Haute Cuisine

I have discovered Golden Grahams.  Unlike your standard convenience store, the Total across the street from my house is stocked with interesting items at a lower price than the grocery store.  In addition to shampoo and canned fruit, wafer cookies (it's a French thing) and household cleaners, they sell Lion (tastes like a Lion candy bar), Cocoa Puffs, and Golden Grahams cereal boxes just inside the glass door.  At only $4 a box, I find that I am becoming one of those people who grabs a bowl of cereal for lunch... for dinner.  Healthy, I don't know.  But, yes, convenient.

An American with connections through the Embassy is now selling loaves of homemade bread a couple times a week.  They run only $3 each and are delicious!  For breakfast, I cut a slice of cofee/cinnamon or barley bread, with butter and the final scraping of Mom's blackberry jam.  Wow -- incredible.  It has me dreaming about those $68 toasters.

I've learned that fish is subsidized here.  You can buy fresh fish, right out of the ocean, for rockbottom prices.  But, why?  Because they don't.  This is a Muslim nation, where goat and lamb are favored.  So while grass is almost nonexistant, and the livestock is hauled across international lines, the coastal kids grow up never having once seen a stinky whole fish.

A couple nights ago, I was complimenting my American colleague on his clever little salads.  Multi-bean salads, crab salads, tuna salads.  His response: "Yea, I'm getting to be pretty good at opening these cans."