guest appearance.

And, here we have another special edition on our cooking blog.

Pictured below is our dear friend and tutoree, Enkhuush. He is the son of our friends Batkhuu and Bora. We have been tutoring him for almost the whole time we've been here. When I say tutoring, though, I really mean hanging out. This boy's got some mad English skills. He's super intelligent and HILARIOUS.

He said he wanted to cook this past Monday so he inspected our refrigerator until he found something he could make. 

He found 2 eggs and some pepperoni...

So, he decided he would fry the eggs and pepperoni. He's a humble chef so he wouldn't allow many pictures. I'll have you know, even though it wasn't captured on camera, he's an excellent egg flipper.

Chef Enkhuush decided we should have toast with our eggs so I started cutting the bread into slices. Recently when we purchased a new oven, we purchased new knives too--and they were sharp--and I sliced my finger. This is Enkhuush's "Come on! Haven't you ever cut anything before?!" face.

Viola! Here we have a delicious mid-afternoon snack thanks to the guest chef in our newly-but-dangerously-applianced kitchen.

dark chocolate apple bread

the discovery of a too-dark-to-eat-outright bar of dark chocolate and some about to go bad apples led to them being chopped up and throw into what became dark chocolate apple bread.

I subbed chunks of a chopped dark chocolate bar for semi-sweet chocolate chips. And used a little over double of the apples called for in the recipe. And added a heaping amount of cocoa powder to counteract the super darkness of the dark chocolate I had. Also we had no nutmeg or walnuts, and I used regular milk instead of buttermilk.



Sprinkled with some cinnamon and sugar mixture...This stuff? Was gone in a day. No lie.

focaccia stromboli

focaccia bread dough + stromboli fillings (sauce, shredded cheese, pepperoni)

rolling it up...

sprinkling more cheese on top...
crispy and perfect.
we heart pepperoni. thanks to Holli's mom and dad for sending it to us!

this also makes me super excited to use the focaccia recipe on its own - as it was quite good. And I've never spent a lot of time making bread prior to this- so I'd love to be able to get some practice making focaccia bread in. Who doesn't love focaccia bread?

so I add chocolate to everything

I am a bit of an oatmeal fan. And by a bit I mean could probably eat it every day.

And this translates into a love of oatmeal cookies in all variations. I had previously found an oatmeal cookie recipe that I've made here before (sans raisins) and was going to make it again last Thursday. Thursdays are my day off and I love being able to bake on those days.

As I was looking up the recipe again, I came across some recipes for brownie oatmeal cookies. I was going to make those but then realized I didn't have some of the necessary ingredients.

So.....I just used the original oatmeal recipe and decided to dump in 2/3 cup of cocoa powder.

And this picture speaks to how this was most certainly a good move...


I then added in the oats. Because oats make everything healthier. Combating the chocolate to some extent at least :-) Baking in our new oven- hurrah!
Finished and proving themselves to be addictive:
So addictive that I packed them up and took them with me to the mission center the next day so that my students could consume them instead of me. No one needs over a dozen chocolate oatmeal cookies.

And we all happily munched on these as we watched Wall-E and studied prepositions on a Friday afternoon.

pancakes of all shapes and ingredients

We are equal opportunity pancake eaters in this household, so it is only fair that we would diversify our pancake consumption. A task which we have succeeded at quite well in the past few weeks. It is not hard to convince us to eat breakfast for any meal, at any time or basically ever.

Pancake variation # 1 was my attempt at German potato pancakes. I say attempt because this before picture doesn't reveal that I managed to forget the eggs that were supposed to be mixed with the rest of the ingredients. Opps. I got ahead of myself and wanted to start frying :- )


So these potato pancakes became more like potato pancake hash browns. Tis hard to know the difference I say, except that these were sans eggs in the batter and we made scrambled eggs to go with them on the side.


These were center stage hash browns with eggs playing the supporting role. Trust me when I say these were good. Because they totally were. And I now know one can easily forgo the frozen bags of hash browns for the real stuff.


Pancake variation #2- Cracker Barrel pancakes for Easter morning made with a recipe Holli found and that required our created-with-a-lemon buttermilk that she has become such a pro at making.

