Food

I enjoy cooking, which is good, because I spend a lot of my time doing it.
We can sometimes get packaged products here, but most of what I cook is
from scratch. Lately, I've been cooking even more things from scratch.
Some things that used to be readily available have been harder to get.
An example of this is canned tomato products. It used to be that you
could almost always get diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, etc
in our store. Lately this is not the case. We have randomly had a small
amount of tomato products, but in the 3 months we've been back from home
assignment, I'd say the times when those shelves are bare have far
outnumbered the times when we've had these things in stock. I don't
think I realized before how much our family consumes tomato products.
Luckily, we have a beautiful fruit and vegetable market 3 mornings a
week here. Knowing that canned tomato products ultimately come from
fresh tomatoes, I decided to teach myself how to make my own tomato
products. As with most things, it's not really all that HARD to make
tomato puree from scratch, it just takes time.
Bread is another thing I often make from scratch. We can get some
sandwich bread from a nearby town. I often buy this for toast and
sandwiches because, frankly, I have a really hard time slicing my bread
in nice even slices like you find in a store bought loaf of bread. The
problem is that it tastes a bit like cardboard, especially once you get
used to eating fresh homemade bread. Nevertheless, the kids don't seem to mind it for their PB&J or grilled cheese. 

Although we do have this option for sandwich bread, whenever we want rolls, bagels, hamburger buns, etc.  They have to be made from scratch.  One thing I've wanted to try to a while is making English Muffins.  As with most things from scratch, they are easier to make than I thought they would be.  In fact, I was pretty pleased with the results. I'll definitely we making these again.  The best part about making English muffins is that I didn't have to turn on the oven.  On a hot day this is a definite plus.  Here are some pictures.  They didn't have all the nooks and crannies you'd find in Thomas' English Muffins, but they were still a hit with the whole family!