We have been able to find pretty much everything we desire here. Some things are harder to find than others, but it’s usually available somewhere. As a last resort, there’s a Walmart about 20 miles away, and they generally have anything that we can’t find in the local markets.

Today we’re having a bunch of guests over and Maricela decided, “Let’s make ginger molasses cookies,” which is one of our favorites to make back at home. We searched high and low for the ingredients, but couldn’t find molasses, not even at Walmart.

We decided to carry on without the missing ingredient. Instead, we made sure to increase the amount of the other spices we were using, especially the ginger. Plus, we added some honey in place of the molasses, anticipating that the similarity in consistency would at least be a reasonable substitute for the moisture content and “stickiness” of the molasses.

The guests haven’t arrived yet, but it looks like our experiment was a success. Obviously they’re not the same without molasses, but they turned out really good!