Sourdough!

Well I took the plunge into sourdough.  Ordered the starter from King Arthur, fed it and then presto made bread.    Here are two photos.  I am still not 100% sure of what I am suppose to be doing to keep it alive but I am following the directions; feed it weekly if I do not [...]

Bagels Encore!

Hello All:  Happy Thanksgiving!  I had a number of PCVs over for Friday “Game Morning” so had to put out a spread.  Quiches, sausages, fruit salad, cinnamon rolls, and bagels. I used Jeffrey Hamelman’s recipe which is available if googled.  It is the best I have tried and though it gives the kitchen aid a [...]

British Biscuits! (English Muffins)

Sorry for the inactivity, I have been cooking and we are eating but have too busy to post.  Hope all are well and getting ready for Spring!  Have a great time at Judi and Dad’s birthday. Anyway, this weekend I decided to make breakfast bread and settled on English muffins rather than bagels.  I used [...]

Pizza Time!

For Doug’s 60th birthday (he is the Country Director and hails from NH) , I was asked to make pizza.  He was planing to have about fifty attendees but there would be other food choices besides pizza.  He has a mud brick pizza oven at his house that the husband of the country director who [...]

Ruth’s Pie

For Luke’s birthday he did not want cake; he wanted pumpkin pie!  Being a great mom, Ruth pulled out all the stops and make this great pie. She made it with fresh Burkinabe pumpkin and despite missing some spices like ground ginger it tastes as good as it looks.   She also makes a fabulous [...]

Baking in Burkina; English Muffins!

Breakfast foods are hard to come by here unless you make your own.  The baguettes are dry and do not last; croissants are found downtown which is a drive for a morning meal, and I am not a fan of cold cereal.  So, bagels, cinnamon rolls, toast and English Muffins need to be made, you [...]

Bagels Encore!

Hello All: Just a quick post to show more bagels!  Luke likes them as do I, so I need to either make more or teach him! For this batch, I found that  rolling out the dough into a long tube and then making a circle by joining the two ends and having the dough really [...]

Chili Contest!

Well thanks to Al Sims and some of my ingenuity, I was crowned Chili Champion of Ouagadougou, 2009! There were seven entrees ranging from a black bean veggie to a chock full of meat,  hot and spicy (my entree).  One other entree was a white bean and chicken chili.  The judging was done by the [...]

Cinnamon Rolls!

As a son of Mary Laing Estabrook, I inherited her sweet tooth!  Cookis, cakes, brownies are all things for which I have a weakness!  One item I bake a lot are cinnamon buns or rolls.   I have made regular cinnamon rolls with a powdered sugar fondant which have been well received.  The receip is [...]

Bagels in Burkina!

So here they are.  I finally figured out the process of how to post.  Of course I would have done this last weekend but we did not have Internet for a while and assumed it was a typical problem of living in Burkina.  Then when the repair man showed up and plugged the phone line [...]