Homemade Granola and other thoughts...

Living in Lichinga, has it's advantages.  One of them being that it certainly brings out the creativity in those who never had a creative bone in their body, namely ME!  Before I continue, let me just state that I love food.  I actually enjoy food.  When I sit down to a meal, I like to enjoy every bite of what I'm eating.  When we first moved to Mozambique, I can honestly say that I barely enjoyed anything that I ate for the whole of the first year we were here, maybe even longer.  I ate just because I had to put food in my body to survive, but there was nothing enjoyable about what I was eating.  My kids felt the same, but I didn't realize how it affected them until Tyren and I were looking at some old photos of our kids from the first year we were here.  They looked like someone was starving them!  They weren't eating well because they didn't like the food either! 

Now, back to Lichinga bringing out creativity.  Since I love food, and Lichinga didn't have much of any kind of food that I (we) actually enjoyed eating on a regular basis (at least not on a missionary's budget), I decided it was time to start being creative with meal making.  If I was going to ever enjoy the food here, I was going to have to invent new ways to eat it that tasted more interesting than what we had been used to that first year.  We've now been here for about 3 1/2 years and here are some of the foods that I've re-created using the local foods available here:

veggie burgers, soy meat burgers, bean burgers, bean sprout burgers, homemade granola, soy meat tacos, homemade jam, yogurt, yogurt cheese (cream cheese substitute), yogurt-cheese cake type dessert, yogurt dip, pretzels, bagels, bean soup (I never liked bean soup until I moved to Lichinga and perfected my own "curried" bean soup), chapatis (flour tortillas), homemade corn chips, homemade pop-tarts (I got this recipe from someone else's blog), various fried pastries, cheese-less quiche...and the list go on, but I think I'll stop for now and continue in a later blog. 

Well, needless to say, we've all been eating quite well these days and my children are looking healthy again.  Sometimes, I think, too healthy in my case!  I'm still trying to lose the baby fat from my last pregnancy!  There goes another blog topic...

Blessings,
Tiffany