In My Kitchen

Today, I am again linking up to the Baptist Missionary Women blog, and we are doing posts about our kitchens!

I posted pictures of my kitchen when we "toured" my house, but I'll post a couple of them again for you.  I love my big, roomy kitchen.  It is a joy to cook in here.

   

 

As many of you probably know, cooking three meals a day on the mission field generally takes all day.  I try to cook hearty breakfasts most days.  Lunches are usually more simple--leftovers, sandwiches, salads, or veggies and dip.  Then about 3:30 every afternoon, I start working on supper preparations.  Almost everything is made from scratch, so, of course, each part of the meal takes a while to prepare.  On Sundays and Wednesdays, we have leftovers, so the day before I try to make a meal that heats up well for leftovers. 

These pictures are from one day a couple of weeks ago when I made King Ranch Chicken.  It was a new recipe that I found here, and it was a keeper.  We all liked it.  First of all, I chopped and prepared all my ingredients. 

I don't always do this ahead of time, but it is less hectic for me when I do because then I'm not having to scramble at the last minute to prepare an ingredient that I missed or forgot about.  I love it when things go smoothly in the kitchen.  (Unlike the other day when I manually juiced tons of lemons for lemonade, had almost a whole cup of lemon juice, and then sent it flying off the counter when my hand bumped it!  Grrrrrr!)

With the veggies sauteing, it is time to make homemade tortillas.

Occasionally, I see tortillas at the store, but I don't bother buying them because I enjoy making them from scratch.  In the above picture, I am using Kimbo, which is our version of Crisco here.  I have also seen Crisco at the store before, but it is much more expensive, and Kimbo works just as well. (By the way, we like our tortilla recipe.  My only issue with it is that they don't roll up quite as nicely as I would like.  If anyone has a recipe for tortillas that roll up well, I'd love to try it.)

 

Then comes putting it all together in my largest glass casserole dish.  

After 30 minutes in the oven, we all enjoyed Mexican food!  Drop my voice to a whisper.  Yes, it is a casserole, but that word happens to be a bad word in our house, so I just give each recipe a "BJ friendly" name, and everyone is happy!  This one I didn't have to rename, so that was a blessing!  

And oh, by the way, my oven/stove is gas.  It took a while for me to learn the settings on my gas oven, but I would definitely recommend a gas oven over an electric one to anyone living in Kenya or in any other country where electricity is not reliable.  When the electricity shuts off here, I can calmly continue with my supper preparations, and it saves me a ton of stress!  

Now to tackle that huge mound of dishes.  Ugh!  Do they make gas dishwashers??? 

* Garlic beef enchiladas tonight