Bountiful Sandstorms

One of the things that I've missed the most since I have been here (you know...other than the obvious things like friends and family and sonic) is thunderstorms...and rain in general I suppose...but I really miss thunderstorms. We've had one week of rain since I got here (the kind of rain that actually forms a few puddles that last more than five minutes), including one or two "torrential downpours" (the kind of downpour that we would actually call a pretty good rain back home), and then a few other random spurts of "sprinkles" (the kind of sprinkles that leave just enough proof in the dust caked on car windows to keep people from thinking you've been smoking "too much shisha*" and are telling crazy stories...I'm not kidding...about 15 minutes passed from the first few tiny drops until all signs of moisture had completely evaporated!!!) Also, the closest thing we have to thunder over here is the occasional round of fireworks that someone sets off near one of the big buildings in town (hmm...that was a very southern country-girl way to word that...too tired to "citify" it, though...), or when the dump trucks rumble past our house. :( 

So that's the rain/thunderstorm situation. For any of you who have lived anywhere in east Texas (which is where I've been for the past five and a half years), you know how much rain falls there...we get a good storm about every week or two (on average)...sometimes a whole week of storms!!!...and I dearly love storms. We are not, however, completely without storms on this side of the world. In east Texas, there is an abundance of moisture (therefore, we have rainstorms); in Dubai...there is an abundance of sand...so we have sandstorms! Since I have been here, there have been several standstorms...a few of them lasting a couple of days. Usually they bring in cooler weather with them, although one of them blew in on some very hot winds (that was dismal!). 

The closest thing I can relate a sandstorm to (at least with what I have experienced in the states), is probably a pretty thick fog. However, instead of your hair curling as soon as you step into the drenched air...you feel like you've been standing too close to the fire for a few months in the winter (that is, the air sucks the moisture right out of you! or at least that's what it feels like). Just like a thick fog, though, sandstorms create an atmosphere of solitude...landmarks are blocked out, even neighbors houses down the road are barely perceivable. (Please note: the pictures really don't do it justice.)

View of the front gate from inside the villa wall...sandy sky on the top, clear sky on the bottom.

View from our "apartment"...sandy sky on the top, clear sky on the bottom.

The wind is usually very gusty during sandstorms (which I do like), but it blows the sand EVERYWHERE (go figure...)! During my first ever sandstorm (before the sand had really taken over the sky), I had the windows open to let in the lovely wind and glorious cool air, but I kept noticing that dust was building up on things a lot faster than usual. When I went outside a while later I realized we couldn't see any of our usual skyscraper landmarks!!! Holy cow! During our second lengthy sandstorm, I really should have known better, but the cool air was just a little too tempting, so after a few hours of having the window open, our kitchen countertop yielded a pile of sand comparable to the pile on the floor! Sheesh! The most amazing sandstorm, in my opinion, was the one that blew in SUPER fast (in February I think), and we were sitting outside and got to see it coming! It looked like a couple of the skyscrapers near us were on fire with smoke billowing out the top (it was just sand blowing off their roofs!)...about the time the wind hit us (blowing things off the outside tables where we were eating), we realized what was going on...kinda. I thought it was a rain storm and got REALLY excited. Only after things had died down a bit and we drove home did I realize that there was no hint of moisture anywhere. Then when we got home and I found little piles of sand on our porch and blown in under the door did reality fully sink in. Fortunately, we haven't had any other storms blow in with quite that much vehemence!

View of our front porch...post-sandstorm on the top, freshly swept on the bottom.

 

View of back steps...post-sandstorm on the left, freshly swept on the right.

So there you have it...the storms of the desert...not as near and dear to my heart as the Texas storms I grew up with...but still quite impressive in their own right! :)

*Shisha--refers to fruit-flavored tobacco smoked in a hookah and very common here in the UAE. Please note that this is a joking reference...I have not, nor do I intend to ever try shisha. 

