Baking in Ethiopia

It's no secret that I enjoy baking a good cookie (/brownie/muffin) now and then, and I have really been missing my apron while I've been here. Last weekend I couldn't take it anymore, and I convinced Melat that we needed to bake. She got on board, but the consequence was that she had her heart set on peanut butter cookies, which would have been 4th or 5th on my list. Even so, I was excited. It took us a while to gather the ingredients, and as we did, I started getting suspicious. A lot of the most simple ingredients and food items we use in the U.S. are hard to find here or they're just a bit different. So when our cookie dough ended up with different butter, different brown sugar and different peanut butter, we found ourselves with very different cookies. In fact, they were a little more like dog biscuits than cookies. Each time we pulled out a panfull, we added something to try to make the next ones better…more butter, more sugar, etc. So we ended up with a bunch of different cookies, none of which were quite what I had in mind. I hope to try again, but I don't really think the Fiseha family was impressed with the first attempt.