Bun Overload

I meant to put this in my last post and forgot, but Mum's post on LissaLou's birthday reminded me...

If you are a busy mum of three already overwhelmed with cooking, cleaning, caring for little ones etc, and (most importantly) you only own 10 very hard to clean bun holders, here is what not to bake for your eldest daughter's belated birthday celebration at school...

It seemed like such a good idea beforehand...but took all morning of slaving away, wasn't helped by me miscalculating the cake mixture and only making half the amount needed, and was only ready 3 seconds before LissaLou left for school in the afternoon! See, even the picture was taken in a hurry!

Next time I will make a cake.

Practical Application

After all that banana research I was inspired to put it into practice with a court buillon for lunch. I tried it with rice before but I think it tastes much better with bananas and racines (root veg).

Preparation (you should recognise these now!): three types of bananas, 3 poyo, a poto and a plantain, along with a madere.
Get a kind husband to peel the bananas (a sticky substance comes out that is hard to get off) and get rid of all the dirt and skin from the freshly dug up madere. These are popped together in boiling water for half an hour or so.Meanwhile the fish has been marinating in garlic and lemon juice.Prepare the sauce (spring onions, tomatoes, parsely and huile roucou straight from pika)Add the fish and simmer down for 20-30 minutesReady to eat!
This meal came out much better this time - I got a lot of positive comments from Bertie (evidently he knows it is the best way to get me to do it again!). CassCass and I both love the plantain, but unfortunately LissaLou hates the lot! Back to pasta for now...

Playing Houses

This is what I felt like yesterday, as with Mamie gone for three weeks, we are now kind of in charge of the house. Papy believes very strongly in the division of roles - he goes off to work (previously he moved wooden houses from one place to another, now it is a morning at Pika) and his wife does absolutely everything else. Cooking, cleaning, ironing, washing, washing up, the lot! In Mamie's absence, he will just sit at the table watching tv and wait for his food to turn up...someday!

So yesterday I began by tidying up Mamie's stall from which she sells her fruit and veg. It looks a bit neater than this now! Then I arranged a lovely bouquet of flowers which Papy had brought from Pika, the rest of which has gone over to France. I swept all the floors and washed our stairs...and then brought Baby JoJo down to enjoy crawling around at his leisure with no fear of him eating unwanted items or coming across hazardous tools and things. CassCass lined up her dominoes and pretended they were train tracks for her Thomas trains and Happyland toys. It never ceases to amaze me how the girls can entertain themselves for hours - either alone or together - with these two sets of toys. CassCass still prefers just lining up everything and pushing along, whilst LissaLou accompanies her playing with lots of chatting, often in French, when it is usually shouted or said in a very stern tone, which I attribute to her maitresse!

Bertie was unexpectedly home, due to another strike, so when LissaLou came home we had a lovely walk down the by the sea. Have a look at these photos for what we saw. The cow looked a bit menacing so we hurried past as far away as possible. Whilst we came past the shipwreck (which really is an eyesore that I wish they would remove!) we saw the plane we arrived on and that Grandma left on flying in, so we watched it and waved as it turned and came along right in front of us. When we got to the pier, it was like standing on a boat, it swayed so much in the wind! So no dipping our toes in today. The girls ran up the hill and then ran most of the way home - don't know how they do it!

We finished the day when the girls were in bed with a game of scrabble - I began with my first ever scrabble (fraises) and won the game by 50 points - hurray!

More On Cuisine

As I mentioned on an earlier post, I am trying to make some local dishes, and make the most of local ingredients. If I can feed them to Baby JoJo, which is more and more possible as I rarely use salt and hot spices, then it is even more of an advantage. I have a couple of recipe books but these are aimed at tourists and only have a few dishes in them, many of which I wouldn't bother trying as they are either too complicated (for a particular festival for example) or I just don't like them. However, I have selected a few manageable ones and so have produced the following..,.

Gratin de christophine

Christophines are a vegetable also known as chayote, according to Wikipedia (although ours are more yellow than the ones you see here). Mamie doesn't grow any and I have rarely seen her cook with them. For this recipe you basically take out the inside and turn it into a sauce then stuff it again. Mum very kindly took these photos, hmm, mine aren't quite like the ones in the picture!

Here is the recipe if you fancy a go! I am having to get used to the french culinary terms.

Colombo de poulet

There is a significant Indian population in Guadeloupe, who came over in the mid 1800s after the abolition of slavery, to fulfil the needs of the plantation owners on the sugar cane fields. They brought lots of traditions and ingredients with them, including colombo, which is a curry powder made of various spices and is very delicious. I just learnt that the Indians were the only ones who cooked cabri (goat) until recently, when the other parts of the population took an interest. It is very tasty in this dish in any case. Often it is made with pork, but I prefer chicken. It came out splendidly, with the chicken falling off the bone, yum!

