A Little Improvisation

Since we’ve been living in Africa, we have definitely learned a few things about improvising.  For me, I’d say that cooking here has definitely required me to be inventive.  A couple of years ago the stove we brought on our container slowly died, except for a couple of burners.  Anything I wanted to bake I learned to bake in our barbeque grill.  I baked cookies, cakes, pizza, biscuits, muffins…oh yeah, we cooked meat in the grill, too.  Thankfully, some very kind brothers and sisters in Christ helped us buy a new stove, for which I am still very thankful.  It has seen a lot of use!

I guess our grill was used so much that it finally rusted away.  George tried to repair it to get a little more life out of it, but about a year ago it finally just crumbled away.  I really missed not having that option any more for cooking.  Now, after moving to Iringa, we decided to see how we could improvise, so that we could bring back the taste of smoked, barbequed meat.

Luke dug a small pit and then circled it with some old bricks.  Then he packed dirt around the bricks and dampened the dirt.  We used charcoal to build a fire in the pit, and then I used my sturdiest cake cooling rack for a metal grill. Our first experiment was burgers.

It was a bit windy and we needed to trap the heat in, so..we used a big metal bowl and put it upside down over the burgers as a make-shift lid.  It worked. (Didn’t get a picture of that).

Tonight was our second time to use it.  We decided to cook the ribs from our recently butchered pig.  You can read about that adventure here.  I made some barbeque sauce which was oh, so tasty!  The ribs were absolutely delicious!  We are so happy to be back in business when it comes to barbequing.  If you want to come visit us, we’ll do our best to cook up something good. 🙂