Cooking For An Army

Well Mark, Andrea and Reuben are all now officially in the States and I am holding the house down by myself. I asked Ivan if he could come and stay at the house with me while Mark and Andrea are gone, and he said he�d be able to stay over some nights. So yesterday he went with me to go grocery shopping. Guatemala has a place called �Pricemart� which is basically like a Guatemalan Sam�s Club but without a huge selection. You can buy American food at Pricemart, but it�s twice as much, for example, two big containers of cream cheese costs about $12. Since I needed cream cheese but didn�t want to pay $12 for it, we stopped by the �Hiper Pais� next which is basically a version of Wal-mar. There we purchased fruits and veggies and raw ingredients to do some mad cooking that night.�

When we got back to the house and unloaded all the groceries, we started to make something I had been craving for quite some time; sweet and sour chicken! Oh yeah! And Ivan started to prepare the potatoes for some mad fried potato action! Man, I hadn�t had anything with potatoes in it for a long time! Anyways, while Ivan was slicing and dicing, I was cutting up the chicken into chuckiness that was to be breaded. Once I had cut up two breasts into the bowl, I showed it to Ivan and asked, �Do you think this will be enough?� Ivan replied, �No man, the meat will shrink once we cook it and we are going to want more once we start eating, so I would add some more.�

With those words I cut up TWO more chicken breasts and dumped them into the bowl. Once the batter was ready, I started dipping the chicken into the bowl, then putting them into the hot oil. As the chicken started piling up, we soon realized that the meat didn�t shrink, but it EXPANDED! Once there was plenty of cooked chicken on the plate for both me and Ivan, we noticed that I was only half way done with cooking all the chicken. Once all the chicken was cooked, we looked at the mountain of chicken on the plate and laughed. We are learning about portions here and how much food to cook for just two people. We had enough for a family of five.

Once the sweet and sour sauce had finished cooking and the potatoes were done, we set the mountain of chicken with all the condiments on the table and stood back to take a picture. It took us like two hours to cook the meal that night, but we had a whole lot of fun doing it. I was trying to remember all the things that �famous cooks� had taught me in the past, like Memaw testing to see if the oil was done by dropping a little batter in it first, or Mom not dumping the oil down the drain. I am going to try and cook every night if I can, trying all kinds of new and different recipes.

I made my first true joke that would only work in Spanish all by myself today!!! Ok, so to pronounce the letter �P� you say it like �Pe� and the number 2 is pronounced �dos.� For the past few weeks, we have been teaching some of the kids how to use Excel. Excel is a program that allows you to enter data that is located within columns of A, B, C� and rows of 1, 2, 3�When me and some of the teachers were outside having �snack time,� I said, �You know, my favorite location in Excel is column P and row 2 because it�s P-2 (or in Spanish �Pe-dos� which is the Spanish word (Pedos) for �Fart.�) All the teachers started laughing hysterically. I am so glad my first joke in Spanish had something to do with flatulence.

I don�t know if I have mentioned this before, but I am working on the Shalom Sponsorships website for sponsoring kids here at Shalom. The people at The Shalom Foundation want to use the logo of the Shalom Sponsorships as their main logo for their foundation. I thought that was really cool.

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