Welcome to Bundu Baking

Hello, Welcome to Bundu Baking Blog! I am so glad you are checking out my blog. I am Tabitha Ramos.

Bundu is the Nyanja word for bush and I grew up in the bush of Zambia and now live with my husband and kids in the bush of Alaska. I consider myself a bush girl and learned most of my bush cooking by helping my Mum. She is a wonderful cook and if I can be any percentage of the cook she is, I will be happy. Since my Mum still lives in Zambia and I live on the complete opposite side of the world in Alaska, I have had to learn to cook on my own. I have not burned down the kitchen...yet. And we have not starved... yet. I really love to cook and even though cooking from scratch is a LOT of work, I find it relaxing to be in the kitchen.

We live in a small village of about 500 people in the interior of Alaska called Galena. Our village is only accessible by plane (or boat in the summer). We are closer to the Arctic circle than we are to the nearest road! Getting supplies here is quite difficult with out a lot of planning. We live a subsistence life as much as possible, meaning we hunt and fish for our meat. But we do a yearly barge shopping trip in the summer when the barge runs down river to our village. So every year I check our pantry, make a list and we fly to town and buy all the food supplies we will need to make it through winter till next summer. Thankfully growing up in Zambia prepared me for that and making a list of how many rolls of toilet paper, spaghetti, and every other item you will need for the next year was sort of easy for me to adjust to. But running to the store for something that I don't have on hand doesn't work here.  So I adjust recipes and have gotten rid of recipes that WON'T work out here. I have a big binder of my recipes that work with ingredients that I have on hand. Everything I cook is from scratch. All my breads, tortillas, main dishes, desserts and any thing you can think of is all from scratch. I do stock up on soups and stuff  like can beans and corn and vegetables since growing a garden when it is -70 degrees outside is NOT an option. Fresh fruit and veggies, milk, sour cream and butter are hard to come by out here and getting them here is a challenge in itself. When we fly out for vacation or work trips, we will mail back all our clothes and fill our luggage with all the fresh stuff we need. Life is challenging out in the bush but I LOVE IT!

I love cooking and I hope that these recipes can help you cook yummy meals from scratch. You won't find canned biscuits being used here... unless I have the recipe for canned biscuit, which I DO! I will share later. This blog is dedicated to cooking from scratch and I hope you enjoy cooking and making these recipes. They are a collection from all over the world, from many different ladies and wonderful cooks.  They all cooked from scratch. I will try to blog about the ladies I do know, so you can get to know them too. I also got a lot of recipes from Pinterest and if they work in Galena, I kept them! I hope these all can work for you. I will try to post a recipe everyday, but with homeschooling my kids and living life it might not happen. But I will try my very very hardest! 

Oh and beef is hard to come by out here so if you see any recipe that I use "beef" I didn't.... I use moose or Caribou or any other game meat I have.

Happy Cooking!