Our Dinner Guest of Honor

(First published at Where in the World Am I? on 26 December 2010.)

After Thanksgiving Mike read the Facebook status of one of our friends who had enjoyed a succulent duck for dinner (We've had her duck. It's amazing.) and Mike wondered if we could get duck here. Well, with the help of our driver, Mohammed, my Christmas present to Mike was a duck for dinner.

On Tuesday Muffin and I went to the bird market in the Old City, where there are all sorts of live birds for both dinners and pets. We were surrounded by blue and green parakeets (budgies), geese, turkeys, blackbirds, guinea hens, and chickens. Ducks were scarce but Mohammed assured me we'd find some. First I was offered geese. They looked good, but they weren't what I wanted. And they looked too big to fit into our tiny oven. (I'd been instructed to buy the biggest duck I could find, but I was thinking of the biggest duck that would fit in our small oven and small selection of cooking pans.) The first ducks I found were mallards. They were cheap, but covered in flies. In an outdoor market like this, there are going to be some flies, but I wanted to shop around see what my other options were.

We walked down the street, peeking into every storefront. The parrots and parakeets where beautiful and I wanted a cage full of little blue ones to bring home for our terrace. There were also some beautiful ornamental hens and I wish I had a yard for keeping some in. I saw two of the biggest turkeys I've ever seen in my life. Mohammed said that if Americans want a big turkey they must wait for Christmas; at Thanksgiving time only small turkeys are available. There are enough Christians in the city to demand big Christmas turkeys, but not enough Americans to warrant big Thanksgiving turkeys. (Not that the big ones would fit in our oven anyway.) We passed by dozens and dozens of guinea hens, small turkeys, and geese but after several storefronts we still hadn't seen any other ducks.

Just when I was resigning myself to the possibility of guinea hens instead of duck we came to one of the last vendors on the block, the one Mohammed buys the Americans' Thanksgiving turkeys from. He happened to have two big ducks as well. They were pricier than the first ducks I'd seen, but the conditions seemed cleaner. No flies, less smelly. And the right size -- the biggest I could find and the biggest that would fit in our oven. We made a deal for the three kilo male duck, the larger of the two, for 1200 rupees (about $26). It was a little more than I wanted to spend, but honestly I have no idea how much a duck should cost. He tried to sell me the pair for a bargain price and it didn't occur to me until the ride home that I could have bought them both and put one in the freezer.

Many Americans get excited over buying fresh meat but then make a mistake, only once, about delivery of the animal. After seeing friends have live turkeys and other live animals dropped off at their houses, I knew to ask for the duck to be prepared for us. Plucked, cleaned, no neck, take out the organs, for an additional 100 rupees ($2 -- probably the best $2 I've ever spent).

On Thursday Mohammed went back to the market with a cooler full of ice, picked up our prepared duck, and brought it home. Our housekeeper cleaned it off and wrapped it up to sit in the refrigerator. Mike had his Christmas duck.

Mike did all the cooking yesterday. I'm not confident in my meat-roasting skills, but I was able to stock the kitchen with all the groceries he needed, plus keep Muffin out of the way, tidy up the presents-opening mess, and set the table while Mike went to work with his bird.

Muffin helped a little.

It was delicious. It wasn't perfect, but that's due to us still figuring out the nuances of the oven and the toughness of the bird had to do with the life it led before it met me. But it was tasty and something we'd like to do again. The potatoes and carrots roasted in duck fat were amazing and if duck fat is readily available to you I highly suggest you try it. With some seasoned rice and a cranberry log our friends brought over, dinner was complete.

Note the cranberry log standing upright on the plate...

We had a great dinner with some of our new friends and we couldn't have asked for a better day. I hope everyone else celebrating yesterday had as happy a Christmas as we did.

year-end deals at amazon.com

It's been a little quiet around here as we adjust to our new life in India. Come the new year, I have plenty of product reviews and local food stories to share. Until then, enjoy some gluten-free end-of-year savings from Amazon.

