Lucy came back from India bearing gifts, including this shirt that her daughter picked out for me. I love it, even if I’m not exactly sure what it means.
The recipe calls for 3/4 cup of butter. Hmm, the butter here comes in 500 gram blocks. What is 3/4 of a cup? Isn’t that a stick and a 1/2? How am I supposed to figure out how much butter to add?
eyeball big block of butter. cut off estimated amount. add to mixer with 1 cup sugar. turn on mixer.
Woah! as sugar goes flying over the edges of the bowl. The super slow speed here is way faster here than at home. Sweep up sugar. Add molasses. I only need 1/4 cup, that’s about one glug from the jar, right? Better add a second glug to make up for the lost sugar.
Add one egg. Add dry ingredients to wet. I know you’re supposed to mix all the dry ingredients together first, but that dirties up an extra bowl and take an extra step so I just stop the mixer and add all the dry ingredients on top of the wet before turning it on again.
Add 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of ginger. At home I always add a full teaspoon because I like them extra gingery, but I don’t have any powdered ginger in the house. I do have plenty of fresh ginger. I bet that will work. Get out microplane and ginger root. Grate into bowl. I wonder how much ginger I should add? Taste dough. Try not to freak out about possible salmonella exposure. Needs more ginger.
Add 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 tsp ground cloves. Look through cupboards. I guess I don’t have any ground cloves in the house. Nutmeg is one of those Thanksgiving-y spices. I’ll add that instead. Grate part of a nutmeg over the mixing bowl. Hope it’s the right amount of the wrong ingredient.
Add 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Cinnamon is easy because I never have to measure it. You can never have too much cinnamon. Turn on mixer. Dodge flying flour. Hope you added enough at the beginning to make up for the loss.
Hmm. The dough looks wetter and less brown than last time. Is that because I was out of white sugar last time and subbed brown? Or because I actually added the full amount of butter instead of cutting it in half like I usually do? Oh well, no turning back now.
Roll balls of dough in sugar. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes. My oven here measures the temperature in Celcius. 220 is high so 180 should be close enough, right? Put in oven. Forget what time you started baking them. Hover in front of the oven until they are browned and the tops start cracking.
The unrestful night certainly didn’t seem to bother her any.
Getting warm by the campfire.
Finally thawing out in front of the fire with my Via and a warm baby in my lap.
People live and farm up here on top of the mountain.
A last look across the valley to the mountains we camped on before we headed down the steep slope. We made it home without incident and didn’t need the runaway vehicle ramps after all. Once again, something that was scary in my head turned out to be uneventful in real life.
It was a great camping trip and all the boys are already asking to go back. We’ll do it again, but I’m packing some extra blankets next time!
Jebal Akdar is a mountain that’s about 2 hours away from Muscat — the name translated means “Green Mountain.” At the base of the mountain there’s a police checkpoint because the drive is so steep that only 4 wheel drive vehicles are allowed. This did not make me a happy camper (literally!), but I just grabbed onto the armrest and tried to enjoy the view.
This doesn’t come close to showing how steep it was in some places. The road was beautiful and new, but it was so steep in parts that the car had a hard time finding a happy gear to be in and kept shifting back and forth. This is where Josh was wishing he had a stick shift.
69 degrees . . . woo! We haven’t seen 60s since leaving Monterey. We knew it would be cooler up on the mountain, but we were still surprised to feel the temperature change. It felt like 29 Palms in the fall — dry air, warm in the sun, cool in the shade.
All ready for camping — Calvin doesn’t have a headache, he’s just reading. He was absorbed in a new book and we had to yell at him to look up and see . . .
the donkeys. At the top of the mountain there were donkeys roaming everywhere. I thought we’d see goats, but I hadn’t expected to see wild packs of donkeys.
Eventually we pulled off the main road and started to drive even further into the middle of nowhere. On the way we passed other campers (Carter was impressed that the abaya wearing lady was helping to set up a tent). Legally you can camp anywhere in Oman. You can even pull off to the side of a highway and throw up a tent. We were heading somewhere a little further off the beaten path. We had GPS coordinates and were following friends who had camped in this particular spot before.
Once again, this was way steeper in real life than it looks in the photograph. There was one hill that Carter and I were very close to getting out and walking up instead of riding in the car.
After a lot of bumping around in the car we made it to our campsite by early afternoon. It had cooled to about 60 degrees at that elevation and Caleb was happy he had his blanket.
After the sun passed its peak, it began to cool off quickly. We pulled out sweatshirts and jackets, bundled up, and went for a hike.
After coming back down the mountain it was time to add some layers. Camille ended up with 2 pairs of leggings, two shirts and a sweatshirt and a pair of my fuzzy socks on her legs when it was time for bed. Since it was already in the low 50s before dark we knew it was going to be a chilly night.
A friend posted this much better video of the sandstorm we had the other day. I don’t know who filmed it, but he (based on the voices in the background) did a great job capturing it as it rolled into town. It also shows how it was a normal day and then at the end when the storm reaches the location where they are filming, everything goes dark, just like it did at our house.
We’re back from camping. It was fun, but cold. Yes, actually cold. We went up, up, up the mountain and while it was 90 at home, it was 60 up there — in the daytime. At night it got down into the 40s (possibly lower, I wasn’t going to go outside of the tent to check) so we were huddled in our sleeping bags trying to stay warm. I was happy I brought my Uggs.
Camping photos and video coming soon!