Bountiful Baking

Well, today was my roommate, Jerri K's, 25th birthday. To help her celebrate, I decided to make a home-made (from scratch) red velvet cake with buttercream icing (a Gifford family birthday tradition). It is this endeavor which provided the inspiration for today's blog....

I have determined that it is very, very difficult to appreciate cooking in one's native country until one attempts to cook in a non-native country! That being said, I would also like to make the disclaimer that I do realize how very fortunate I am to be in a country that hosts so many different cultures--I am sure it is EXPONENTIALLY easier to find American staples here than it would be in many places, so please do not consider any of this a complaint...just a comparison of what I've been accustomed to with what I'm growing accustomed to!

I'm sure that I have already mentioned that grocery shopping here is always an adventure because you never know what you will find (if I haven't mentioned it, my apologies...grocery shopping here is always an adventure because you never know what you will find...there, now you know*.)! Also, you never know what kinds of products you will find at the different stores...even stores in the same chain may not (and probably don't) carry all the same things. It is always somewhat of a gamble trying to find specific things that may or may not be "uncommon" items. Root beer is an excellent example of this! Jerri K once went to 3 or 4 different grocery stores looking for it, and we ended up finding at a small corner grocery store--she hopped out of the car at the red light to run into the store and get some (then walked down the street half a block to where we were rendezvousing with some friends). Anyways, I digress....

The point is that I was a bit concerned about finding all the ingredients for the cake...flour, sugar, baking soda, milk, eggs, salt...these are all easy to come by (although the sugar granules are HUGE!)...cocoa powder wasn't a problem (yay!), vanilla I had found at another grocery store a few weeks ago, stick butter we had (although the "sticks" are shaped differently than they are in America...more like blocks) which was good, because I couldn't find it today (probably wasn't looking in the right place, the organization in this store [Carrefour...one of the three grocery stores we frequent...and my least favorite by far!] makes very little sense to me), vinegar** and Crisco I had borrowed from Brooke (no idea where she got those from!), and I finally gave up on buttermilk and opted to make my own substitute (milk plus lemon juice or white vinegar). 

So, by the time I had all the ingredients together, the most difficult part was over...I could turn my music on in the kitchen and bake my merry little heart out...it was GLORIOUS!...until I actually went to bake the cakes...two 9-inch cake pans will not both fit into our oven...sigh. I ended up baking one in our oven and the other in Brooke's oven (yes, I do realize that I could have baked them one at a time, but I wasn't really prepared to devote that kind of time to this project...even though that's about what ended up happening!). Our oven also does not come with a temperature regulator...so it's really a bit of trial and error to bake anything in it. The cake in Brooke's oven (temperature regulated) turned out picture perfect...the cake in our oven...well...it tasted good, but was rather tough and dark on the bottom (like cake jerky!). However, this is not a sad story...the four-layer cake very quickly became a three-layer cake with artistic cake crumbles placed on the sides to decorate the icing! The extra icing was combined with some more red food coloring and used to decorate the top of the cake!

I'm happy to report that the cake was a success (Alex was kind enough to find some candles for us in the "gift drawer")--it was happily complemented by some Blue Bell ice cream (Jerri K is a HUGE fan and Carrefour had several flavors to choose from...including two of her favorites: Strawberry and Mint Chocolate Chip!)--and the birthday was a good one!

*So, for any of you reading these blogs, you will likely have noticed that I'm rather easily side-tracked and extremely fond of including all my asides in the narrative, however, I decided this particular side-track was just a bit too long to include above (but was, of course, certain I would forget it if I did not include it here...so here it is!)...a few examples of the "randomness" one can find at the local grocery (and by "randomness", I, of course, mean "strange things to find in America, normal things to find not in America")....

Found these a month or so ago..."Lamb Franks"...I have not yet worked up the courage to try these...don't know if I ever will...I'm just now deciding that I like lamb shawarmas and lamb kebabs...lamb franks is a bit of a stretch, I think....

Today's discovery..."Coffee Whitener"...right next to all the coffee creamers. I'm a tad curious if this actually does anything to the flavor or truly just changes the shade of the coffee. On my list of things to try someday....

