Brands of Foods and Glad We’re Here

 

Sunday afternoons are spent skyping and calling our kids.  And thinking what to blog.  It is good we have to think of what may be of interest to you.

We thought today we would give you an idea of some of the brands of foods that are available to us. (Yes, we are out of imagination today for a better blog topic!)  Since we haven’t traveled much yet, except to go to church and the airport, we don’t have much yet to share showing more of the culture.  Our days at the office are long, and we are encouraged not to go out after dark, for safety reasons.  The mosquitos and the traffic.  Year round daylight is 6 to 6, so it is dusk many nights before we leave the office.  You might appreciate your food prices after reading this!

The orange juice is 1 liter ($2.35) and comes in a wax carton from South Africa.  Notice it is 100% juice blend not 100% Orange juice. It is the preferred Orange Juice.  The milk is also 1 Liter ($1.50) is heated treated so it doesn’t need to be refrigerated until after it is opened. It comes France.  Not bad tasting at all.

The “Happy Cow” cheese slices are from Austria. This package of 24 slices runs $6.25.  The eggs are provided locally by an employee at the office building and we pay $1.30 for nine eggs.  That is a lot cheaper than they are in the stores.  The picture on the right shows brands of foods. Most are manufactured in South Africa.  The peanut butter comes from China.  It is actually very good. It is about 30 oz and costs $5.75. The thought does enter one’s mind about how safe things are to eat.  The butter is 200g (less than .5 lb) and comes from France.  It runs $5.50 for the package.

Cereal and chips are from South Africa, the crackers from  the UK and flour (package on the right) is from the UAE. The canned vegetables are mostly from South Africa and run about 3 times what you would expect to pay in the States. The tomato paste is pretty reasonable – $.20, .but look at the size of it, 2.5 oz.

 

About the only things from Ghana that we’ve shown are the salt and the spaghetti noodles.  The raman noodles have 6 languages (like most packaging does here) but the most predominant one looks arabic, so maybe that is where it is made.  Those pouches of Knorr pasta mixes are as close as we can come to having “fast food” other than soup.  They are a little over $3 each.

We do spend a bit of our free time figuring out what to eat.  And how to cook it, and where to buy it, and if we are adventurous enough to give something else new a try.  It is kind of fun, and usually quite edible.  Someone left a Presto brand microwave popcorn maker in the apartment.  It really works well.  That’s why you see the bag of popcorn.

Saturday morning I decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Using a recipe of my mother’s that I remembered from 35 years ago I made them from scratch.  I used some biscuit flour that had a rising agent because I didn’t have any baking soda and then I added some additional flour, eggs, baking powder, salt and oil.  It was an experiment that actually went very well. They looked like pancakes and tasted like pancakes.  Success!  Then we found a box of pancake mix Sunday afternoon.  Oh well….

And this is our dishwasher!  Not a bad job if there was ever hot water.  Most often hot comes out warm. So we heat water on the stove.  But from last Sunday till Friday night we had no hot water at all.  And for most of Friday they shut off all the apartment water to try to fix the problem.  About then your are just glad to have any water at all.  We have it so nice here, compared to missionaries who are really out “in the bush” as it is called.  We are happy to be here serving.  Thank you for your love and prayers and support.  You are in our prayers!