Valley chef ready to tempt taste buds in Kabul

Until now, Tracy Hunter’s life has been a piece of cake, or actually several pieces of moist, flavorful cakes baked for anniversaries and weddings, birthdays and ribbon cuttings.

Life’s been sweet. Even the air she breathes at her Just American Desserts in Spokane Valley is powdered-sugary, creamy-buttery tasty.

Today, things are becoming a little more salty for the 43-year-old chef. Hunter is at a military facility in Washington, D.C., preparing for a two-year deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan.

She’ll still be cooking. Hunter has signed on as a civilian chef for the various government agencies occupying the former Iraqi embassy in Kabul. There, she’ll be living in a shipping container, the kind of 7-by 17-by 17-foot metal box that moves so easily from freighter to semitruck. Hers will have air conditioning.

She will still have a kitchen staff, although in Afghanistan the staff will be all male, all Muslim, and completely unused to working with, and taking orders from, a woman.

“I think it’s finally set in,” Hunter said Friday.

She was packing for a Sunday flight.

“I reached for my phone, my land line, and it was dead. I don’t have a car. I sold my car.”

She sold, for $1, her interest in her bakery to her sister and business partner of 21 years, Eva Roberts.

Hunter won’t be going it alone. Her husband, Mark Springer, works for the Army Corps of Engineers. He’s been in Afghanistan for a couple of years already. The two decided a while ago to look for Army Corps jobs overseas that might include them both. Anywhere in the world would have been fine, Hunter said, but when the Army Corps learned she could cook, the position of chef at the former Iraqi embassy in Kabul fortuitously became available.

She will also be writing home and sending pictures often. The Spokesman-Review will eventually be sharing her dispatches with readers as the journey unfolds.

Hunter is well traveled and her trips always include letters home.

Her first dispatch, submitted last week, allowed us to peer inside her bags.

“We are trained at an early age never to look through a woman’s bag. It is never spoken of. It’s a known thing we are born with,” Hunter said.

“God forbid the man who ventures into it without permission … he will have hell to pay. They dutifully bring the bag to you, holding it like it will explode in their hands, for you to reach into the bowels and retrieve what is needed.”

What is needed, for two years in Kabul is money and tampons. Hunter packed $300 in $1 bills in her bag so she wouldn’t have to worry about receiving change.

“Many Third World countries use U.S. currency as their main monies. You want to give them the correct amount,” she said.

“Even if they can make change, the money they give you back is so disgusting looking you tell them to keep it, as it looks as though it’s breeding Ebola.”

Unsure whether Kabul would have any tampons, let alone her brand, Hunter purchased 300 last week at Costco. The checkout guy must have thought she was buying for a boarding school, Hunter said.

Also making the trip: two years of hair dye, courtesy of Nelson Aitchison at Mosaic Salon Spa. There’s an Afghani barber that comes to the embassy to cut hair, but his social custom forbids him from touching women, so Hunter is going to have to draft a stylist.

“Somehow I will have to translate this to Mark,” Hunter said of her husband.

“I am electing him to be my chief hair dyer. If he gets nasty about it I will conveniently forget to tell him about the gloves.” Sometimes, you have to make your own sugar.