I'll ask Mary

My next door neighbor is moving away today. I'm ready to bawl. If you've been following this closely you might be wondering "How did you get so close to someone when you only moved there 5 months ago?"

I first met Mary on an extended visit to Suva in 2013. Every morning we'd walk our kids down the schoolbus and we'd come back to a cup of coffee. At the time she was relatively new to Fiji, but she was already a font of information!

A year and change passed in a blur and soon my husband and I were deciding to make our time in the Pacific permanent. Not a week went by that I wasn't tweeting or emailing or facebooking Mary and asking for advice before my move from the Big Apple.

Now I've been here 5 months and everyone comments on how well I've settled in. Mary, Thank you.

So, in a nutshell, here's the highlights of the things I remember asking Mary how to do -- and also things she told me not to do! This is going to be a very incomplete list, but I promise to come back and add to it as a pearl of her wisdom bubbles out of the wrinkles in this blob of gray matter of mine.

Mary let me know

• to take every skin puncture, burn, and abrasion seriously. Clean it well, preferably with an antiseptic disinfectant like Dettol, Fiji is in the tropics, things get infected and can go septic faster than you ever imagined. 
• if something is weird with your skin, it's fungus. Get some Selsun Gold. 
• to use insect repellent religiously. Not religious? Use it the way you use your phone - from the minute you get up to the minute you go to sleep. 
• to take care of your feet. You probably won't wear closed toe shoes as often (or ever!) here, your chances of cutting, puncturing, twisting, blistering and just plain wearing out your feet are higher here. Also pedicures are awesome, get them frequently. Mary loves Beauty Mantra, but I haven't found a favorite place here.  
• regardless of what your alcoholic drink of choice is, when you go to an event, especially one for work, drink beer. It's hot here, you're sweating more than you realize, and wine or mixed drinks will hit you harder than you expect. Drink beer so your thirst is at least partially quenched and you don't end up dancing on the bar. 
• that if there's something you absolutely can't live without in the States then you'd better bring a year's supply with you when you move because there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get it here. 
• when you see something that you used in the states/UK that you haven't seen before in the store, buy it. You never know when it will show up in the store again.
• Stumped? Search the Suva Expats facebook group. If still no answer, post your question.
• that when you go to resort, regardless of how many stars it has, you still want some essentials: Line for anchoring kayaks, Snacks,  Mosquito coils, Matches, Bug repellent, Bug killer, Bite salve, Antihistimines, Sun screen, Shampoo, Hairbrush, Snorkel stuff, First aid kit including antiseptic, Water/cups, Games, Torch, Earplugs, Camera/cable, Phone charger, Mask demister  
• that even if you don't know somebody, go to an expats group meeting. Chances are you do know somebody, and even if you don't one month expat time is like one year of knowing a person anywhere else (I think the expat time quote might actually be from another expat) 

Here are some of the local expat groups. I've listed them in the order within the month that they meet:

• International Women's Association First Monday of the month
• University Expat Partners and Spouses Second Tuesday of the month (HR has the contact info) 
• Corona Fiji Third Wednesday of the month
• Asian Ladies Group Third Thursday of the month
• American Women's Association Last Thursday of the month  

Other Suva expats' blogs can be helpful!

• Fiji Diaries Mary's blog
• From Seattle to Suva Hypatia's blog
• Sweet European Dreams An US Army wife's blog 
• http://passintimeinfiji.blogspot.com Kates Blog
  

I'll update this as I get a chance, but I have to go now. I've already had my wifi completely quit and two video calls that I had to take on my phone. At least the water didn't go out as it did yesterday. Or the electricity... that happened way too frequently this past month. 

Banana Bread without the bananas.... and without the flour

First of all I want to point out that I'm not the only person in my kitchen. The kid is a great cook and I love what he comes up with!

This may or may not be the real reason why I taught my son to cook pic.twitter.com/rHl85QdCX6
— Amerika (@amerikag) February 14, 2015

But the result of so many cooks in the kitchen is that sometimes I start making a recipe with kitchen staples only to find out that those staples aren't in the kitchen....

