News from the kitchen

For those of you who read my blog during my year in Vancouver, you may recall that I would regularly post reviews of various meals I had enjoyed cooking. I realised that I have not been doing that lately so I thought I would take this opportunity to tell y'all about my recent experimentation with the middle eastern favourite falafel. Sorry I don't have a camera any more so there are not photos to accompany this review, you will have to use your imagination.

Falafel are little fried balls made mainly of chickpeas (or Garbanzo beans whatever you want to call them). As the selection of meat here is not all that great I have been finding vegetarian dishes to be more and more of an appealing option lately, especially dishes using chickpeas. I first tried my hand at making falafel a few months ago, the first attempt was not bad, definitely a recipe I considered worth trying again and experimenting a little with. The second time I forgot a vital ingredient, flour is essential to help the falafel hold together, after trying to shallow fry a couple of them I found that my oil was extremely dirty and my falafel were very small. So I added the flour and reshaped all my falafel then tried again, still using the dirty oil. They were
not all that good and it kind of put me off attempting them for a couple of months. Then last week Chris and I were deciding what to have for dinner and I suggested trying falafel again. As good as falafel are, they really need something to go with them, some kind of sauce or dip or something, so I decided to try another chickpea staple, hummous. Wow, what a great meal that was, who would have though the humble chickpea could so easily be made in to 2 wonderful dishes. The unfortunate side effect was the strong taste of garlic left in my mouth for the rest of the evening, but that is a small price to pay. I was so impressed by the falafel and hummous that I thought I should share the experience with others, and as Deb has frequently had Chris and I over for dinner I thought I would repay the favour. So on Wednesday I invited Deb over to share in the falafel experience. This time I decided to try a slightly different recipe, as I had not been entirely happy with the texture of the previous attempts. This recipe involved rolling the falafel in sesame seeds before frying. It was a great idea, the sesame seeds added a little crunch and tasted just superb. As I had planned this meal a few days ahead I made sure I had other sauces available as well, well actually it was just more hummous and some unsweetened yoghurt, but it was certainly a great addition to the meal. Then to make the meal complete I baked some pita bread, and to my surprise they actually worked pretty well, good enough for us to stuff them with hummous, yoghurt and falafel without them falling apart.

So now after these last 2 falafel experiences I am right in falafel mode again, and each time I go to the store I can't resist buying another can or two of chickpeas, just in case. I have my eye on a rather yummy looking eggplant dip that I spotted in a magazine the other week, so maybe I will have to try that with my next falafel adventure.

The Golf Course

Well once again it has been far too long since my last blog update. In my last post I hinted at an upcoming review of the Ukarumpa golf course so I guess I should start with that.

On my first day here in Ukarumpa I was having lunch with the Hinton family and was pleased to learn that Ukarumpa has it's own golf course, and whats more membership fees are non-existant (well I think they are anyway). I was eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to display my prowess with a golf club, and pretty excited at the prospect of driving a golf ball while at such a high altitude. The boost that would do to my ego would be substantial I am sure, I mean who wouldn't be impressed by 350 meter drives? After expressing this to a few people I was informed that the golf course was not really that kind of a course, it is more of a pitch and putt kind of arrangement. Furthermore it is not a full size pitch and putt, there are 3 holes and 3 tees so if you play all combinations then you get a 9 hole course, play every hole twice and there is your 18 holes.


I didn't hear much more about the golf course for a few months, when I made a passing comment to someone that I had heard there was a golf course somewhere but I had not yet seen it. In reply I was told that I have walked or driven past it numerous times. When they explained exactly where it was I couldn't get myself to believe them, it looked like a small vacant section, awaiting the time when the number of staff here necessitated the addition of a couple more houses. Melanie and I decided one day to find out once and for all if this was in fact the golf course, so went in search of tell tale signs of a golf course, the holes. This was not an easy task as the grass was kind of long at the time, but eventually I found evidence of the existence of the golf course, 1 hole partially covered by grass but most definitely a hole non the less. It turns out that the guy who was maintaining the course is not in Ukarumpa at the moment, he is either on furlough or gone for good, I'm not sure which, so the course was in a state of disrepair. Rumour has it that there has been a renewed interest in the golf course and it has been mowed now so I will have to check it out some time.

The hole.

The entire course, all 9 holes

Birthday party

I thought I would take a few minutes to update everyone on what I did this year for my birthday. My birthday was on a Saturday this year so it was jolly nice being able to sleep in on my birthday for a change. A number of my friends were away for the weekend so I decided to have my party last Wednesday when more people were around. Tiffany kindly offered to make dinner for everyone and to hold the party at her place, a very good idea considering that my house cleaner only comes Monday and Thursday so by Wednesday we are normally a little low on clean dishes. On a side note it is really very nice having someone come and do laundry and clean the dishes and make a cooked lunch twice a week, I'm sure I will take a while to get used to not having this wonderful service when I leave here. Any way back to the party, Tiffany made a lovely curry for dinner and also organised party games and a cake. All I had to do was invite people, oh and I also made icecream for desert but more about that later.

