Then we thought well maybe a tin of something meaty once a week. How-ever
choices in Ndjamena seemed limited and expensive when we visited the
supermarkets and then how much weight are you allowed to take in an aeroplane or
how much space can we have in a pick-up. What about the fact that vegetables
are not too readily available and don’t even mention cheese. So how to have a
balanced diet- maybe just dried beans would be fine.
Finally one of our new team mates arrived in Ndjamena and we took her
advice, followed her expert tuition and started drying meat. Boil mince meat
for an hour or so then slow dry in the oven was her advice and its ready when
it looks like light coloured coffee granules! So now we have several jam jars
of meat ready to go with us. It’s amazing how much water there is in it.
Inspired we moved on to fruit and vegetables- we hope we may grow our
own- but as we are not going as agriculturists we may be a little hungry at
first and even later on. Some veg will be available but it all depends on
trucks coming into the town with supplies and on us not being too busy and
getting there before it’s all sold.
So we have dried green beans(chewy) and cabbage (not sure) and peppers
(definitely nice like roasted ones). We have also dried pineapple and guavas (a
bit seedy), apples and bananas soaked in lemon juice. Sadly it’s not mango
season because as many of you know from the summer they are very tasty. We’ll
have to get Rebecca trained when we’re away to do some for our next trip.
We’re still waiting for tomatoes and carrots to go down in price and
then we will add them in. All these have been done in the solar cooker so no
extra cost, not too difficult and finally no weight or space to transport them.
It’s amazing what advice you can get on the internet when you’re not sure how
to do things.
So now all we need is some recipes and we’ll be cooking on gas well not quite
actually we will be using kerosene stoves and our solar oven!
The other good news is that we now know all the words for these things
in Arabic and are even allowed to say them. So far we haven’t ended up with any
of the wrong things at market but bargaining in Arabic money is not always easy
but that’s another story…………
