At What Temperature Does...

Water Boil??? Living in Zambia, you find that things don't quite work the way they do in the States. Take a spaghetti dinner for instance. The other night, Kerri was trying to make some spaghetti and started boiling water to cook the noodles. After 20 - 30 minutes, she looked a bit perplexed. The spaghetti sauce was bubbling, the burner was on high and was working, but still no boiling.

She thought: "maybe it's the water." So, she replaced the water that she had poured from the tap with bottled drinking water. Another 20 minutes and it still wasn't working. So, in came the problem solver (me).

I decided that if it wasn't the type of water and it wasn't going to boil on the stove top, then we would just put the pot in the oven and turn the oven all the way up. Another 20 - 30 minutes and voila, still no boiling. Now we were both really confused.

Since the water was steaming, we thought it was hot enough to cook the spaghetti noodles. At least this effort was successful even though it took a little bit longer than if the water were boiling. On a side note, the next morning when Kerri was heating some water for our coffee, she put a top on the pot (the same pot we used for the spaghetti noodles). And guess what? The water boiled. Had we known that the night before, we would have been able to eat our spaghetti dinner before 10:30 pm!

Sorry for such a descriptive story on cooking spaghetti, but we just wanted to give you some insight into the small things that make living in Zambia different than living in the States.