when we got home (amazingly no glass got in any of the dishes)....and it was DELICIOUS!  Since then I have cooked/baked many more things, including banana bread (adventure:  try to figure out how long it will take to cook when you have no way to know the temperature and you just have a "high" and "a little less than high" setting for your oven), rice crispy treats (cocoa crispies were all I could find and it was generic and uber expensive but oh so worth it), mashed green bananas with garlic, cherry juice (turned out to be pretty gross - NOT AT ALL the same as when the locals make it), rice - lots of rice, turkey burgers, home fries, egg sandwhiches, and am hoping to make some more local dishes while I am here.

All in all the cuisine isn't that bad.  We've had the local BBQ (which they do every Friday night) and we've tried hot tuna sandwiches.  I recently found out that the KFC (believe it or not I've actually eaten there) and Rituals (which tries to be like starbucks, but also serves really good food and muffins) have only been here since February of this year, so I feel very lucky to have come at a time when more things are available to eat. 

Grocery shopping is a little different as well.  There are about 3 different stores here were you can get some items (I say some, because the joke here is that you can make a lot of the dishes you had back home, but you won't be able to find all of the items at one store - you will have to go to 2 or sometimes all 3 stores!)  Roseau, which is the capital of Dominica and about an hour drive away, does have grocery (I use the term loosely) stores with bigger selections and more items from back home.  Don't get all excited though, they still have more of a Big Lots/Dollar Store feel to them, and you have to check the expiration dates on everything!  And just because the pasta/rice/flour/sugar etc. came from one of these stores does not mean it lessens the chance of having bugs in your food. :)  So you always take everything home, go through it and then if bugs could get into it, it goes in the refrigerator - which unfortunately with mini fridges - leaves very little room for the items that should be in the refrigerator.

However, we are hearing rumors that an IGA (grocery store that we normally can only go to in Roseau) will be finished in September or November of this year right next to campus (varying information from various sources).  Now for those who have never been to the Caribbean or West Indies, IGA is the closest thing you are going to have to a US grocery store.  In fact they often carry a lot of the items that we would get back home.  So if that actually does happen it will drastically change our lives here.  On a sad note, there are several mom and pop type grocery stores here that would be hit hard because of it.   SO I'm a little torn, but with me going to work in the fall, it would be nice not to have to get up super early on Saturdays to take a trip down to Roseau an hour each way (on winding roads that go up and down and round and round - Dramamine is highly recommended!)

Well blog family and friends, that is all for me now - until next time,  COOK for those you love, PRAY for those in your life and the world around you, and EAT things you shouldn't every once in a while because they taste good! ;)