Poulet au coco

This is a pretty simple dish, where you cook the onions, garlic, carrot and white wine (I used water as didn't have any!) then cook the chicken and let it simmer in coconut milk. I have been using coconut milk in a tin but I would like to try using it from fresh as we have so many of them! I am not sure how to get the milk though. I used to have a problem with my chicken not being fully cooked but having investigated online, I discovered it is better to cook it low rather than high I was doing, and it seems to have helped.

Court-bouillon

A fish dish where you make the sauce with lime, garlic, spring onion, tomatoes, thyme and hot pepper (unless you are me!) then cook the fish in it. These ingredients are really common here, and in season they are all in Mamie's garden except the garlic. I used salmon rather than local fish. It is common locally to use oil which has roucou in it - Mamie grows these in her garden and the grain is used for the oil - have a look at wikipedia for more info here. The dish was fine, though a bit too watery and it would have been nicer with racines (sweet potato, breadfruit etc) than rice I reckon.

Gateau de patates douces

Oh, I have not had much luck with my baking recently! My loaf of bread was like a doorstop, my first bunch of cinammon rolls the same, the second lot I went to the other extreme and undercooked! My banana cake was not cooked in the middle and the biscuits I made also burnt. Sigh, I blame it on the oven...! However, this sweet potato cake came out fine, and as it is 1 kg sweet potatoes and only 100g sugar I was happy to stuff the girls on it!

If anyone has baking tips I would gladly welcome these, and I would love recipes based on wholewheat flour and honey rather than refined sugar and white flour. I am looking for a tasty carrot cake recipe too, if you hae any suggestions. At my Saturday night bible study group they passed around various tips and I learnt not to dump in my flour all at once, or mix it with the hand mixer - has to be done by hand. All very useful!

Another common practice here is to chop and freeze vegetables as soon as you get them, which is a great idea as even in the fridge they do go off quite quickly. My only problem is my tiny freezer, but I will give it a try anyway! At the moment I have five cups of shredded coconut and some courgette in there, and I have just purchased a huge bunch of parsley (whilst awaiting Bertie's!) which I will put into ice cube trays.

On a similar subject, I am sure you are eager to know how my menu went...! Well, I mostly stuck to it except when I forgot to check it and soak the beans on time (apparently you can prepare them and freeze them too, which I might start doing if I can fit them in!) which just resulted in shifting around a couple of meals. It was very unstressful in any case! I also spent a third less at Carrefour this week, as I followed my list to the letter, which I was thrilled with, and I have thrown out less. Keep it up!

This week's menu is as follows:
Monday - Chick pea curry (soak chick peas and brown rice) - very nice, unfortunately our gas bonbonne (no gas on the island so everyone has a little or not so little canister attached to their cooker and hopes it doesn't run out at an inopportune moment!) ran out half way through. We have had it for nearly three months which was good going. Anyway, Bertie dashed to the store and exchanged it for a new one, but the rice was ruined! The girls didn't like the chick peas so I squashed them all and they ate it fine!
Tea – bread and salad
Tuesday – Tuna pasta (courtesy of Gina Ford!) – you are supposed to add fromage frais to this, but I didn’t discover till I got home that the tub I had bought was vanilla flavoured! Made lovely dessert though…
Tea – Pancakes (wholewheat with cheese and ham, followed by maple syrup ones for the girls and lime and sugar for us)
Wednesday – supposed to be blaff de poisson but I realised I needed to use up my leftover Minestrone soup, so we did
Tea – supposed to be soup, became a delicious omelette courtesy of Bertie, made with eggs from Mamie’s hens
Thursday – Spaghetti Bolognese and wholewheat pasta
Tea – Potato wedges and salad
Friday – supposed to be bean burgers using the leftover brown rice, but I have just realised I haven't soaked the beans, oops!
Tea – Salad, and if I can manage it, some homemade bread that isn’t as hard as a brick!
Saturday – leftover spag bol
Tea – Bertie handles this one
Sunday – eat at church

Life Is Like That

We woke up to a tremendous storm at 5am (well, I should say we were woken up!) and it looks like it will be a day of rain. No trips to the playpark today! Unfortunately, the building Bertie works in on Saturday is prone to flooding, so it will be a tricky morning for him too. I just opened the door to the balcony for the first time today and LissaLou told me the rain had started again, so bang shut went the door! I don't think I will be opening them again anytime soon!

Clothes have a tendency to disappear here, if you don't grab them off the washing line the moment they are dry. Bertie found a missing pair of shorts...on his sister (he never wore them again for some reason!) and my favourite pair of white trousers mysteriously vanished in 2006. So I was delighted to come across them the other day, and even more so to find that they still fit! I took advantage of the cooler weather today to put them on, admired them, got on with the day...then a naked CassCass came and plonked herself on my lap and all too late I realised she had done a number two and not wiped her bottom! Sigh. The trousers have gone to the wash and will have to wait another day.

