Thursday, September 11, 2008

Shopping in Montenegro



When it comes to buying fresh fruits and veggies, you can't beat the piatza! We have found every imaginable sort of produce, as well as dried figs and dates, fresh spices (mostly paprika and that dried tomato stuff you see at Italian restaurants), cheese, eggs and fish. We have a vendor who particularly seems to like us.


The prices are also amazing here. We bought a kilogram each of tomatoes and peppers, as well as four onions and three cucumbers and paid less than three Euro total!



Upstairs there are many vendors who each have their little booths which sell a variety of things. Some focus on one item such as shoes or clothes, others have pillows and curtains, and there are ones who concentrait on plastic goods, then there are ones who seem to have a little bit of everything.


I want to try and make something like chocolate chip cookies. This is more complicated than you would imagine. Here is everything but the flour, eggs and white sugar. We had to buy the baking soda and powder in individual packets. The vanilla is either a powder or a dried bean (I'm not sure what to do with that), they don't have brown sugar, so we got unrefined sugar, and no chocolate chips, but we can break chocolate bars for chips. (I know that you don't use baking powder in chocolate chip cookies, but I just wanted you to see what it looked like here-it's in the orange packets).

UPDATE: Okay, so it is a dried vanilla bean. I guess we're gonna have to get some vodka and make our own extract? What fun! I wonder just how important vanilla is to chocolate chip cookies. Do you think I could skip it and they would still taste okay?

2 comments:

mombi50 said...

I'm excited to hear that you are learning to improvise like G'ma Moyers-I've never made cookies without vanilla,but I think the dough might be kinda' flavorless.Did you make the cookies yet?How'd they turn out?

Steve, Laura, Ruth and Esther said...

We made the cookies with vanilla powder. They turned out fine, once I figured out the oven. There are two knobs for controlling it, one is temp the other is for choosing what way the oven should heat, convection (I think), just the top rack, just the bottom, both, and one other that I couldn't understand. I just tried each one until the cookies came out right.