Jan 03 2009
A busy new year so far (thought not necessarily productive)
New Year’s day was pretty low-key – just a day full of cooking with one of my sitemates. It’s apparently an enabling environment, as by the end of the day we had a liter and a half of kahlua, baklava, cream cheese-apricot strudel, pineapple upside-down cake, buttermilk pancakes, and an entire mexican dinner (horse-meat fajitas with homemade tortillas and from-America salsa and refried beans). In other words, it was *excellent* although almost sickness-inducing quantities of food. I still have most of the desserts here as well as 9/10 of the kahlua.
Yesterday I finally pulled out the pickling-in-process beef and made what I assume to be relatively authentic corned beef. As I’m typing I’m cooking up hash now and plan to have some nice fried eggs on top of it…yum…for dinner.
Today was the mandatory fun NGO/work event. For me, preparations involved getting to the meeting place at the agreed-up 10am, waiting for about two hours, then finally going when everyone else actually showed up. We went to the lake, and this apparently meant “drive on the lake and find a nice spot where we normally couldn’t have a picnic as we’d be waist-deep in water”. AND there was a Schedule of Events. Five hours later and after several bouts of woman Snow Sumo, group tug-of-war, random eating and drinkening, frost-defrost cycles, and way too many group photos I’m now back at home. Overall, I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would, which is often the case with group events. Needless to say, from both the cooking extravaganza and this group event, there are a variety of awesome pictures, some of which will be posted in the subsequent blog update.
Oh, and during the process of baking and experimenting with puff pastry (see random baklava above), I found out that I bought not 10kg of normal flour but 10kg of semolina flour. Ugh. So now I have to look for lots and lots of recipes that use this kind of flour, as it normally takes me about 2 months to get through 10kg if I make bread, and I doubt I can make that much bread with this stuff.
Hope everyone had a good new year – last lap here for me – I’m actually leaving this year!
