Christmas (?) cookies!

Yes, despite the lack of "Christmas in the streets" here (or probably because of it), I decided to make some XMas cookies!! (yes, for those of you who know my (absolute lack of) kitchen skills, this does make one shrudder!) But I needed to get into the holiday spirit, and I did want something to be able to give as a gift to people (and there's just not much 'gifty' type things to buy here!!).

So, last week I noticed that the grocery store had M&M's for sale (and one gets used to the fact that if you see it and you *think* you might like it - buy it (in bulk). Because the stores don't have a regular inventory...who knows when you might see that item again). So I bought M&M's and found a cookie recipe online for M&M cookies.

Next step was to do my "baking supplies" shopping trip - which included some challenging items (baking soda), and some which needed further research to find a substitute (brown sugar (= sugar + molasses (no go) or honey (go!))!
Here are some of my baking goods - it's always neat to see how things are packaged in another country. The flour is pretty easy to pick out (looks just like how it's packaged in the US). The sugar is packaged in plastic bags (to the left of the eggs). Eggs come by the dozen or 20 - and are packaged flat and shrink wraped. The two golden packets are slabs of butter (like how we'd find Philly Cream Cheese). M&M's are easily id'd anywhere! And the box at the front is baking soda.






Yum - cookie dough! :)




My friend, Ginny, graciously offered the use of her (western) kitchen. I actually had a blast making my cookies - and they turned out really well. They spread more than I had expected and are very thin. They also were done at the lower end of the baking time range. But they're yummy, and now I have goodies to give people as holiday treats!



Here's a picture of some of the cookies - not a great picture, and they look better than this in real life! :)






While I was sharing pics of groceries, I also wanted to share some of what 'basic' groceries look like......

Milk on the right, juice in the middle and spicy ketchup on the left. The milk and juice usually come in .5 liter cartons. No skim milk here. There's a wide selection of juice - this one (as you can see from the pic) is a combination of orange, apple and carrot - and is actually really good. The ketchup is not at all like Heinz - it's a bit spicy, but a great addition to almost anything I cook.

I was really happy to find small cannisters of salt and pepper (I certainly didn't need to buy a larger supply of salt!) But I was really surprised to find them packaged as 3's - salt (white), black pepper (black) and red pepper (red). Given my lack of taste for spicy food, I don't think I'll use much of the red pepper!!

There's always lots of bread available - and it's good! But very high in calories - and many ppl here (expats) have mentioned trying to stay away from the bread to maintain their weight. But at this point, that's the least of my concerns. I eat (and love) the bread - and I've lost weight since I arrived here. Here's a picture of nan (the TJ word for bread) - with my cellphone to give a sense of scale (yep - I've already been enjoying it!). The bread also comes in 'round' loaves (rather than oblong). Bread is traditionally very important for the TJ's. The first thing they do with their monthy paycheck is buy flour (they all make their own bread). They buy flour in 50 kilo sacks (quite diff't from my baking purchases!) and one sack will not last a month.





And you never want to be w/o a good supply of potable water. Safe drinking water is sold like this (5L bottles) - I tell you hauling these from the market to my apt is my upper body workout! This is for drinking (and w/ coffee/tea) and teeth brushing. I wash my dishes, and clean myself with tap water. If I'm boiling something (pasta) I also use tap water. Tap water varies daily in terms of the color (it's never completely clear) and smell.

One interesting thing when shopping is that some of the products are from Tajikistan (and labeled in Tajik), while others are imported - mostly from Russia (and labeled in Russian) - and some from Iran (?) (and labeled in Arabic script). So when I try to figure out what something is - I first need to figure out what language it is in (which can be difficult for Russian vs. Tajik, since they both use Cyrillic). If you look closely (or blow up the picture), the bottle on the right is labeled in both Tajik (above the picture of the waterfall) and in Russian (below). You can tell by the vocabulary (water is 'Ob' in Tajik and 'voda' in Russian), and there are some letters that only appear in one of the two languages. Still, all this adds an extra level of processing required just for a quick trip to the market for staples. No wonder my brain is so tired all the time!! :)


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