**Semi-funny story: Brooke found the apple cider vinegar for me in her pantry, no problem. She then proceeded to offer me the other types of vinegar she had on hand...malt vinegar and fig vinegar. When I went back later to see if she had some white vinegar (so I could make the buttermilk), she didn't have any...! The moral of the story? You know you live in a foreign country when you can find FIG vinegar in the pantry, but not white vinegar!!!

Bountiful Surprises (2nd edition)

My apologies for not staying more consistent with these blogs. Thank you all so much for your positive feedback. Once again, I've been very busy the past few weeks...which means I now have plenty more to blog about (still struggling a bit to find sufficient time...I apologize in advance if this is not tremendously coherent). 

Alright...to properly explain my latest excuse for busy-ness, I must transport you back in time to last Thursday evening (March 3rd). Brooke had asked us (Jerri K and I) if we would accompany her to the airport to pick up a person as a favor for a friend. She sounded a bit reluctant to do it, and explained that it would just be really nice to not have to do it alone. I thought this a little strange since the person she was picking up was a female and Brooke was going to be taking her daughters with her (and she doesn't usually have much problem chatting with people she doesn't really know), but flexibility is key here (and we were getting dinner out of the deal... :) ...yeah, I'm still in college student mode!). Anyways, as we were driving to the airport, the girl called Brooke to let us know that her plane had landed and she would be sitting in the lobby waiting for us. Brooke told the girl that she was going to send two young ladies in to collect her and gave her Jerri K's description so she would know who to look for. When we got to the airport, Jerri K and I hopped out of the car and went in to look for this girl...only then realizing that we had no idea who to look for...good grief. 

I wish now that I would have had my camera with me to take a picture of what we found in that lobby.... We had looked through one mostly empty seating area and moved on to the next when I saw (from the side) a young lady sitting towards the front staring at the lobby doors. From her body language, I thought she could very well be our fare...then as we walked a little closer I realized that she looked very similar to our good friend Filicia from Beaumont...she actually looked a LOT like Filicia...enough to actually be Filicia...what were the odds?!?!? Sure enough, about that time, she turned and saw us and had just enough time to smile and stomp her foot that we had "snuck up" on her before Jerri K was squeezing her tight and repeatedly touching her face to be sure she was really there!!! A few tears were shed...a few more threatened...and after about 5 minutes of hugging and pinching and face-touching, we determined that we did indeed have a huge blessing standing in front of us...one we would enjoy for an entire week! :)

When we finally escorted her out to the car, Brooke was absolutely beaming and when I turned to the little girls (Bella and Alex) in the back seat to explain who this "new girl" was, they were both mirroring their mother's face...they'd been in on it, too!!! (At least for a few hours!!!). I found out later that day that Leslie and the boys (and I'm sure John, too) had known about it for several days as well!!! We live with a bunch of REALLY good secret-keepers!!! I couldn't believe it! (I'm definitely going to be the weak link around here next Christmas...I can tell already!)

Anyways, we had a wonderful week with Ms. Filicia...she was such a huge encouragement to us both (and we did lots of "touristy" things with her...so those will be some of the blog subjects later this week, hopefully).

Here's a picture of Jerri K and Filicia with one of our new friends in Dubai...this was taken at Safa Park (one of the greenest places I've seen in Dubai) and shows a lovely portion of the Dubai skyline (that's the Burj Khalifa on the far left...the tallest building in the world!...and we went up to the 124th floor!!!...but more about that later....)

P.S. I told you I'd keep you updated on interesting drinks/foods I've tried...I've discovered some relatively inexpensive juices that I've been experimenting with. So far...Strawberry is good, Mango is good, (strawberry and mango mixed is good), Orange Carrot juice is good (as in, the fruit orange, not the color), Guava juice is not so good (unless it's mixed with the orange carrot and some lemonade...then it's not too bad...just adds some texture to the drink!). Also, the Fruit punch I tried was pretty good...but Mango and Strawberry (and of course, Red Orange) are my favorites. :)