Garden Goods and Other Culinary Adventures......

When life gives you radishes......eat a ton! Our radishes and mustard greens are going crazy in the garden. I planted the radishes in a few different plantings to space out the harvest. Glad I did; we can barely keep up with the first round as it is. I'll have to make some neighbor garden bags to give out to keep up with it.

- In the meantime they have booth made deliciously crunchy and spicy garnishes to 'ramen' style soups, cole slaw and stir fry's. There is nothing better than fresh veggies from our own labor.
- In other food news....sorry, I can't help my self.....I successfully made a 'pan' pizza. I didn't have high hopes for this pizza and its chances of coming out tasting like a real pizza. It exceeded my expectations by a long shot. I took a chunk of dough off one of the two loafs I was making for that day. I let it rise a little, while I made a tomato sauce from caramelized onions, fresh garlic, italian herbs, stewed tomatoes and a little tomato paste. When the sauce had simmered and reduced enough (wish I had had wine to add to this), I heated a pan with a small amount of olive oil and dusted it with corn meal to prevent sticking. The dough was now soft and airy. Instead of trying to roll it I just stretched it a bit to about the size of the pan (this wouldn't of worked as well with a bigger pizza) and plopped it in the hot pan. The bottom got crunchy, I added the sauce, thinly sliced fresh onion, mozzarella, and covered it with a lit to let the cheese melt. It was almost perfect! My only complaint was my inability to broil the cheese a bit and get the top of the crust nice and crunchy. Regardless, it was delicious. Ok...that was a little long to talk about food.
- We had a crazy rain/hail/wind/thunder and lightning storm on Friday. The rain drops were massive and the hail was the size of a quarter. Our garden would of been destroyed if the hail had kept up more than a few minutes. The clouds were amazing afterwords.

It was probably the biggest rain we've had. There are definitely a few leaks in our roof that will need some attention before the next one comes. I'm sure we fared exceedingly better than most houses in the area though. Yikes!

Our weeks of integration are coming to and end and they couldn't come any sooner. It will be so nice to be able to come and go when we want or need. So far we have been ok with the one night a month we have been allotted during this period, but it makes it frustrating on those few times when it would be nice to have the choice to stay an extra one.

Last week was pretty slow for us. I think we were experiencing another dip in our motivation, etc. We tried meeting with the primary school a few different times to work out the simple task of finding a teacher to work with on the library project. Regardless of the low amount of responsibility it will take, no one wants to commit. It's hard to keep going back to blank stares and the lack of progress when we have been promised week after week that the board will meet and make a decision, etc etc. Come on people!

We have been attempting to dig up a lot of information on grants and programs available in this country for various possible projects down the road. This at least makes us feel like we're not completely idle.

We also met with an organization who works with communities in developing permaculture practices among homesteads. We are excited to maybe get connected with them and learn a few things to bring back to our own community. They work with a few different communities for a year with 4 day/month, hands-on work shops. We are hoping to have the chance to volunteer at a few and get involved.

Saturday - yesterday - we met with a couple here in Swaziland that we made contact with via our time in Pasadena. My good friend Erika was good friends with Lisa who's in-laws live here in Swaziland. You know, the way things usually work, round-about. Lisa found out we had been posted here and got us in contact with them. We finally met yesterday in Mbabane and had a fun day exploring Swaziland by car! This is a treat when your life relies on public transportation and everything is harder than it should be. They treated us to coffee and lunch and a day exploring Malolotja, one of a handful of Swaziland's national parks. Swaziland is a small country and it's even smaller in a car. After Malolotja and its amazing array of wildflowers, baboons, blesbok and some crazy, long tailed bird doing some sort of mating ritual, we drove down to see the MaGugu dam just because we could. Turns out they also live a stones throw from the Peace Corps office. They drove us home at the end of the day, relaxed, happy and with a huge bag of avocados in hand. It's a small world and I love it.