Un récapitulatif fin d’un déjeuner mal documentées

So I learned something very important the night before our big Greek lunch: its very easy to forget that you promised to take pictures when you’re wrapped up in converting your cups of yogurt to grams.  So, unfortunately, the only picture I managed to remember was a picture of the table full of food before everyone dug in.

The Spread

Looks pretty delicious, right?  From the bottom to the top we have: Macedonian salad, lemon and dill chicken and rice (Jon and I pretty much made that one up, and it turned out great!), our beautiful tzatziki sauce which is next to Neelima’s dish, a traditional Indian chickpea dish, and finally, enough bread and pita to feed an arm.  I unfortunately failed to remember to put our dessert in this picture, but we had a fruit and nut tart of some sort that was delicious, and a chocolate hazelnut tart of some sort that was simply divine.

Well, thankfully, everyone loved it.  The lunch went off without a hitch.  Everyone had a great time, and even stuck around for nearly four hours just talking about all sorts of stuff.  When your table has two people from the United States, two people from Saudi Arabia, one person from Mexico, one person from India, and one person from Russia, the subjects vary greatly from alcohol, politics, movies, and food.  When everyone parted, Jon and I took a very well deserved nap, and the remainder of the evening consisted of taxes (I’m getting nine whole dollars back!) and filling out my FAFSA, which went off a lot better this year than last.  Thank goodness.

Today after class, since the weather was beautiful, Jon and I walked back down to the marina so he could jump around on all the rocks and the break water.  Needless to say, he had way to much fun reliving a little bit of his childhood.  It was fun and scary to watch him.  I guess I’m just not the dare devil I used to be.  So here are some pictures from that.

Jon and I before he started jumping around

Climbing

And jumping

And giving me funny looks

And resting

And strechting-ish.

As for the evening, it was fairly relaxed, considering we spent about 5 hours of our afternoon just walking around.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to brave the slight chill in the air for some tanning time on the beach.  I’m in desperate need of some color.  Carnival parades continue tomorrow as well, so hopefully the weather holds up for us to finally go see one.

Until next time, bonne nuit!

Nous prévoyons un repas grec

In my previous post, I mentioned a lunch that Jon and I had with a few classmates of ours, and that this week we’d be hosting one of our own.  After pondering on a cuisine type for a day or so, we landed on Greek.  Obviously, Jon and I are not Greek, but we’re firm believers in the fact that there is very little that one could call “American Food”, with the exception of soul food, which would involve frying chicken, and I don’t want to try that for the first time for a bunch of new friends.  So therefore opted for one of our favorites.  Our choice may have been swayed slightly by the fact that we’ve been craving tzatziki sauce basically since we got here, but that is neither here nor there.

However, planning a meal for people of many different cultural and religious backgrounds could be a little difficult.  For instance, Khalid and Doha are both from Saudi Arabia, and Muslim, so pork is not an option.  Fine by me, its neither my favorite nor Jon’s.  But Neelima is from India, so Hindu, and cannot eat beef.  So that leaves us with chicken, lamb, and fish.  Lamb would be classically Greek, so definitely an option.  Fish isn’t possible because I’m weary of serving fish that isn’t purchased that day, which would make having a quick lunch after class a little more difficult.  And of course, the comfort zone, chicken.  Somehow we landed on Greek meatballs, made with lamb, onion, feta and Kalamata olives, despite the fact that neither of us have cooked lamb before.  Hopefully this goes well, otherwise all we’ll have is a rockin’ Macedonian salad and tzatziki with pita.  I am remaining optimistic though; Jon and I surprise ourselves in the kitchen sometimes, so I’m confident in our ability to follow a recipe.  Converting US standard measurements to metric may prove to be a little annoying and time consuming, but alas, we always did well in math.

I will be photo documenting everything, and we’ll start preparing everything tomorrow night.  I’m a little more excited than I should be, but I love to cook, and I haven’t been able to in over a month.  Wish me luck! :)