2.11.2011

tamarind

Thought I'd share a little interesting discovery. 

My favorite dish right now is Pad Thai.  I could eat it every day.  Seriously.  So upon learning there was no Thai restaurant in Abuja, I ate a ton of it to hopefully get my fill before the move.  No such luck.  We bought a ton of the ingredients for it and they will arrive with our HHE - eventually.

In the meantime, we've managed to find the ingredients around town and tonight Joey is making me Pad Thai.  So excited!  (I have an awesome husband.)  But the one ingredient we had a hard time finding, both here and in DC, was tamarind paste.  So first I started searching substitutes (I read lime juice works alright), then I decided just to see what it looked like.  Here's the picture from Wikipedia:


These trees grow everywhere here!  The pods fall all over the ground!  From Wikipedia: "Tamarindus indica is indigenous to tropical Africa, particularly where it continues to grow wild in Sudan; it is also cultivated in Cameroon, Nigeria and Tanzania."  Who knew?

The other, almost as exciting, discovery is that a Thai restaurant is opening next week.  I'm not getting my hopes up just yet, but hey, we'll see.

going to the chapel


Our appearance at the baptism on Sunday garnered us an invitation to a Nigerian wedding.  Which means I have to get a new dress.  Ordinarily a wedding invitation sparks the following conversation:

Melissa: “I need to get a new dress for that wedding.”

Joey: “You have thirty-eight dresses in your closet.  You do not need a new dress.”

Melissa: “No, this is an evening garden-party wedding and absolutely none of my dresses are evening garden-party appropriate.  I will look ridiculous if I do not get this $$$.$$ dress.  And, by the way, I certainly don’t have any evening garden-party shoes.”

Joey huffs and puffs and about blows the house down when he gets the bill but that’s beside the point.  The point is that right on this wedding invitation it says I need a new dress.   No argument.  And guess who else is getting a new outfit for the wedding?  The same person who calls weddings “dog and pony shows.” (Do you think our destination wedding had anything to do with that?  Not that our wedding was any less a “dog and pony show” but for its size.)  So in keeping with his theory, Nigerian weddings take it to a whole other level.  You don’t discern the guests by whether they sit on the bride’s side or the groom’s side in the church; you discern the guests by whether they’re wearing the bride’s color or the groom’s color.  And since we were invited by the bride, our color is wine.    Joey said the bride told him it would be okay if only I wore wine and he just wore a matching tie, but he told her he’d go all out, so this weekend we’re off to find some wine-colored fabric and have our outfits made. 

I know I don’t have any wine colored shoes.