Happy Healthy Blogger Thursday!

As always, I have an amazing blogger for you this week. Her name is Kirsten and she blogs at The Foreign Domestic. Kirsten and I “met” when she featured one of my recipes in her From Your Kitchen to Mine project. In this project, Kirsten vowed to do 100 recipes from 100 blogs. Pretty cool, huh?

I think Kirsten does a great job on writing about the importance of balance in our lives and she is also an amazing photographer. This week she is sharing some pics and observations from a recent trip to Uganda. Hope you enjoy it!

Without further adieu,

heeerrrreee’s Kirsten!

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A FRESH TASTE
Hello!  I’m Kirsten from over at The Foreign Domestic.  I’m excited to be able to join Kimberly here at Badger Girl Learns to Cook.  I’ve had the pleasure of sampling one of her recipes, and I look forward to sampling many more in the future.

I love to travel and experience new cultures.  In fact, I’m just returning from a 10-day short term mission trip to Uganda.  My trip to Uganda was my first international mission trip and it was a life-changing experience.  I returned home with a completely new perspective about life.  I won’t go too deep or expound on that in this post, but I will share some of what we can all relate to–food.

For me, one of the fun parts of experiencing a new country is tasting a traditional meal from that country.  In Uganda, we ate a lot of rice, beans, fruit, and chapatis.  We ate other things, but these items stood out to me the most.

On our second day in Uganda, we had the opportunity to visit a local market in the city of Jinja.  The Jinja market was very large and extremely busy, but it was amazing to walk around the market and see the fresh mounds of beans, rice, flour, fish, bananas, and pineapples.

Back home, my husband and I live near a fresh fish market and a farmers market;both remain open all year.  In the past, I would be okay with purchasing vegetables from cans or frozen fish.  Actually, I still do from time to time–especially when I’m crunched for time.  But, I’ve grown to truly enjoy cooking with and eating fresh food.  I’m not
exaggerating when I say that I was heartbroken when our local farmers market shut down for 4 months for building renovations.

 

While the markets I visit in the United States may look different than the market I visited in Uganda, I appreciated what I saw, smelled, and tasted in Jinja. Nothing beats the flavors that come from fresh produce.  Now, let’s see if I can recreate some of those delicious African dishes back at home!

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Who else loves farmer’s markets?

Any favorite go-to market vendors or products?