South African rusks, Mexican Oaxaca (wä-hä'-ka) potato soup and lots of reading!

Wow! What a fast week! It almost seems a blur! 

Our little car was in desperate need of a service and so we got the details of this reasonable 'Oil change' business down the road! It was our little Dodge's first Bakkes service:

We are so grateful that besides getting the spark plugs replaced and something else minor replaced (the cap for something I can't remember now), everything seems to be in order. I especially enjoyed the way that Patrick's auto repair has a real car backseat in the place of a couch in the waiting room!

Now, I am sure that some of you are wondering what it is like to have a husband in seminary. Well, I have taken a few 'snapshots' of his life at home whilst at TMS so far:

Here we have him seeking refuge from my noisy exercise routine:

Then a little later: (See how he has grown in utilizing the space effectively!)

Then a little later, a change of scenery often helps to get the brain ticking:

And even later yet:

In the meantime,  I have been experimenting in the kitchen! Here we have our first batch of South African rusks: (Our oven is a little warmer than I am used to and some may call them burnt, but I think that the more optimistic view would be that of 'slightly' toasty rusks.) I was going to share some with our landlords but now I may wait til the second batch! :)

Our landlord Pat is a school teacher in the LA inner city and she gets given free food parcels every second week and has been bringing some of the food for us too. She brought us apples, potatoes and carrots this last week. So considering our fresh produce and since we are in Los Angeles with lots of fun Mexican food in the stores, I thought I would try out a Mexican recipe. 

Lenore gave us this cookbook recently and it has been helpful to have a book with ounces and Fahrenheit instead of grams and Celsius!

So, I went searching for a recipe and found one called Oaxaca (pronounced wä-hä'-ka) potato soup and we really enjoyed it. Here is a link to it online if you would like to try it out: http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com/recipes_archive.html#17

And here is the soup served with tortilla chips and a dash of sour cream...(don't worry, the soup is made out of lots of veggies so the meal is not as unhealthy as it looks!)

We have the best landlords! Pat has her own vegetable garden and has been bringing us homegrown cherry tomatoes weekly: (I have never seen the yellow tomatoes before but Izak has...) The shape makes me miss butternut, I haven't found any here yet.

Speaking about gifts, we have also recently blessed with: 

A Belgium waffle maker! (Izak's FAVOURITE and it works really well, we tested it to make sure!)

Then, I haven't had a phone for the last while because they don't really do SIM cards here, from what we can tell. If you do a prepaid SIM card, you end up paying for receiving calls and making them and it works out quite expensive and the call quality is not great. So we have only had one phone between the two of us. On Sunday, Bob and Lenore gave us a contract phone to use! The quality of the calls is a great deal better and we are grateful!

We still need to figure out how to add text messages to it or if we will just keep using the other phone for text messages...decisions! decisions!

This is the phone:

Overall, we are getting more used to things here and our little home is starting to feel more and more homey! One of my favourites is our fridge: (We have our crazy schedule on it as well as some of the Grace missionaries to remind us to pray for them.)

Note the multi-coloured schedule... Eek! It's a full week. (It's a good experience though.)

We are busy doing our second test week of Hebrew vocabulary. It's been good but challenging to retain the previous weeks vocab... Note the new flash cards:

Here is the close up of one of our workbook pages, so that you can read the word in transliteration form as well as the English translation and also the original Hebrew:

We are so encouraged by all your feedback! Keep it coming! You could even post us a picture if you like so that we could put you up on the fridge! (As you can see there is some more space.)