Today was one of those times.

Here's my usual Banana Muffin recipe:

Banana Crumb Muffins

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/2 cups normal flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 bananas, mashed
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted

Crumb Topping
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons normal flour
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon frozen butter, grated (keep it in the freezer until you need it)

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly grease a cupcake pan.
2. In a large bowl, mix together 1 1/2 cups flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, beat together bananas, sugar, egg and melted butter. Stir the banana mixture into the flour mixture just until moistened. Spoon batter into prepared cupcake pan.
3. In a small bowl, mix together brown sugar, 2 tablespoons flour and cinnamon. Grate frozen butter into the mixture. It should resemble coarse cornmeal. Sprinkle topping over muffins.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 18 to 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of a muffin comes out clean.

It's pretty delicious, but not as easy to make when you don't have those key ingredients....

So I adapted:

Pumpkin Whole Wheat Muffins

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/2 cups atta flour (finely ground whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup cooked pumpkin
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
60 grams butter
25 grams oil

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly grease a cupcake pan.
2. In a large bowl, mix together 1 1/2 cups atta, baking soda, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, beat together pumpkin, sugar, egg and melted butter. Stir the pumpkin mixture into the flour mixture just until moistened. Spoon batter into prepared pan.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 18 to 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of a muffin comes out clean.

They turned out delicious and I took them over to a new expat's house. Her kids loved them.

The Big Metal Bowl

I have a son that's a picky eater. It makes me crazy, but at the same time, I can remember turning my nose up at foods. One of them was avocados. They were just so ... so green! I grew up in South Texas and for parties my parents would always make a giant bowl of guacamole. And they'd always encourage me to try some. But I kept my distance for years and years and then...

I got married.

Now, when you're married, you really try to make your spouse happy, even if sometimes you know down to your boots that you don't like something.

You can see what's coming, can't you?

Yeah, that's right. My new partner in crime made guacamole. Not only did he make guacamole, he used some of our oh so tiny paycheck to buy riotously expensive avocados. With love he chopped the tomatoes, added extra cilantro just like I like it, and then proudly presented it in a miniscule bowl with a side of tortilla chips.

Well, even if my pride wasn't at stake, we'd spent good money on that bowl of guacamole and by golly I was going to try it. I mean, how bad could it be?

I loved it. I absolutely totally and with every fiber of my being loved it. The creaminess of the avocados, the tang of the lime, the gentle bite of the red onions. What was this food of the gods and why had I never tried it?!

*crickets*

*clears throat*

I suddenly remembered all the parties my parents had growing up. I remembered that giant bowl of guacamole that they made and offered every time. In that moment I wanted to cry.

Fast forward twenty years (yes, we've been married that long) to our new home in Fiji. In case you're wondering, I moved here in October. I'm a newbie.

A friend of mine was giving me a ride and asked if I minded stopping by her house on the way. No problem! While she ran inside I walked around her yard. Look! The avocados grow on trees here!

She gave me a couple of avocados and I excitedly brought them home. I've been buying a couple at a time from the market, but this was the first time I'd had avocados fresh from the tree I saw them growing on. 

I tucked the avocados into a paper bag at home and then went to get dinner started. I opened the fridge and found...

We really need to be able to insert sound effects into blogs. I need a minor chord here to be followed by a choir singing Hallelujah! No, I'm not making this up. 

I opened the fridge to find a bowl as big as the one I remembered from childhood filled with freshly made guacamole. 

Isn't that a thing of beauty? 

Now if I can just get my son to try it. 

Dye? I earned this gray

From time to time I've considered dying the tips of my hair blue. 

I saw a woman at World Makerfaire who totally ROCKED a rainbow of colors, I admit I was tempted to see what the kaleidescope of color that I saw would look like on me. 

But I've never been tempted to dye my hair to cover my gray. Here's what I look like. Or rather, what I looked like in the last pic I can find of me that shows my gray. Turns out that even though those white strands look incredibly bright in my mirror, apparently they're mostly invisible to my camera! 

