cooking in the dark

Cooking is always a bit of a gamble. Everything has to be made from scratch so lots of our food prep has to be done early in the day, before the boys finish school and home work time starts, and before I have three little people to trip over in the kitchen.

The trouble living in Addis (well one of them!), is the power is unreliable, so you never really know when you are planning something in the oven whether that will be possible or whether the plan is going to have to change.

All was going well yesterday, I'd prepared home made fish-fingers and home made french fries (having introduced a weekly junk food night to try and keep Josh happy). The power was on, I happily put them in the oven, and they got half cooked before the power went off. The trouble with power cuts is you never know how long they will last - there is no predicting whether it will be 20 minutes or 20 hours, so the fish-fingers and fries got transferred to the frying pans to be cooked by solar light.

The power came back on again just as I was finishing!! I am fairly sure this was just to annoy me and rub in the fact I now had twice as much washing up! At least the light was on for the washing up!! The joys of cooking in Addis....or not.