Baking in the East

One of my biggest stress relievers is cooking...more specifically baking! I usually like to bake cookies, brownies, cakes, or whatever sounds good at the moment. One of the blessings of living here is that since we don't have many bread products, I have been forced to bake for necessity not just pleasure. Out of this I have become better at making all kinds of things. Flour tortillas has become quite a regular for me. And lately we have added Naan (Indian flat bread) to our diet. We try to eat a lot of salads, and Naan adds a lot of variety in that we can wrap our salads! My latest conquest has been bagels. Yes, after living here for two years and wishing we had bagels, I finally broke down and started making them myself. One of the reasons I like to bake sweets over bread (besides the obvious "chocolate" answer) is that it doesn't take as much time. Bread is SO time consuming. And my previous experience with trying to make bagels had been painstakingly long. But this time I found a true Jewish (yes, folks, these are Kosher!) recipe and it is so easy. So we are now on our second batch...and it's pretty exciting and a lot of fun. As for the kids, they were tickled pink (or blue) when I made them blueberry bagels (thank you to whomever sent the dried blueberries!). After this, who knows what I'll add!
In other truly more exciting news...
Right now, Isabella is pretending to be a penguin. Thanks to the movie March of the Penguins (and they have only seen it is French) the kids have learned a lot about a penguin's life. So Isabella has a plastic ball (her egg) between her feet and is waddling around like a penguin. Pretty funny!
Elijah has finally conquered the "potty training" thing. It's been a long time since he wet his pants last. We are so proud. And another thing we are proud about is that the vegetable hater is finally coming around. He has eaten salad a couple of times now and asked for seconds on broccoli...these are major milestones in his life, I think! He's really a great kid!
Just the other day, Lydia started clapping. It's funny because she has been ahead of the curve in a lot of things (crawling, etc.), but never even tried to clap. She is also struggling to get those top two teeth down, should be any day now!