The GoPicnic Energy Boost Care Package includes hummus, multi-seed crackers, popchips, organic energy chews, and other high-energy, gluten-free treats. It's usually $29.99 and is on sale for $9.00. Stock up for your favorite college student who will be returning to late-night study sessions soon.











A case of Pamela's Chocolate Chunk cookie mix is down to $25.20. I love all of Pamela's mixes and packaged cookies and biscotti.













Bob's Red Mill products on this page are 15% percent off when you use the code BOBS2010 at checkout. Note that not every product on that page is gluten-free so read the descriptions carefully.












That's enough commercialization for now. Cheers to a happy, healthy 2011. Happy New Year!

*I am an Amazon affiliate. If you purchase from these links or from my store, I will receive a small kickback.

breakfast is served. in india

For those of you who don't follow my other blog, Where in the World Am I?, here's a summary of the last few months. We moved from Burundi in June and had the baby in August in the United States (a little girl named Sophie, who goes by Muffin in the blogosphere). Last week we moved to Hyderabad, India.

We are temporarily living in a furnished, "full-service" apartment. One of the services provided is breakfast. We have a choice of Western, which is an omelette and toast, or South Asian, which is idli (steamed rice pancakes) with savory sauces. I don't like eggs and can't eat the toast, so I get a plate of idli with fresh fruit. And I yank a little of the sweet red jelly from Mike's tray because my stomach isn't ready for savory sauces early in the morning. They don't go well with coffee.

Wait, let me be more precise here. On the weekends I get a plate of idli and fresh fruit. Because on the weekends we request breakfast at eight o'clock. But during the week we request breakfast at seven o'clock and they can't source their idli that early in the morning. So despite our protests that we have plenty of fresh fruit, Mike's Western breakfast is served with an additional plate of fruit for me. (I can't wait until our blender arrives and we can go back to making smoothies, which is an excellent way to consume all the freakin' fruit that gets hoisted upon us.)

glutino frozen pizzas

While I was home in the United States this summer and fall, my pizza addiction led me to try Glutino Duo Cheese, Pepperoni, and Three Cheese frozen pizzas. They were all decent, for frozen pizzas. I doctored them up a bit, adding extra veggies. I also found that I needed to bake them in the oven for longer than the instructions recommended in order to get an acceptably crispy crust and the crust was inconsistent. Sometimes piping hot, sometimes cool in the middle, even though I baked the pizzas the same way.

My favorite was the Three Cheese. The Pepperoni was tasty, but I preferred adding slices of Aidells Italian style sausage to the plain cheese pizzas. The Pepperoni and Three Cheese have brown rice crusts, which was a better crust. For some reason it seemed to cook to a more consistent crispiness and had a better flavor. The cheeses and sauce on all three pizzas were flavorful.

No frozen pizza, gluten-free or otherwise, is as good as a restaurant or homemade fresh pizza. On the scale of frozen pizzas, I'd put these toward the high end if you like a thin, crispy crust.

Image from Glutino.com. I was not compensated in any way for this post. Items were purchased by me for personal consumption.

against the grain frozen bagels

Whoever labeled these packages "bagels" has never actually eaten a bagel before and apparently doesn't know a single person who has, either, in order to conduct a taste test. This, sir, is no bagel. It's round and that's where the similarities between bagels and whatever this is ends.

It somehow manages to be light and airy in appearance (which is the first clue that it's not a bagel) yet chewy in an undercooked pastry dough kind of way (chewy is good in a bagel; undercooked dough is not).

They were also greasy in a pastry dough kind of way. On their own website Against the Grain admits that people have compared them to croissants. A bagel that can be mistaken for a croissant isn't a bagel.

These bagels just weren't for me.

Images from Against the Grain. I was not compensated in any way for this post. I purchased items myself for personal consumption. 

eat more

I had a consultation with a nutritionist this week. My blood sugar levels have been up and down and my doctor wants them to even out a bit. Not to worry, everything is absolutely fine with the pregnancy. My doctor is just being extra cautious because I’m here rather than in the United States. He found me an American nutritionist who lived in Nairobi for several years, so has a good idea of what kinds of food are and are not available and she knows what life in general is like in this region. She’s also worked with celiac disease and gestational diabetes (ugh, I hate that term, but technically I have it based on a couple unusually high glucose readings).

