Beans, beans the magical fruit, the more you eat the…less money you have to spend.
Before coming to Belize, my cooking repertoire included peanut-butter and banana sandwiches, burritos, and a mean tostada. In a particularly gutsy endeavor to make hard-boiled eggs last summer, my roommate and I innocently plunked a couple eggs into a pot of water and watched in horror as they cracked upon sinking to the bottom. Needless to say, I lack a basic culinary swagger.
Transitioning to a land of raw ingredients (flour, corn, squash, plantains, sweet pepper) has forced me to learn my way around a kitchen. This has not been painless, and I’ve lost a lot of good meals out there. This is straight-up jungle cooking, stovetop and four pots. Have I mentioned that we have neither an oven nor a refrigerator?
Here are a couple of snacks and tips that I have found to be comforting even in the darkest of refrigerator-less, oven-less times:
No-bake oatmeal cookies: Stovetop cookies, anytime, anyplace. The one stressful moment is the rigid timing of the boiling process, but you can handle it.
Dutch-oven cakes: Beyond the giggle factor of what the phrase “dutch oven” means (this took some explaining to my British roommate), this is the miracle process for baked goods. Take one large pot and boil 1-2″ of water. Place an object in the water that will be able to hold a smaller pot above the liquid (bent fork, upturned pot lid, big rocks, etc). Complete recipe in smaller pot and then place in larger pot, above the water. Cover larger pot and let cook for >45 minutes. The trick is the patience to let the heat do its work without lifting the lid and letting out all the steam. All recipes remain the same (here’s a good banana bread one).
Kamal cooking: A kamal is a big, cast iron flat surface used to make tortillas. It was a glorious day when we figured out a way to cover the kamal with an overturned pot to be able to melt cheese and make pizzas over a tortilla. Be sure to grease the kamal a bit so that the tortilla doesn’t burn while waiting for the pizza goods to cook.
No refrigerator substitutes: Powdered milk is not Wisconsin dairy, but it does the trick and lasts as long as the ants don’t get to it. Oil can be used in the absence of butter. And it’s key to get over the Westernized paranoia of refrigerating everything. Eggs can be left in tropical heat for >1 week and still be good. That said though, be sure to always crack your eggs into a separate bowl first, so as not to spoil the rest of your meal in case the egg has gone bad.
The all-powerful curry: Cook any bean (lentil, black-eyed pea, pinto) with an abundance of water and chuck in any vegetable. Seriously. Anything. Squash, zucchini, carrot, potato, coco yam, plantain, raisin, eggplant; sky’s the limit here. Douse everything in curry and you’re instantly serving an exotic dish.
My cooking has gotten better, but I’m still short on diversity. Due to my enthusiasm for the curry, my roommate gets nauseous at the mere mentioning of it. So if anyone has some recipes to suggest, I think he’d appreciate it.
Any tips from other countries?
Bridget Barry is currently a volunteer with the Ya’axché Conservation Trust in Southern Belize. For more snippets of the day- to-day lives of volunteers, check out these other posts by La Vida Idealist bloggers.
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It’s great to read about your eagerness to experiment and innovate. We used to cook on a wood stove for a few years in Guatemala, and learned that you can even bake a pie in a dutch oven (yes, it’s really an oven!). You’ll need to control the distance from the heat, and to get even baking you pile hot coals on top of the dutch oven lid (that’s why the lid looks sunken).
Something I enjoyed was making a wood frame with wire screen, and using it to dry fruit, and even to make dried beef, which is great with scrambled eggs or in gravy on dutch oven biscuits!
For a collection of classic electricity-free recipes, check out the Jungle Camp Cookbook (http://www.ethnologue.com/LL_docs/show_bookdesc.asp?bookid=1).