Cooking in Costa Rica

There are many interesting and fun things about living in another country. Add a new baby to that mix and there's sure to be some sort of excitement every day!

Today, I'd like to share some more with you about the adventure of cooking in Costa Rica. As many of you know, I enjoy cooking quite a bit and it has been several months since I've had my own kitchen. In our last post, which you can see here, we posted some pictures of our apt. It's a pretty small kitchen and there's zero counter space, but it is mine for the time being and it is actually considered to be a good size kitchen by Tico standards (Tico = Costa Rican). All in all, it's been fun to get back into the swing of having my own kitchen.

But here's the thing. I love to cook, but I realized a couple things as I prepared for my first grocery shopping trip.

1. I usually cook with recipes and all of my cookbooks have been sent before us to Ecuador.

2. A couple days after we arrived in country Jim and I spent one evening brainstorming some ideas of meals that I could make. Of course, our minds went blank (conveniently), and most of the stuff we thought of were clearly U.S. style dishes in which meat is the main event. (For those of you that have never gone grocery shopping in Costa Rica, meat and cheese rather expensive and it is not in the local diet to have either during every meal).

3. In the midst of figuring out what types of dishes I could make, I also ran into a bit of a hiccup in realizing that our furnished apt. didn't include a stocked kitchen. Upon our arrival we had one cutting board and a cookie sheet. Therefore, the first items we bought for setting up our new little home included one pot, one pan, a baking dish, a large serving spoon, and a spatula.

So, the adventure begins. It seems that cooking and food preparation take a little bit longer here overall, and I know that I may get to a point where I feel like my one pot and one pan are not sufficient for our needs, but to be honest I'm kind of feeling up for the challenge of cooking with only the four items shown in the picture below. Also, Jim has poignantly pointed out that only having these four items is great for washing dishes (we have no dishwasher)!

Ok, so now that you've seen my tools, here are some of the dishes we've been able to make thus far....

 

I  also have a "Tasty Treats of 2012" album on my facebook page, so if you are interested in seeing this adventure continue I'll will upload additional photos here.

As they say here in Costa Rica - Buen provecho!!