Basically, I have to eat more. My weight gain has been slow and steady, but she wants to see it increase a bit now that I’m entering the third trimester. I have to stop eating so much dried fruit and stop drinking juice and I have to increase my healthy fats. I should start taking a calcium supplement, since I’m not getting as much dairy here as I would be in the United States. That all sounds reasonable enough. I just have to buckle down and force myself to eat the same foods, day in and day out, until I get back to the States in a few weeks. And see if any other Americans around here have some TUMS I can buy off them, for the calcium.

And the nutritionist knows this, too. She understands that I’ll basically be on a peanut butter and avocado diet for the next month, since they are the easiest of the healthy fats for me to obtain here. She knows I snack on the dried fruit to add a little bit of variety to the limited fresh fruits that are available. And she knows I’ll expand my dietary horizons as soon as possible. It was nice talking to someone who has an understanding of what it’s like here. Other nutritionists I talked to didn’t really understand the living conditions and gave me lists of foods that are impossible to find here, which I can’t really fault someone for if they haven’t been here; but they also didn’t seem to grasp the gluten-free diet, which is troubling.

So, no sugar, no gluten. But eat more. It's hard to do that when your food options keep getting narrower.

pineapple

Since my great sugar reduction, I haven't been able to completely break my cook of the habit of making cakes and ice cream for dessert (um, I haven't really tried too hard), but he does serve plain fruit for dessert more often. And he gets creative with it, too. This lovely pineapple was served one day last week.

Pineapple is one of the staples of my diet here. It's cheap and when someone else is cutting it up for you, it's easy. And it's so sweet it's like eating candy, but it's good for you because it's fruit. It goes into my smoothies every day. Several times a week it's my lunchtime dessert or afternoon snack. And there's nothing more refreshing on a hot afternoon than a cold pineapple juice (remember my fruito post?).

I've been looking for some magical nutritional properties of pineapple other than vitamin C, but it seems there aren't any. But what a lot of vitamin C it has! It's also a decent source of fiber and has teeny, tiny amounts of vitamin A, calcium, and iron.*

I don't know what I'm going to do back in the States this summer, where fresh pineapple is expensive and canned pineapple is tasteless in comparison, and pineapple juice comes from concentrate rather than pineapples. And where I have to drive to the air-conditioned supermarket to buy tropical fruit. How can anyone live without fresh pineapple being sold roadside in the heat (and where the good vendors will bring out their machete to slice it open for you, if needed)?

*According to nutritionaldata.com. 

how long does it take you to eat 10 pounds of pasta?

How long does it take to eat ten pounds of Ancient Harvest quinoa pasta pagodas? It took me about a year and a half.Back in the summer of 2008 when we were preparing our consumables to ship to Africa, I was thrilled to see that Amazon.com had my favorite brand of pasta for sale in bulk. I bought a case of spaghetti, a case of elbows, and a case of pagodas, a short, squat, twirly tricolor pasta. I received 10 little boxes of spaghetti, ten little boxes of elbows, and one giant box containing 10 pounds of pagodas. While all the cardboard packaging of individual boxes may not be stellar for the environment, it's great for long-term storage and for portions. One giant box of pagodas? Not as convenient.

Our consumables met us here in September 2008. Since then I've been slowly but surely pecking away at my pagodas. I've made the spaghetti and the elbows a couple times, but I really wanted to finish those pagodas. The spaghetti and elbow boxes will keep and can be shipped to our next destination. The pagodas are an open box, so the movers won't take them. I had to consume them all.

And tonight, the last bowlful is boiling away, while a creamy cheese sauce waits to smother every last bit.

Image from quinoa.net.

easiyo yogurt maker

Quite simply, I love my Easiyo yogurt maker. A friend recommended it as one of the best kitchen gadgets you can buy for moving overseas. She'd had problems with infections and was told to eat more yogurt, but she didn't trust what she could buy in Nigeria. And making your own can be difficult, messy, and time-consuming. Then she discovered Easiyo and told all the rest of us living in Africa to give it a try.

