Cooking on my own...

If I come back with nothing else from these three months (don't freak Mom, I will), I will at least know how to cook.  MB (my roommate) and I have been cooking this past week and things have gradually been improving.  She has a lot more faith in my cooking skills than I do and has put me in charge of the kitchen.  She's vegetarian, and I'm not eating meat for the month (too expensive and difficult to cook) so we're sharing meals.  There's a few things that we have to do here that we would never do in the US.
1. Sort rice.  Rice here is never long grain, and is full of gravel chunks.  To avoid breaking teeth, you have to sort the rice by hand.  It's a tedious process, and I'm pretty sure that my nightmare job would be sorting rice for a living in a restaurant.
2. Buy vegetables from a market.  A little ways from our apartment there's a giant market that's a constant mad house.  I went in alone today and was constantly shouted at with a lot of "hey mzungu, hey white lady!" calls.  But the market is amazing- there's piles of spices on tables and more lentils than you can imagine.
3. Fight ants.  Okay so I would totally have to do that in the US, but here they're so insidious!  They chewed through our bag of rice, so we didn't only have to pull out all of the gravel, but we also had to kill all of the ants.  It's super annoying.

4. Skim boiled water.  We have to boil our water here (for obvious reasons) but every time we do it develops a white, fatty skim on top.  We use our tea strainer to skim the majority off, and then hide the taste/look with juice mixed in.  I think that the skim must come from the pot (I hope) as residual cooking fat- and that’s what I choose to keep thinking.  Please don’t inform me of anything disgusting to the contrary.  It doesn’t make us sick (it’s already been boiled) but it’s still pretty gross.  

Mostly we've been eating eggplant, tomato, onions and garlic in various sauteed combinations with either pasta, potato or rice base.  Vegetables here aren't quite the same, but if you have quick and easy suggestions to vary our meals it would be much appreciated.  I'm not the best at varying meals when they're vegetarian- I'm used to using meat to switch it up.  There's okra and some other veggies in the market that I've been afraid to touch because I don't know what to do with them.

Today I got a list of women that actively participate in the Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus group that I"m working with so I'm going to be starting case study interviews very soon.  It looks like I might have over twenty case studies to work with, which would make writing the paper super easy.  I also did some typing and translation work for the org- which was difficult to say the least.  A lot of the complex stuff is left blank, awaiting someone that is actually bilingual to help me out.
Next Thursday I'll be going to a town about 45 minutes outside of Mombasa and doing a marathon of case study interviews- should be a challenge!