Category: Experiment

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Mushroom omelette – or at least I tried!

I like eggs. They’re cheap and tasty and can be cooked in 2 minutes or less. In a pinch some people eat them raw, but I’m not that hardcore yet. And even picky kids can be coaxed into eating a fried egg or two, so it makes a good bribe.

I also like mushrooms. Not as much as eggs, but they’re supposed to be really good for you and we have a regular oyster mushroom supplier, so I eat them quite a bit. Most often as a meat substitute in a quick gravy when all my meat is frozen or I just can’t be bothered to fiddle with meat.

So you put the eggs and the mushrooms together and you get a mushroom omelette! Or omelet, if you’re American. In the past I’ve experimented with slicing the mushrooms really small and beating them into the omelette, but I didn’t quite like the taste. It still seemed a bit undercooked, and rather flavorless. So this time I had a new idea. First prepare the ingredients as usual:

Mushrooms, onions, eggs, pepper, salt, any other seasoning you wish to add. I then fried up the onions and mushrooms with the seasonings:

Just a few minutes over medium heat so the mushrooms are a little wilted and soft but the onions still have some crunch. Then I started beat the eggs with some salt and pepper and poured it into the pan:

This was where I was supposed to put the mushrooms on top of the egg and fold it over. I would have liked the middle to be slightly creamy and the outside not too dry, but I think I left the heat on too long. It still turned out relatively nice:

But it was more like a plain omelette wrapped around a mushroom filling rather than a mushroom omelette. I.e. I didn’t get that mix of egg and mushroom I wanted, each is still very much its own entity. It was still delicious though. Went great with some hot buttered toast and tea. And a very good time was had by all. If/when I get a better camera I’ll attempt this recipe again and see if I can get it just the way I like it. Until then!

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Experiment: Stewed pears

What do you do with a box of green, underripe pears? Ablotsii pears oo, not avocado pears. Ei wait, where do you even get such a box in Accra? As for that one, you’ll have to thank a generous uncle for that. If you don’t have a generous uncle, sorry oo. Or you can just buy pears. A few of them were ripe or almost ripe, and it’s likely that the rest would have ripened with time. But what if you want to eat them now? Or you just want to try your hand at stewing some fruit?

And that’s how we got Exhibit #25 in the “Chief Foodian need a new camera and much better plating skills” series. I really should start taking photos expressly for the purpose of this blog so that I show the whole process from start to finish. Most stewed pear recipes call for a little wine or other alcohol, which I imagine improves the taste, but I didn’t have any wine on hand and most of the people in my house can’t have alcohol anyway (too young/on medication) so it’s just as well.

Here’s how I did it:

  1. Wash the pears, cut in quarters, remove the cores.
  2. Put them in a small saucepan with a little water (enough to come about 1/2 way up the pears), a spoonful or two of sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon and a handful of cloves.
  3. Cover and bring to a boil.
  4. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for another 15 minutes until pears are soften. If a toothpick goes through easily, that’s enough.
  5. Remove from the heat. Serve hot or cold. You can also cover them and keep them in the fridge for up to 5 days. Stewed pears probably don’t freeze well unless you intend to blend them into smoothies or drinks.

That’s it, pretty simple. I kept mine in the fridge and had them with oats or yogurt every morning for the next couple of days. Pretty tasty and a good way to get a sweetish kick without adding sugar to the rest of the meal. You don’t even have to stew the pears with sugar if they’re sweet enough for your tastes. In that case just add spices and water and cook.

Enjoy!

 

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Experiment: Scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes

Another day, another experiment gone wrong. This is a photo I took last year, so I don’t remember exactly what I was trying to make or why, I just remember it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. I think I was aiming to make a big omelette filled with tomatoes and onions? No… Or yes… Actually I seriously don’t remember. But looking at the photo triggers memories of too dry, too-finely scrambled eggs, all boring and grainy in my mouth.

It would have been better if I had just fried the eggs separately and the veggies separately and eaten them with my rice for a tasty breakfast or light lunch. The thing is, I make Chinese-style egg and tomatoes all the time so what went wrong here? The onions? It was the onions, wasn’t it? Anyway, I’m just clearing out old photos of stuff I’ve made in the past and came across this one. I have about a 7:3 ratio of success to failure when I cook stuff, so you can expect more stuff like this in the future. See ya!

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Ordering from Shoptomydoor: my experience

Shoptomydoor is one of those services that promises to let you buy goods from the US, UK or China and receive them in Ghana. They’re based in Nigera but claim to ship to Ghana via DHL. Hmm, is that really true? What easier way to find out than by testing them with a smallish order to start with? Hence this post, where I will track my experience with Shoptomydoor from placing an order to finally receiving it in Accra.

Strictly speaking this post has nothing to do with food right now, but there are a number of tools, cookbooks and utensils I want that I can’t find in Ghana. If this experiment goes well, I’ll be ordering a lot more stuff from abroad so a lot is riding on this venture. On the other hand if it doesn’t go well, Shoptomydoor has (or claims to have) a 100% refund guarantee. Looks like I don’t have much to lose so here goes.

23rd November 2017
Created a profile on Shoptomydoor and got a warehouse address for the US, UK and China. The sign up process is very simple, takes about 5 minutes. They’ll send a verification email to your email address and a text code to your phone number, so make sure you use the correct details.

24th November 2017
Placed an order on Amazon US for 4 items with a total weight of 3 pounds or less, dimensions of around 8 x 8 x 8 inches (before repacking) and a total cost of a little over $150. The weight and dimensions will be important later on when it’s time to ship.