A few weeks ago I told a bunch of my friends here about the little run in I had with a horse while driving my car 10 years or so ago. Apparently they enjoyed this story and I guess they thought it would be funny to hassle me a bit about it. So for the main party game of the evening we had a rousing game of "crash the car in to the horse", a twist on the party favourite "pin the tail on the donkey".

After the game I was presented with my very own racing car cake, and a very interesting cake it was. Now to accompany the cake I had made the icecream that I was shown how to make in my french cooking class in Vancouver. It was basil flavoured icecream and most people were a little skeptical about the desirability of having basil and icecream mixed together. Admittedly I was not all that convinced about the idea until I tasted it, but it actually works pretty well. Most people claimed to enjoy it, so either they were lying or it wasn't bad.


After cake we played a game of beans (a very cool card game) but unfortunately it doesn't really work so well with 10 people so the game wasn't the best, it works much better with 4 or 5 people.

That about raps up the birthday party. Tune in next time for photos of the Ukarumpa golf course, rather a grand course.

The long promised fireworks review

Well time has just been flying by and I realize it has been a good couple of weeks since I promised the posting on what people do for entertainment in Ukarumpa. I would have gotten around to this sooner, but I couldn't be bothered, sorry.
Anyway…

A while ago now a bunch of us decided to have a fireworks evening. Fireworks are not readily available in the store here so we had to make to with home made fireworks. When I say home made fireworks I am not really talking about anything flash, in fact it was very basic and I’m sure you would easily be able to find the necessary items in any good supermarket, or even in some not so good ones. What you need is a metal coat hanger, some string, some steel wool and a flame, we found a candle worked well. Now tie the string on to the coat hanger so that it is at a length that you can swing around without it hitting the ground. Now wrap some of the steel wool around the coat hanger, make sure the wool is not too tight as you want the air to be able to get in when it is swinging around. Once it is securely fastened on to the coat hanger light the steel wool with a candle. Once it is sufficiently alight started swinging it around in a circular fashion as fast as you can. And that’s all there is to it. If you want to take photos of this, I suggest not using the flash, and use a relatively slow shutter speed, that way the photos show the fireworks really well. Actually you may find that looking at the photos is more spectacular than looking at the real thing.

Just to give you an idea of what it was like, here are a few photos. I can’t take credit for these ones, my photos were all stolen along with my laptop.

Lighting the steel wool

I am swinging this one. Note the fine swinging form displayed.

Warning: It is not advisable for small children to attempt this, the steel wool gets very hot. Do not stand beside anyone who is swinging the fireworks, you will get covered in sparks if you do. Ensure you have a plan for what to do in case a fire breaks out, we decided to do the fireworks outside the fire-station just in case.

This was going to be about entertainment but...

Well I had planned to write today about how people here in Ukarumpa keep themselves entertained. I had some photos all ready to post about the homemade fireworks that we had much fun with one night last week. However a certain unexpected event last night means I can no longer post those pictures.

Yesterday after work I moved my stuff from the house I had been staying in, to the new house I am moving in to. I am moving in with 2 other single guys who I have been getting on pretty well with. So anyway, I moved my stuff in and then went out for dinner. It was hamburger night at the teen centre where a bunch of school students sell hamburgers to the rest of the community, quite an event for a town with no regular restaurants. After dinner I went to another friend's house to play Settlers, a board game that is rather popular here. Unfortunately this time I didn't win the game, but it was fun never the less.

On returning home at around 10pm we found that some thieves had broken in through the back door and stolen all of our laptops and cameras, hence my inability to post the previously mentioned photos. So within 4 hours of moving in to my new place, I had been burgled, that is just great.

Hopefully some of the other people at the fireworks night will have some photos I can copy so keep an eye out over the next few days and maybe there will be a couple of pictures.

Madang photos

I have had a request for photos of last weeks Madang trip, so to keep my
readers happy I present Madang in colour.

There were lots of bats in Madang.

The little boys at the village we went to were very good tree climbers. They would go up to get some 'buai', a little nut thingy that lots of people chew to get a bit of a buzz. They then spit it out resulting in red stains all over the ground. Oh and their teeth and mouths are all red. Very attractive.

We saw a pet cassowary on the way home. It is just a baby one.

The store at the village we went to. There wasn't much for sale in the store.

The back of the PMV for the last little trip from Kainantu back to Ukarumpa (only about 10 minutes). It was much more crowded than it appears in the photo.

One of the lovely snorkeling spots. This is where I had my T=bone steak.

The other snorkeling spot, Rempi. Very nice little spot.

This tree was pretty cool. It was huge with a lot of different trunks all part of the same tree. Good for swinging on.

Madang

I have now been here in PNG for around 5 weeks, so I figured it was about time I had another holiday. Well actually a bunch of others were heading to Madang for a 6 days and asked if I would like to come along. There were 8 of us going, so the most economical way for us to go was to catch a PMV from Ukarumpa. The nice driver picked us up bright and early at 7am on Wednesday and we set off. I was told by a national chap that it takes 3 - 4 hours depending on the driver. I now am wondering whether that chap actually had a watch, because there is no way you could drive there in 3 hours, I think we took at least 5 hours. Thankfully it was a very boring trip, no accidents, no armed holdups, not even anyone blocking the road armed with shovels asking for money.