I spent hours sweating away in the heat to tidy the flat, only for CassCass and LissaLou to spill a packet of rice, break a glass or two, get the entire contents of their toy box out, chuck Baby JoJo's food on the floor...oh well!

Bad news - there was another cockroach on the floor this morning. Good news - it was dead. By what means I am not sure but very grateful!

I have renamed the final day of the week Fever Friday as somehow Baby JoJo keeps getting a very high temperature on it. Yesterday he hovered around 39 degrees which was rather worrying. We haven't had to visit any doctors or hospitals yet and I am not in a hurry to! We still don't have a social security number either to reclaim the cost. However, he is back to normal again today - a mixture of prayer and two hour feeding sessions! (Oh, and apparently the local solution is to put Eau de cologne on his head - er, right!)

Right, back to the life of a mother!

Good Housekeeping?

In the UK, if you are not managing to keep your humble abode clean and tidy, you may get a comment or two, or someone sweeping their finger along a dusty shelf to make a point, or even a visit from Kim and Aggie...or it may just get completely ignored by all the kind folk around you. Here, it is a very different matter.

No, I do not have obsessively clean in-laws (far from it!). The state of my flat is in fact made very clear to me by....BEASTIES. Tons of 'em. Yuck.

Did I leave food on the table top or the dishes undone? Flies, everywhere. Great fun swatting them with a flip flop, they are surprisingly easy to kill.

Did I leave crumbs or jam dripping? Or even a few dead flies on the floor? Along come the ants, with their incredible instinct that allows them to find dirt in minutes. They are much smaller than the ones we had back home, but just as impressive in their actions. I have spent many hours killing them one by one...

Did I miss those crumbs under the sofa or the bed? Watch out, our friend the cockroach may be along shortly.... These ones scuttle far faster than any I remember in the past, and are far FAR bigger. It is pretty hard to get them with your flip flop, all that works is spraying the wonderful Baygone or screaming loudly and waiting for Bertie to turn up. Thankfully, I haven't seen many and mostly downstairs. I had a horrible moment when my SIL told me she had found one on the bed of her daughters one night (don't feel alarmed mum, but it was in the guest room!!). I am even more grateful for our mosquito nets!

And finally yesterday's traumatic discovery - it is only good to be green if you are organised enough to empty your leftovers and peelings regularly. Otherwise for your crime, maggots! Thousands of them! (Or so it felt.) And they don't die! It was like something out of a horror film, with more and more pouring out the box, me squashing them for all I was worth, only for them to start to move again - eek! LissaLou took great joy in watching me in my distress then running around the flat shouting "mankots! mankots!" Thankfully Bertie arrived home to help and we found that even spraying them with the deadly Baygone didn't do the job. So we put them all in a plastic bag in the bin and who knows what they are up to now? As for me, I keep seeing them everywhere...on my plate, in my glass, on the floor, in my hair...I expected to dream about them last night but was spared that!

So now I intend to be much more thorough in my cleaning schedule! No easy task as all the world seems to conspire against me when I get to cleaning. I met up with some nice ladies from the House Church that we occasionally go to this morning and they were telling me that they had left their houses by 9am this morning with the washing on the line, lunch ready, floors clean, washing up done...what was their secret? I begged to know. Ah, no children under 10 years of age in the house. May have to wait a few years before I get rid of all those bugs then.

Various Happenings

Sympathy please - two days ago I was bitten by a bee, owww! Now my leg is still inflamed and red and sore so I think I will pop into the chemist tomorrow. The most annoying part of the event was that the bee had been flying around for a while and I had been tempted to kill it but decided to leave it in peace. Never again! Death to all bees is now my new slogan, although I am now running a mile on sight of one!

Bertie's aunt has come to stay, allegedly for a few days but it looks like it will be far longer...she is a great talker and if you sit down for a minute you risk being there an hour. Except with me, as she prefers creole so our conversation doesn't go very far!

Meanwhile, our world has collapsed as Bertie's mum has gone off to her native island of Marie-Galante for a few days and her presence is sorely missed. The house really does cease to function without her! Or rather, she is the only one able to provide meals to his dad's requirements! We have tried a couple of meals but anything eaten was only out of desperation! Neither does he do anything in the house, so all the washing up etc has fallen to us.

Today we took the plunge and cleaned out the fridge. I won't shock you with the details of all we found within. Suffice to say you can now tell what colour it is. One interesting discovery was a bag of batteries. On questioning, Bertie said it came from the myth that if you leave them in the fridge they recharge! Hmmm...

Baby JoJo is making every effort to roll over. He can get onto his tummy in his cot, but then gets stuck and can't get back again. So cute!