through the looking glass

so I had a few people over for dinner the other night. thought I’d give a few students a taste of western food, more specifically pasta. cheese is out, so I went with a red sauce. even had the spices I needed, basically. slow simmer sauce, real italian pasta, fake up some bread and butter, cucumber salad with oil and vinegar dressing, plenty of salt and balck pepper. not half bad for a girl with a wok. end result? cold food is cold food no matter what kind of vinegar you use, and the meal they claim tasted like a noodle dish I can’t remember the name of. tasted pretty much like western food to me. poor kids, they’d expected something unexpected. though I suppose if you look at it one way that’s exactly what they got.

I’m gonna try a different tach with the next bunch. phili steak sandwiches, pasta salad, mashed potatoes, corn apple cucumber salad, mango salsa and chips. it’ll prolly taste just like chinese sandwiches, but I know with all the chopstick action over here at least the mashed potatoes will feel, if not taste, different.

after may break a few of the foreign teachers and I are going to attempt a bbq. basic stuff, hamburgers and hot dogs, salads. if anyone has any ideas on how to rig a makeshift grill comment it, I’m scrounging already.

chicken. thanks to kfc everyone I’ve met thinks a hamburger’s made with chicken. sigh.

they say your culinary taste’s the last thing to go when you live in another country, you might not miss much but you’ll always miss the food. I can’t say that much applies to me, as I ate almost as much chinese food (rather, the americanized version thereof) back home and I only miss sandwiches and cereal when I’m too lazy to cook, but none the less I feel a bizarre, almost instinctual need to introduce a non-mcVersion of american cooking to the unsuspecting masses in the general vicinity of my academic institution.

this is gonna be fun.

in messing around with photo layout I stumbled across what I consider to be a rather cool effect. feb 5 drops back in time and crosses into feb 4. I’m so diggint the idea of photos travelling in time that I want to keep it, however in ie for mac (or course) it renders the next entry all but useless. I cannot test on a pc (well, I can go to a net bar but that’s a lot of work people) so if you’re using one and you see a tiny little margin of text instead of a ccool cascading through time effect please take a minute and let me know.