peanut butter is expensive in mongolia

which means that no-bake cookies are not really a cost-effective option here. 1/2 cup of peanut butter is a lot to use for a batch of cookies. Especially since Hol and I try to stretch our little containers of peanut butter imported from Mexico as far as we can.

However, nutella-like things are relatively abundant and not too expensive. So when we happened to have a jar of that around and a craving for no-bake cookies, nutella became our peanut butter substitute.



if you don't like chocolate, these cookies are not for you. if you do, enjoy :-)

perhaps next time I'll use 1/4 cup peanut butter and 1/4 cup nutella. peanut butter/nutella no-bake cookies anyone?

(thanks to Heather who took the pictures while we made the cookies and then let me steal them to post this :- ))

taco time.

Special Edition: Cooking Class.

Recently I started a cooking class on Fridays. It started with a simple request to learn how to make cake we soon realized it was too much fun not to make it a part of our weekly schedule. So far, we've learned French food and Mexican food. It has turned out to be the ladies of the church and I cooking and then sitting down to share a meal together and talk. It has been more of a blessing to me than to them, I think. I'm beginning to think that is what "mission" is all about anyway. We are supposed to be infinitely blessed by the people that God has surrounded us with, they are there to teach us and point us back to Him with gracious hearts.

Here are some pictures from our Mexican Friday.

Rolling out the tortillas...

...cooking the tortillas...

...ready for another...

...mmm...peppers and onions...

...taco time!

We had a lot of fun making the tortillas and then making the tacos. Next week...Italian food.

3 apples can totally become a pie

a different crust recipe this time around, but same filling recipe from thanksgiving. it calls for 8 apples, but we only had three. cutting up the apples into thin slices helped make up for the lack of heaping piles of apples.

before baking:
after baking:

this recipe is the first I've ever used that calls for the sugars and butter to be heated on the stove top and then poured over the apples/lattice crust. this makes the lattice crust all kinds of delicious as the sugars solidify on top and seep down into the apples.

next time I think I'll make sure we have more apples (this pie was an impromptu dessert and not planned) on hand....and I'll definitely re-use this crust recipe- it's flakier than the thanksgiving pie's and it still doesn't require shortening (which is not readily accessible here).

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.