Weekly Goal.

Since I've been here, I've made weekly "goals" for myself. Sometimes to provide motivation during the day, and sometimes the goal is just a place or activity I want to do. I haven't been blogging much, so my goal for this week is to blog more--maybe once a day--just to provide some more insight into my daily life. I've talked a lot about traveling but not about class--so I'm going to work on that--plus still include fun tidbits of everything.

So for today's entry I'm going to talk about what I did on Thursday night...I'll call it cena americana (American dinner).

Earlier this past week, Amparo told Marli and I that it was "time" that we ate food from our country--simply put, she wanted us to cook an American meal for dinner. We decided to have the dinner on Thursday. Then there was the task of creating an "American" menu. This sounds a lot easier than it was. We have a girl here with us for 6 weeks--her name is Joelle, and she is from Switzerland--and she has a ton of food allergies. She can't have anything with wheat (no bread, crackers, flour, cereal, etc) or dairy or eggs, and the only meats she can eat are chicken and tuna. Then Amparo doesn't really eat a lot of meat and is a little lactose intolerant. We had to work around that, but Amparo had said that we could make what we wanted to and that she could make something for Joelle. We ended up with the following menu after much deliberation and thought.

-salad to start (just because we always eat a lettuce salad)
-Chicken breast coated in cracker crumbs, with the option of having cheese melted on the chicken too (a chicken cordon bleu type dish)
-Cooked corn (frozen--not from a can...they really don't eat frozen veggies here so it was a "specialty")
-Roasted potatoes

For dessert.... APPLE CRISP with ice cream (of course)

The cooking went okay though it was a little difficult. The ovens here are small and we almost had to nix the potatoes, thinking we wouldn't be able to put them in the oven at the same as the chicken--but we found a way! Then the oven started smoking a little because there was something on the bottom, and we thought the food was burning (luckily, it wasn't). Then there was the dilemma of the apple crisp. We used Marli's mom's recipe. And well we had to convert the measurements. Marli converted them into mL, but we needed them in grams. So basically, I ended up approximated everything.

And at the same time, Amparo was trying to help us cook, and it was difficult (but hilarious) translating everything into Spanish. The hilarity also came from the fact that Amparo was dancing in the kitchen, as we had music playing...some of the artists we were dancing to...Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, T.I, music from Slumdog Millionaire, etc. Then when the apple crisp came out of the oven, Amparo was wanting to "flip" it out onto a platter, as is traditional here with "tartas". We were puzzled why she would want to flip it, and she said "it is ugly like this"--so we let her flip it onto a platter. She crossed herself before she flipped--and it turned out perfectly!

The dinner went over really well. Paco and Elena (Amparo's son and his wife) ended up coming to dinner. Elena is a bit of a picky eater (she usually just eats chicken and grilled veggies here), but she ate all our food and loved it! We were successful in our American dinner. Plus we only ate half of the apple crisp, so Marli and I have been eating it since Thursday night and just finished it today. It was delicious.

The rest of the week was good--tomorrow I think I'm going to write about my favorite class "History of the Spanish Language." I had a huge exam in that class last Wednesday, and I studied a lot because it covered a ton of material. Luckily, the exam went really well. I went to the ballet "Carmen" today. It's based off the opera. I went with my grammar professor and 2 other girls in my class. It was really good, a more modern interpretation of the ballet. All for now though, I need to get some sleep soon!