If you like coleslaw you'll love this. If not...

you probably shouldn't move to Kazakhstan.
We've been forced, by lack of access to our familiar stores, ingredients, and language of communication, to try a few new things in the kitchen. As you can imagine, this fills Scott with excitement and innovative ideas. Some of our ideas have worked out splendidly while others have, in some cases literally, crashed and burned.

One of Scott's first attempts was a grilled cheese sandwich using an unknown swiss-looking cheese from the store and some french bread looking bread from the bakery downstairs. These tasted good except that the cheese was resistant to melting and the bread sliced a little thick creating either burned edges (which I don't really mind) or barely cooked cheese. We'll do better next time.

Another of Scott's experiments was a banana pancake sans baking soda, and sugar. The result was not exactly what either one of us would call a pancake, but not without merit entirely. They ended up more like flattened banana flavored play dough with crispy edges. Don't worry, I found him some baking soda and he made me some amazing pancakes a few days later which more than made up for the strange banana pancake incident.

Lettuce is hard to come by here in Kazakhstan. Cabbage, however, is not at all hard to come by. Scott really likes cabbage, always has. We are trying to think of new ways to use cabbage and a few things have come to mind: cabbage smoothies (rejected, Scott said he already tried that once, not a good idea), cabbage in stir fry with other veggies (probably), cabbage soup (check), cabbage salads (traditionally called cole slaw, the sometimes questionable, sometimes delicious addition to nearly every outdoor summer meal. BINGO!). Inspired by a recent visit to the Fat Frog in downtown Littleton we decided to try making a vinegar based cole slaw using dried apricots instead of mangos and balsamic. Add a few tomatoes, cucumbers, and a lot of cabbage and you have yourself an amazing Kazakh constraint produced cole slaw. Give it a try.. you might like it.
We are starting to try new things we see a lot in the stores here and have stumbled upon a delicious oatmeal breakfast mix, little croissants filled with something yummy and unnamed, and three different types of buttermilk in our attempts to find non-butter milk. Why we haven't looked up the word for milk in Russian, I do not know.  We'll keep trying and also trying to find interesting ways to use buttermilk.