We arrived home on Tuesday and I set about my goal of making some of Arnie's favorite meals. I brought some of the ingredients for making enchiladas and chili rellenos from home but I still needed some fresh stuff.
Luckily, Tuesdays is one of the days that Arnie's maid, Leone, is here and she usually goes shopping for him because she can get a lot better prices at the market that a Toubab can. Arnie was so "kind" to let me have the "opportunity" to write out the shopping list for Leone, in French, saying that it was good for me to get that experience. All the while he is chuckling under his breath while I am on my computer trying to find the translation for everything I need to get plus the measurement conversions! Leone is very kind, though, and with her help, I was able to get everything I need to make dinner the next day. It was a very weird not going to store myself though. I was very nervous until she got back and I saw that she had got exactly what I had asked for and got great prices for them too!
We invited Francois for dinner as well as another gal who works for the Peace Corps. I was very excited and wanted everything to go well. Now looking back, I am glad that people who live here are used to things not going as planned!
Well, for dinner, the problem came down to the oven. Arnie's stove and oven are finicky things. When I first got here, Arnie showed me how to use the stove, which was a gas stove. Per his instructions, I had to turn on the gas at the valve above the stove, lift the stove top and light the pilot lights that sat between the two burners on each side and close the lid. Then I could just turn any of the burners on by turning the knob all the way to light. When I was done, I was to shut the valve and let the pilots burn themselves out, thereby leaving no excess gas behind.
To light the oven pilot, I had to read the instructions (mercifully in English) on the inside of the oven door, since Arnie didn't have experience with this. Well, according to the instructions, I had to basically take the oven door off, take the oven racks out and remove the bottom of the oven in order to get to the pilot light. This was such a brutal process that I decided that i was going to just leave it on instead of having to do that every time I wanted to use the oven.
Well, everything went according to plan. I got things in the oven on time, the guests got there on time, Arnie had some great music playing, everything was great! When the buzzer for the dinner went off, I went to the oven and realized that the oven pilot light wasn't on and my food hadn't been cooked! What I didn't know and that nobody, not even the instructions, told me was that you couldn't use the oven and the stove at the same time! So I rushed and lit the oven pilot and my guests ended up waiting another 30 minutes for their food. Like I said, I am glad that people here in Africa are used to this sort of thing.
The food end up great anyway and armed with my hard earned knowledge, I felt confident that I was ready to tackle my next culinary challenge in Africa the next day: cinnamon rolls!
1 comment:
Good job. Sounds like a "newly wed" experience.
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