The local yogurt and milk here is great when it's good, but really bad when it's bad. I question the amount of refrigeration it receives -- we have city power and a generator and still can't manage to keep our fridge running continuously; I can't imagine what it's like for anyone with less reliable electricity, which is most homes and businesses in the country. So when a nurse here told me to start eating more yogurt to fend off infections, I looked into the Easiyo.

It's so simple. You add cold water and the powdered yogurt mix to a plastic chamber. Then you add hot water to the outer capsule, put the chamber in the capsule, seal it up, and let it sit overnight. In the morning, remove the chamber and put it in the fridge, and in a couple hours you have cool, fresh yogurt. There are recipes for making sour cream and cream cheese, but I haven't tried those yet. I've been happy with adding yogurt to my smoothies and fruit salad every day.

There's one drawback. You have to keep buying the Easiyo powdered yogurt mix packets and they don't seem cheap to me. In all honesty, I've been away from the U.S. for so long that I don't know how the cost of a packet that supplies 5 to 6 servings of organic, probiotic yogurt compares to the same number of servings and same level of quality, ready-made in the grocery store dairy case. I'd been buying my Easiyo packets from Amazon.com, but they recently raised the price. Currently the cheapest price I can find is from the Easiyo U.S. website. Easiyo is from New Zealand and doesn't ship to every country, but they have a U.S. distributor. I'll definitely keep shopping around for the best prices, at least while I'm living overseas.

There are several different varieties of yogurt, from "plain," to probiotic, to a luscious, thick, Greek-style yogurt. The different varieties are available in low-fat versions. And there are fruit flavors as well. I haven't tried the fruit flavors because I generally find flavored yogurt too sweet for my taste. But occasionally I'll add a bit of honey to the yogurt powder and water mix to make the probiotic variety a tad less tart. So far, every item I've looked at on the site states that's it's gluten-free, but you should check the ingredients and nutrition information on individual items before you purchase them.

Image from Easiyo.com. I was not compensated for this post in any way. Items were purchased by me for personal use.

parma ham at pasta comedia

You'd be right in thinking there's very little a gluten-free eater could order at a restaurant called Pasta Comedia. However, it's the newest restaurant in town and they are becoming famous for importing some Italian treats that aren't otherwise available here, such as real mozzarella for the pizzas and calzones. (Pizzas are made with local cheeses here. Fun at first, but tiresome after two years.) Since so many people are talking about the mozzarella and flocking to the restaurant, and I was told they had some plain grilled meat dishes, I decided I didn't want to be left out when some folks at my office were heading there for lunch one day.

I wasn't really in the mood for grilled meat when I sat down at the table. I feared it would be like all the other grilled meat you get here, not especially Italian. I perused the salads and was resigning myself to the avocado salad I tend to get at most restaurants, when I spied jambon du parme avec des fruits de la saison (my French may not be exact) at the bottom of the salad list. I asked a friend who knows food well to confirm what I was reading: Parma ham with seasonal fruits. And by fruits, actual fruit, not fruits de la mer, which is shellfish, which I don't like. He said I was right, parma ham and fruit.

I decided to go for it. I know a plate of ham isn't the healthiest lunch, but it's been ages since I've had something different. I admit I had low expectations, but the plate that arrived erased them right away. It was a huge plate of thin, melt-in-your-mouth parma ham served with fresh mango. Yum. People watched in amazement as I cleaned my plate. It was a lot of ham! And it was better than some of the parma I'd had back in the States. If I weren't pregnant, I would have eaten about half of it and shared the rest. But Mike was relishing a huge, cheese-stuffed calzone which he couldn't have shared with me if he wanted to, and the others had pizzas and lasagnas, so I relished my plate of ham while enjoying the novelty of it all.

I can't describe just how refreshing that lunch was. There's nothing new here and I'm glad that even though I can't get any of the dishes with the mozzarella, I could still take part in the fun that everyone else was having in experiencing a new restaurant and a novel food.