Amerika Gray

Why don't I just grin and dye it? I mean, I get my eyebrows threaded, waxed, tweezed, whatever. I love pedicures and a freshly painted tootsies  

Well, the year I turned 30 I was lucky enough to go to a women's retreat. Now I'm pretty hard to miss in a crowd, I'm the first to sign up for an adventure, I'm also happy to mentor others. What I didn't realize is that I was - I AM - really a young'un. At the retreat I met women from 17-70 from all walks of life. I met women with PhDs and women who had never graduated from high school. I met women who had built their own businesses and women who had built their own homes (As in CUT THE TREES DOWN built their own homes)

One of the women that I met and listened to over the course of the retreat related her story of transitioning out of her corporate lifestyle and into a more simple way of living. I remember her telling a group of us about how much she hated having her hair dyed. She hated everything about it - she hated sitting in the chair when she could be someplace else more productive. She hated the chemicals that were on her skin and hair. She hated the cost of the process and most of all she hated that it had to be repeated on a regular basis.

Now, not all that long before that retreat I'd been looking in the mirror and seen a gray hair. I'd looked at in in shock, pulled it, and then ran my fingers through my hair AND FOUND ANOTHER! I pulled that one too and stumbled out into the living room.

"I have a GRAY HAIR!" I announced to my husband.

He calmly looked at me.

"Oh, I thought you knew. You have lots of them."

Clearly his reaction did not correlate to my level of surprise.

Months went by, I accrued additonal gray hairs, but I never really got to a tipping point. Then, after the retreat, I realized I was perfectly ok with my silver. After all, I earned it.

Update 5 March 2105  - Saw this on facebook, had to share

Watching clothes dry

There's a chipmunk that just ran across the roof. I snuck up here to warm up in the Indian winter sun while our clothes dry. I have traffic noise on my right and the smell of lentils and other yummies cooking downstairs.

And I'm homesick. 

Well, not really homesick, because I'm still not sure where home really is right now, but definitely have that "I wanna be back" feeling and really not looking forward to schlepping big heavy bags and being folded into origami for a crazy long flight back. 

I'm tired. I'm tired of packing and unpacking our house and of putting myself out there to find new friends. I'm tired of not knowing where the things I want are in the grocery store, sometimes not even knowing if the things I want are in the country much less the grocery store. 

I miss my family. They're scattered all over,  so even if I stop moving or move closer to one that doesn't bring the rest of them any closer. 

Sometimes there's a lot to be said for putting down roots. 

In another 5 minutes I'll go downstairs and be utterly captivated by something again. This momentary sigh will be eclipsed by a squeal of excitement. But sometimes in the depth of the night, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes I wish my life was a little less interesting.

Goodbye 2014

“I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasn't going to change unless I made it change.” 
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

As we head into 2015 I invite you to join me in our own Happiness Project. We're using the book by Gretchen Rubin as a guide, but really, this is our project, the happiness that you and I and the other members of the group create for ourselves. It's a closed group, but if you'd like an invite, let me know in the comments below.

In prepping for this, I updated my google calendar based menu. It's 20 days of meal prompts loosely based around the following themes:

• meatless Monday 
• Taco Tuesday aka international cuisine 
• Wacky Wednesday aka new recipes 
• Thrifty Thursday aka leftovers 
• Friendly Fridays - invite people over or go out 
• Saturday is Noodle Night (any ideas for something alliterative with Pasta? Yeah, me either) 
• Sunday is Homemade Pizza Night

We do hot breakfasts most days of the school year around here, but at Oh Dark Thirty it can be hard for me to think of what to make. I've found it helps tremendously if I can prep a little the night before and then just fry the eggs or bake or present the muffins the next morning. 

BTW, there's a good read on meal planning strategies at http://goodcheapeats.com/2012/09/meal-planning-101-create-a-formula-for-the-weeks-meal-plan/

So, goodbye 2014. You were an interesting year, I said final goodbyes to too many people near and dear to my heart and "Until We Meet Again" to pretty much everyone else I knew in the world. On the plus side I spent October, November, and December meeting old friends for the very first time. 