I ran into a bit of trouble when entering the address because Amazon kept telling me “The street name or number is invalid” when I put in 12011 Westbrae Parkway #B. If you run into this problem, the solution is to go to the USPS website (here), enter the full address Shoptomydoor gave you, copy the corrected address the USPS site gives you and put that into Amazon.com as the delivery address. In this case, it gave me:

12011 WESTBRAE PKWY # BSTMD
UNIT GH******
HOUSTON TX 77031–3814

as the correct address and Amazon accepted it. Phew!

I used a regular Visa debit card from a local bank to pay. I ordered from Amazon UK a few months ago and they accepted the payment all right but the items never arrived. Someone at Ghana Post must have nabbed it. Luckily Amazon was nice enough to refund my money. This is why I’m bothering to go through a proxy service like Shoptomydoor even though in theory Amazon ships a lot of items to Africa.

Amazon added a tax of about $11 on the order, probably a Texas thing. Just something to take into account when ordering if your budget is tight.

The next update will be around the 30th-1st or whenever my stuff starts arriving at the Shoptomydoor warehouse. Stay tuned!

26th November 2017

Got word from my bank that Amazon has charged my bank account for the price of the goods. That’s a good sign, means everything is okay on that end. I checked up on the order but it hasn’t been shipped yet. No problem, no hurry in life. Incidentally I saved 9 cedis by choosing to pay Amazon in USD (even though my account is a cedi one) and letting the bank do the conversion instead of Amazon. Amazon’s exchange rates are predatory so never pay them in local currency

27th November 2017

I got word from Amazon that they’ve shipped my stuff and it should arrive in Texas by tonight. So far this is all par for the course for Amazon and their excellent service. The true test will come once Amazon hands over the package and Shoptomydoor takes over.

Update in the evening: As expected of Amazon, they delivered it as they said they would. Their part is done. I entered the Amazon tracking ID in the Shoptomydoor website and they confirmed that they had received it.

It will take another day or two for them to put the stuff in my warehouse, they say. If they delay too long, I won’t be able to take advantage of the $20 off shipping promotion! It ends on the 30th of November so there’s still time.

29th November

Received word from Shoptomydoor yesterday that my shipment was ready, so I went ahead and paid. They got all the prices of the stuff I ordered wrong, but the weight seems about right.

The dimensions seem way larger than they should be for 5 very small items, but I will measure the box when it gets here and see. There’s an option to upload the invoice and make them correct the prices, but it takes another 1-2 days and might make me miss the Nov 30th deadline. I went ahead and paid, applying the 20Loaded4Me discount.

Yeowch! Man, that’s expensive. When I did a rough estimate before ordering my stuff, shipping via DHL came to $74.99, which I thought was plenty expensive already. Unfortunately DHL is the only option Shoptomydoor offers for Ghanaian customers. Honestly if the items weren’t already sitting in their warehouse I would be tempted to give up on the whole thing. But it’s too late now, so I paid via Visa card.

That was yesterday evening. This evening I got a message that my order had been processed successfully. They say they’ll send my order this weekend. They also gave me a tracking number to track my package. Let’s see how things go.

4th December 2017

At long last, the struggle has ended. My stuff has arrived! I followed it all the way from Shoptomydoor’s warehouse in Houston till it arrived and I signed for it:

 

It arrived a day ahead of schedule, which is great. This means the whole process from start to finish took only 11 days, which is not bad at all. If you want your stuff in a mega-rush you can have Amazon send it to you via express shipping – assuming they will even ship your stuff to Ghana. But that’s a discussion for a different day. Here’s package itself:

Although Shoptomydoor said it weighed 2.6lb, it actually weighs 3.5lb as DHL wrote on the package and as my own weighing confirmed. On the other hand, Shoptomydoor said the package was 9 x 9 x 9 inches large but it was actually 14.5 x 8 x 5 inches. I suspect it was too much work for them to measure it so they just wrote something. I entered the new figures into their shipping calculator and got $91.47 but I don’t know whether it includes Shoptomydoor’s own charges or not. Besides it’s only a $9 difference. I’m not so stingy as to begrudge a company their little profit, especially if it means I get the stuff I wanted.

All 5 items I ordered were intact and in good condition, despite the fact that the package had obviously been opened by Customs. Speaking of which, they didn’t charge me anything extra for clearing customs so I assume it’s all included in the shipping fee. I like that.

It looks like Shoptomydoor chopped up the original Amazon box, added some cardboard and refitted it into a smaller, snugger box that fit all my items exactly. They didn’t use any padding or packing peanuts, which is fine for my items but might not be so fine if your stuff is fragile or breakable. You might want to check with them first.

Overall opinions on Shoptomydoor

It’s a great service for when you desperately need something and no one is coming down from America soon. The whole process from start to finish only took 11 days and was largely automatic. I didn’t have to speak to anyone until DHL Ghana was ready to deliver. Speaking of which DHL was the most disappointing part of the experience, since in this day and age they still don’t use Google Maps. You have to do the usual “Look for the blue kiosk near the plantain seller and then turn right…” stuff I thought we had moved past. The day the kiosk owner paints it red…

Apart from that, Shoptomydoor works perfectly… if you can stomach the crazy shipping price, that is. That one it’s for you and your pocket to decide. $100 might be chump change to one person and more than a monthly salary to another. I know they have a $29 ocean freight option for Nigerian customers. If they introduced that for Ghanaian customers I would probably order from them every single month, I’m that satisfied.

As it is, this was a successful experiment that will probably not be repeated in a while. At least I know Shoptomydoor are not scammers. They provide the promised service in good time for a steep fee. And that concludes my Shoptomydoor review. From tomorrow onwards, more posts about food!