And when chocolate chips are not an option- walnuts and chopped up snicker bars. What Easter pancake shouldn't have mini snicker bars chopped up in it?


Pancake variation #3- Potato pancakes round 2. Except this time I ix-nayed the previous recipe in favor of a recipe called "Amish Hash Browns." Being a Western PA girl, I know the goodness of Amish food. And these called for corn meal! And I also couldn't help but throw in some red bell peppers for color and redeeming vegetable qualities.


A bell pepper version of Amish hash browns....so good.

I need to do some AllRecipes searching to discover what other pancake variations can come from our Mongolian kitchen :-) Breakfast is always a welcome meal at our house.

recipes are merely suggestions.

"Recipes are merely a suggestion" 

I'd say that's the motto we've adopted. When preparing for a meal for our Mongolian kitchen, it is not unusual to visit 4 different stores. So, the adoption of this motto comes from some frustrating times of not finding the ingredients we need. Now, we use most of the recipes we find as a guide. In other words...we make it up. 

As of late, that's been a little difficult, though. Our beloved and trusty oven said "NO MORE" and it quit working. After a few weeks of stove-top only recipes, borrowing a microwave and finding out our oven is "unfixable," we finally got a new oven. 

  

I can honestly say the day our new oven arrived was one of the most joyous days of our Mongolian life. 

Prior to the arrival of our new oven, I had already decided we should try making the Korean sushi called "kim-bap" or something like it. We did our best and although it didn't turn out perfect, it tasted good.

This, my friends, is the first thing we baked in our new oven. That's right peach cobbler. Delicious, or amtay as we say in Mongolia.

And this is our latest suggestion-creation. Indian food. After we discovered, became obsessed and had to limit ourselves to a once-a-month visit to our local Indian Restaurant "Hazara" we decided maybe, just maybe we could make our own. Well, we did. This is "Murg Makhani" roughly translated to: butter chicken. It turned out well but WAY spicy. 

We are rockin' our Mongolian kitchen. Watch out America because when we get back to easily accessible ingredients, we're gonna be out-of-control. I'd venture to say even then, we will keep our "recipes are merely suggestions motto." 

-Chef Holli

the other lettuce

Cabbage! I know, I know- it's not really the other lettuce.

But I live in a country where basically the only vegetables you can get easily without paying an arm and a leg for them are carrots, potatoes, onions, bell peppers and....cabbage.


And I'll admit that I can't ever remember even eating it prior to about two weeks ago. If I were to buy a leafy green in the States it was consistently spinach.

But six months of being here had me finally wanting to try making something with cabbage. Combine that with the fact that our oven broke, leaving us only with the stove top and my desire to always consume more vegetables....and you have the cabbage, potato and chicken stove top casserole recipe that Hol found.

Which is to say that it included ingredients we didn't have and called for ham.

But we chopped and diced ourselves some onions and potatoes.

And then we did the same with some cabbage and chicken.

It was quite good and I'm always a fan of anything that allows me to combine chicken, potatoes and other veggies.

Since we've needed to be using this head of cabbage up we've also:

-steamed cabbage and put it with rice
-stir-fried cabbage with other veggies for an orange chicken recipe
-chopped it up and put it in baked vegetable spaghetti casserole

Any cabbage recipe suggestions from you all? So far we've mainly just thrown it in as an additional vegetable to already vegetable-filled recipes, but I'd be up for a cabbage-centric recipe if you know of any good ones.

navajo fry bread in ub

visitors who bring recipes are always welcome at our apartment :-)

Heather brought the recipe for Navajo fry bread with her (she lives and serves on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico) when she came in March. And so we set to making it in our UB kitchen, enjoying the connections that we've discovered between the Navajo and Mongolians- including but not limited to their love of mutton and fried flour concoctions. Fry bread is similar to a Mongolian dish, except the Mongolian version has meat inside of it.


Frying the dough....And then we took the pieces of fry bread and dumped ground beef, cilantro, bell peppers, onions and shredded cheese on top. Fry bread makes an excellent foundation for a taco of sorts.

Anything that allows me to make a mountain of vegetables on top is a-ok with me :-)