Variations... aka life as usual in Suva

A couple days back I posted a recipe for Fiji Rum PawPaw Cake. And then I somehow came home from the market with a kilo of fresh bananas only to see that my neighbor had dropped off another kilo of bananas from her tree.

What to do with 5 pounds of bananas?!

Well, things have been a little crazy here this last week, so I threw all the insanity in a mixing bowl and came up with (drum roll please)

Fijian Banana Bread with Cognac Raisins 

(made in a bundt cake pan so I don't stress about the middle not cooking)

Fruit topping
1 cup dried fruit (get the box of mixed fruit at New World. Every time I get one it's a different mix)

Mixed Fruit from New World Grocery in Damodar City

.5 cup cognac (find the glass that your husband poured and then forgot because we had to pick the kid up from a program but is too good to pour out)

Add directly to the prepared bundt cake pan:
4 tablespoons butter
.75 cup brown sugar

Cake Mix
2 cups mashed bananas
2 tablespoons lime juice (see lime is pretty much all I buy. You might have lemons, but lemons don't go as well with tequila, so I don't usually buy them)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
5 teaspoons baking powder
.75 cup butter, diced
4 eggs
.5 cup coconut cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon lime zest (lemon, lime, orange, whatever you've got on hand)
1 cup dessicated coconut

I skip this next part, not sure why I keep leaving it on the recipe, but hey, here you go:
Boozy Glaze
.5 cup butter, melted
1 cup granulated sugar
.5 cup liquor

Directions

Two tanks, in case one runs out while you're baking a cake. All you do is turn the switch to the full tank What, they're both empty? You don't say! 

Preheat your oven to 325°F/165°C. Or, if your oven isn't warming up fast enough, check to see if you need to switch to the other Fiji Gas cylinder. If both cylinders are empty, go get a new Fiji gas cylinder. But before you leave, soak the mixed dried fruit in the cognac. It shoudl soak for at least half an hour... but overnight...or a week is still ok. You know what, you need liquor soaked fruit. Just get a cup of dried fruit and soak it in your favorite rum or vodka or brandy. Just do it. We'll find a use for it down the road.

Oven warming up? Good. Now spray a large 12 cup bundt pan with cooking spray and add 4 tbs melted butter and .75 cup brown sugar to the bottom of the prepared pan. Add your cognac/fruit mixture to the sugar mixture in the bottom of the cake pan.

In a bowl, mash the bananas with the lime juice.

Cream your sugar and butter together, add your eggs one at a time, the coconut cream, vanilla and mashed bananas/lime juice. Slowly add in the dry ingredients, lime zest, and coconut, occasionally scraping the bowl, until well mixed. Add in anything you forgot. What? You didn't forget anything? Wow, you're reading the wrong blog. It's ok, we can still be friends, but no banana bread for you.

Pour the batter into the bundt pan and bake in a preheated oven at 325°F/165°C for 1 hour. Check for doneness with a wooden pick after 60 minutes. Remove from oven and invert onto a serving dish. You might need to tap the bundt pan to loosen the sugar sauce and marinated fruit from the bottom now top of the pan. Or, if you're going to add the boozy glaze go to the next step.

Boozy Glaze: Let cake cool for at least 10 minutes. In a small pan on the stove, mix butter, brown sugar and cognac and bring just to a boil. Spoon the glaze onto the cake until it is completely absorbed. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit overnight. Before turning out the cake onto a serving platter, warm it in a 325°F/165°C oven for 10 minutes to loosen the sugar mixture at the bottom of the pan. The cake will be very delicate.

Hey look, I got a picture this time.

Amerika's Fijian Banana Cake with Cognac Soaked Raisins

So, all's well that ends well. And this is kind of my story so far in Suva. It's not quite what I expected, there are unexpected stops and detours, but it's pretty good, especially with an occasional cup of booze thrown in.

3 December Update: Hub took the cake to a friend's house after work last night  (I had Fijian class). It didn't come back. I guess I'll never know how it turned out  (but I bet it was awesome)