Madang is on the coast of PNG and has some very nice snorkeling and diving spots and a great supply of coconuts, mangoes and papaya, yummy. On the afternoon that we arrived we took a short trip in to town to go to the market and to the supermarket to get most of the ingredients for the various meals we were planning to cook over the week. There were 4 supermarkets that we went to over the week and they were pretty good by PNG standards. I picked up a few ingredients that I can't find or are expensive in Ukarumpa, yay I can start cooking with olive oil again.

On Thursday we went second hand clothes shopping in the morning, not really my cup of tea, although I was surprised at the quality of some of the clothes available. Unfortunately nothing caught my fancy so I didn't buy anything. After a while I grew a little bored so went for a walk to take some photos of the town. I found a bunch of big bats hanging in a tree, they are not the prettiest of creatures.

In the afternoon we went snorkeling and I am happy to report that I did indeed find Nemo. He was darting in and out of an anemone. We also saw a bunch of other colourful fish and even a sea snake, right next to the spot I had been standing a few minutes earlier.

We then all went out to the golf club for dinner, a lovely Chinese restaurant, very tasty. We were going to have ice-cream but they had run out and they apparently didn't have anything else available for dessert.

On Friday we went to visit the village that Tiffany lived in for 5 weeks during her POC orientation course in January. They were very nice people and extremely generous. They didn't know we were coming, and yet still they fed us all a big lunch including a chicken and various root vegetables. One man was particularly talkative and liked to tell stories. I am not exactly sure what the moral of most of the stories were, but the theme that seemed to reoccur time and time again is that if you are going in a boat, don't let any cassowary birds in with you, they are not to be trusted. In one story it pushed a wallaby in to the water and then ate a turtle, very odd stories indeed.

On Saturday we went up to visit the people currently on the POC course. The course runs for either 6 weeks or 15 weeks, depending on the kind of work you will be doing in PNG. During the weekends they all have to cook for themselves on outdoor fires, so that they can learn how to cook while in a village. Ron and I were on cooking lunch that day, so we made tortillas on Friday night and then cooked up some mince and made salsa and guacamole. It was jolly tasty and everyone seemed to appreciate it. Home made tortillas are much nicer in my opinion to the store bought variety and they really are not that hard to make.

On Sunday we went to a local church in the morning, we turned up a little late, but still managed to catch the last 3 1/2 hours or so. It was mostly in English so at least I could follow what was going on. In the afternoon we went to another snorkeling spot, one that had a restaurant too. So after a nice steak lunch I went and had a snorkel for a while. I saw more clown fish and a few other of the finding Nemo cast. The water was not as clear as the first spot, but there were bigger fish around so it was nice to see a bit of variety. In the evening a few of us went out for dinner, the last opportunity I will have for a while to eat out. I decided to see whether they could top the steak I had for lunch, and what do you know they could. It was very tasty although the mushroom and red wine sauce seemed to be missing the red wine. The specials board said there were strawberries and ice-cream for dessert, but it turned out that there were none left. So we inquired about the cheese-cake of the day, "Sorry no cheese-cake today". There were only 2 more items on the dessert menu, ice-cream and pie of the day. Ah yes a nice pie, so what was the pie of the day? Well at first we were told peach pie. Then after we finished our main course it had changed to apple pie with strawberry ice-cream, apparently there was no vanilla. So 3 of us ordered the apple pie with strawberry ice-cream. What we actually got was what we are assumed to be a peach pie, and vanilla ice-cream. The steak was significantly better than the pie was.

This morning (Monday) we left the SIL guest house at 7:15 and were dropped off in town to catch a PMV back to Ukarumpa. With 8 of us we figured it couldn't take too long to fill a PMV (they don't leave until they are crammed full of people). If any of you have played Pitt and were good at it, then you may want to consider moving to PNG and becoming a 'boss man', this is the guy who calls out of the window trying to attract more passengers. It seems that the number of available seats was a pretty flexible number. The boss man started off yelling "4 pela Goroka, 4 pela Goroka" (not too sure on the spelling sorry), meaning room for 4 more passengers going to Goroka. When he realised that the 8 of us who were already in the van were only going as far as Kainantu the call changed to "4 pela Kainantu, 4 pela Kainantu". Eventually 2 more passengers were found and they jumped in. The call then changed to "3 pela Kainantu". Now it has been a while since I was at school, but last time I checked 4 - 2 = 2 not 3. Hmm, I wonder where the 3rd person will sit. We drove around town for a while more calling for 3 people sometimes and 2 people other times, possibly depending on how many people we were passing at the time. Then one of the passengers that was in the van decided to get out, right back were he got in. I guess he wanted a break from the sun or something. Finally after much futile calling and driving all around Madang centre, we took off, with 1 spare seat. The trip back was equally as uneventful as the trip to Madang and I am now back safe and sound in Ukarumpa.