Cooking on gas
Alex October 12th, 2008
After a couple weeks cooking on a 1kW electric ring and a kerosene stove, Marcel and I finally gave up and bought ourselves a gas stove, with a 25kg bottle of gas. The electric ring never really got hot enough, plus it was too small to heat up the whole frying pan – you could only heat half at a time.
The 3 ring gas hob cost us 350 birr (around 40 USD) and the gas bottle 620 birr – including the deposit on the bottle, so to refill it’ll be arond 260 birr and each refill ought to last us a 2-3 months.
This weekend has been quite chilled out, on Friday I went over to Doreens house to look at some furniture that was in the VSO store there, we’re after some new armchairs, as ours are quite basic and feel as if they’ll fall apart at any minute. They’re just made from 1″ square tubular steel with a bit of foam and fabric stuck on. There were a couple of much better ones in the store, so I’ve put my name on them and will need to figure a way to get them up to the house, along with a new bookcase.
We went for a few drinks and a meal with most of the other VSO volunteers in Mekelle, then a few of us went on to play pool. Pool seems very popular here – there are several pool ‘bars’ near the house – most are just a single pool table, actually without a bar! It’s played very differently here to how I’ve ever seen it before. The balls are set up evenly spaced just up against the side cushions (in numerical order) and the red (no 3) is placed just off the top cushion. The balls are potted in numerical order (starting with the no 3) and you get points corresponding to the number of the ball (although the no 3 ball is worth double, being the first ball). No penalty shots are awarded, but your opponent gets the points for the ball you fouled on. Extra points are gained if you pot a ball using the object ball, so if I hit the no 9, and the no 9 then pots the 14, I’d get 14 points and another shot at the 9. Makes for quite an interesting game, as you can pot fewer balls than your opponent and still win.
On Saturday morning, after getting the new stove, we did some more food shopping and spent most of the rest of the day cooking. I made some ginger cordial, having a rough guess at how to make it. Root ginger here is really cheap – about 25p a kilo, so I got a couple of kilos, chopped up half, just covered with water then boiled it with sugar for about half a hour, left it to cool and then strained through some muslin. I’d only cleaned the root, couldn’t be bothered to peel it, as I’d probably still be there now if I had. Then made some lentil burgers for dinner, again they seem to have worked well and was enough for lunch the next day.
Sunday was haircut day – although Mike had told me about a good barbers, I was a little nervous about what I may end up looking like, as wasn’t sure how they may be with cutting ferengi hair, plus my Amharic isn’t up to asking for short back and sides. Fortunately the guys English was quite good, so managed to say that I wanted it the same style but shorter – I didn’t want any extensions!
I’m feeling much more comfortable at the end of my second full week here in Mekelle, the first week was quite confusing and had a lot to do with finding my way around and things to sort out with the house. Seems like I’ve been in Ethiopia for a long time now, even though it’s only a month since I was in the UK.
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