crazy pretzels

i love salty foods. especially pretzels.

Hol and I tried making pretzels when we had been here about a month and did not yet know where to get yeast or what it looked like (our efforts are documented here).

They were good, but definitely not made with yeast (despite our best intentions).

So I've been waiting to try another go at pretzels, this time using what I knew for sure was yeast.

And so, Saturday morning I did just that.

First, I made some regular, salt pretzels.

And then....well, then I got a little crazy with the pretzel toppings.


Here from clockwise we have: poppyseed, cocoa with marshmallows, sprinkles and sugar, crushed up animal crackers, oregano and cinnamon sugar, with another cocoa with marshmallows in the middle.
I think my favorite so far has been the oregano- it tasted like a really good bread stick that should be dipped in tomato sauce.

Next time maybe I'll attempt some chocolate-covered pretzels :-)

there has never been a better idea

It's a well-known fact that Holli and I both love tea.

And drink a lot of it here in Mongolia. I had tea this morning with breakfast. We shared another pot of green tea at one of our favorites cafes mid-morning. And I'm drinking more tea as I write this.

So when I came home to discover Holli making chai tea cupcakes earlier this week...I couldn't think of a better kind of cupcake.

First, Hol boiled milk and then steeped some chai tea bags in the milk.


This chai tea milk mixture was added to the cupcake batter and poured into the pans...


delicious chai cupcakes. they ended up with chocolate icing on top of them, but I didn't get any pictures of that and they were all devoured before the night's end.

jimmies or sprinkles?

regardless of what you call them (I definitely called them jimmies as a child), they are a necessary ingredient for funfetti cupcakes.

i may have gone a little overboard on the sprinkles, but what's the fun of making funfetti cupcakes from scratch if you can't up the amount of sprinkles in the batter?


don't they look so cool once they've been baked? they're like tie-dye cupcakes (they made me think of you, Jamila!)
pouring on the chocolate icing that Hol made.

yum.

the finished product- with even more sprinkles on top.

3 minute chocolate cake

Hol found this recipe online* just as we were getting ready to go over to our fellow missionary's apartment for dinner. We decided that was the perfect excuse to try out the recipe on them- especially because they have a microwave and we do not:-)

And when I wished out loud that we had a camera to document the process for the blog, we searched for one, discovering that the only one available had a dying battery. So instead, Michael pulled out the video camera and set to taping our chocolate cake experiment.

Enjoy our silly video and trying this recipe for yourself-it's easy and totally worth it.

*This is not the exact website that we used, but it's the same recipe and I can't recall which one we did use.

broccoli and bell pepper casserole

rice is a good, cheap base for a casserole. and we have plenty at our disposal.

we also had some frozen broccoli- a treat! and some onions to steam in our rice cooker.

add some red and green bell peppers that we needed to use up.


add the vegetables to the rice, as well as some chunks of butter, some chunks of cheese and one can of cream of mushroom soup.



bake in the oven for a little over 30 minutes and voila, you have a delicious vegetable casserole.

i miss vegetables.

this casserole made me happy and grateful for the little things like broccoli and bell peppers.

i say potato, you say patato

super easy baked potato soup a la our mongolian kitchen


there are limited vegetables to be found in mongolia, but we can consistently find potatoes, carrots, onions and bell peppers at the market.

this leads to us constantly trying to think of new ways to cook meals with these four vegetables. we eat a lot of steamed vegetables with rice, make hash browns with our eggs (that have onions and bell peppers in them), eat veggie stir-fry and use veggies as pizza toppings.

we've been talking recently about how we wanted to make soup, as we haven't been able to find our favorite soup at the store as of late. Ready made broth isn't an option, so we've been thinking up ways to make our own broth.

but to start our soup-making adventures, we went with a milk base and used a recipe for baked potato soup that Hol found online.



I didn't use whole milk, we don't have bacon, chives or green onions- but my goodness, this was a darn good soup.



and all it took was:

ten small boiled potatoes (the recipe called for them to be microwaved, but that wasn't really an option in our kitchen), 1/8 of an onion, 6 cups of milk, about a cup of flour, 2/3 cup of butter, a bit of salt and pepper and some sour cream for on top.

sans long underwear

cooking in Cambodia meant not having to wear long underwear. it meant having good tasting milk and bean sprouts (never underestimate the deliciousness of bean sprouts).

it meant cooking with only a stove top. it meant having things available like bacon, fruit and vegetables other than potatoes or carrots. it was beyond wonderful. we pulled a mongolia stand-by and made breakfast for dinner one night.

i'm not a big meat eater, but bacon is the most wonderful thing ever when you haven't had it for four months.

"Hillsong loud on the speakers, barefoot, the kitchen hot with the blue flames of a gas stove, crackling bacon, flipping pancakes, eggs forming in the pan. Singing as a meal takes shape, the night easing forward as we let it slip away, grains of time sliding away with peace and worship danced upon the tile floor."

- excerpted from Cambodia Hues on Once Upon a Time in Real Life



cambodia also meant getting to cook for our friend Joseph. it's unfortunate he doesn't look happier in this picture :-) he ate the food anyway.