Cereal

Today I want to share with you a little about the joys of grocery shopping in Nicaragua. It all begins with me trying to decide what to cook for dinner. My roommates and teacher neighbors have a fabulous plan where we each cook one night of the week for everyone else. This is great for me, because cooking is not my forte. Anyway, once a week I still need to decide what to cook for my friends. I run through my ideas: BLTs, hamburgers, spaghetti. The ideas quickly end. If it were just me, I would make some yummy mac and cheese, cereal (we will come back to that later), perhaps a peanut butter and jelly. However, I need to feed something substantial to my friends, so none of those things are going to fly. I decide that I just cooked BLTs and probably should hold off for a while on those, same with the hamburgers and spaghetti. So I hit up the internet, looking for cheap and easy recipes. The internet is exploding with such things, so this usually doesn't take long. I find a delicious looking chicken something or another, then realize the stores here don't carry one or two of the ingredients. Next recipe, same story. Finally, I uncover the recipe. To the grocery store I go - only to discover that the store no longer carries that ingredient. I know it was there last week! I saw it with my own eyes! It is still hard for me to comprehend how stores can go in and out of stock so quickly. Nothing is consistent and you never know what you are going to find.

This can turn into a blessing though, those unexpected surprises. Last week I went to a Costco-like store that I only shop at a couple times of year. As I was going down the cereal aisle (my favorite aisle, which should be noted is about 1/10 the size that it is in the States) when I saw it. LIFE CEREAL. Right there on the shelf. I got my breathing under control and snatched up the double box.

Let me back up and tell you about my cereal drama last year. I love cereal. I eat it every morning. When I first moved to Nicaragua the stores had none of my favorites, so I adopted a new favorite. About three months later, that particular cereal was gone. Bummer. So I moved on to another, just for it to be gone a couple of months later. The story continues. When I arrived back this year, both of those cereals had vanished. So my excitement was doubled when I was in the store and saw Life cereal, my all time favorite. I decided that I needed to start stocking up so my problem from last year wouldn't reoccur. Over the week, at three different stores, I found some treasures and made a nice little collection in my kitchen. As along as the ants don't find them, this should be a great situation.

Off to cook dinner!
Laura