You Gonna Eat That? Part 2

               So now that you’ve had a chance to become acquainted with some of our shopping adventures in Belize, I wanted to touch on cooking and eating in Belize—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

                I knew cooking would be its own challenge when we moved to Belize, and though I welcomed the challenge at first, I soon found that I was a bit of a “slow learner” when it came time to getting a handle on cooking and eating in Belize. 

For the first few months, it would take me anywhere between 2-5 hours to put together a meal.   So, the first thing I wanted to do was find out how other Americans had been doing it in my area, to see what their typical meal looked like and how it was prepared.  Soon after we moved to PG, I’d arranged a visit with an American missionary “supermom” who managed to grocery shop once a week and put together some amazing meals.  Unfortunately, her family was operating on a budget that was quite a bit higher than ours and many of her meal ideas had to be altered for us or wouldn’t work altogether but I did learn a lot of tips on meal planning and cutting down my time in the kitchen.  Later I met, and became good friends with, a missionary mom whose family is similar to ours: tight budget (though a bit tighter than ours), 5 young kids, and two hungry adults.  They had recently adjusted their budget due to a drop in support and the mom quickly realized that food is one area where they could control what they were spending.    This amazing mom gave me the confidence to reorganize myself and my mindset that would help change the way I “thought” my family needed to eat.   But like I said, I was a bit of a slow learner.

The real catalyst for quick change happened about 2 or 3 months after we moved to Belize, and of course it hit me in the head like a 2x4.  I had been in the kitchen cooking up some Chicken Curry (a common Belize dish).  As I stirred my skillet full of simmering chicken, the 11 year old neighbor looked on.  As she peered over the stove top, she looked at my pan and then looked up at me and said “you gonna eat that?”  I replied, “yes, we’re having this for dinner.”  And then she said, “no, you gonna eat all of that?”  That’s when I realized, panged with guilt, that I was cooking a skillet full of chicken for my family but it was an unreasonably huge amount of meat—an amount that I thought we needed.  At this point my family definitely wasn’t stuffing ourselves at meals but I also now realized that meat did not have to be such a huge part of the meal.  No one around us is eating anywhere near this much meat, not even middle to upper class Belizeans, nor is the missionary family (whose family is the same size as ours), and they also are not wasting away to nothing.  And so began my most important cooking lesson in Belize. 

Now, what had previously been enough meat to feed our family one meal (plus a lunch or two for a few people the next day) could be stretched to cover two meals by simply adding more starch (namely rice), homemade breads, and veggies.  It took some getting used to—we still felt hungry after meals, craving more meat, for a short while—but so soon enough, I got a handle on it.  Meal prep began to decrease (even more so if you include the fact that I was regularly making a meal to last two days), tummies were satisfied, and the weight we had dropped the first few months began to get put back on.  Meat was no longer the star of the show, just an important sidekick, and our plates really did appear to be a lot more balanced and healthy.  More importantly, I was cutting back on our spending and feeling a lot more in solidarity with those whom we were in community with.  Though admittedly, my family still cannot eat as much rice as a typical Belizean does at meal time—usually at least a pound per family I would guess. 

Best of all, I now was getting a better opportunity to cook real “Belizean style” and open up my family to a world a great food and tastes—some of which are still favorite dishes in our house.   (And which will be the discussion for the 3^rd and final part of this blog topic.)

Charlie helping knead the dough:  a new common activity at our house

Getting ready to cook up the string of Red Snapper that we'd bought at the market