Potluck

Just a heads-up, I haven't been online in the past 5 days, so this next succession of blog posts will be pretty rapid-fire.

We decided to have a potluck on Friday to send off an Aussie named Shannon who has been here for a year (Shannon is a friend from Frisbee). They told us (Jodie, Reuben and I) to arrive at 7, so we arrived fashionably late at 8:30.

I decided to make chana masala, so I started soaking the chickpeas in the morning. We had had a phone meeting at 5 at the office, so I offered my input, while I was boiling the chickpeas and cutting up vegetables (we keep a gas cooker in the back room of the office and our secretary cooks lunch for everyone Monday-Friday). The power went out soon after that, so Jodie was sorting through the rice to pull out the rocks in the dark (we just bought a generator for the office, but there's not a good way to hook the lights up to it). The chickpeas were ready at 6:30 (the sauce wasn't as thick as I would have liked, and I ran out of curry powder, so I didn't have the spicing quite right, but I think that my modified ratios did the trick). The rice was ready just after 7, but then the electricity (and by extension the internet) came back, so we all spent another hour on our computers.

Still, several people (including most of the cooks) arrived just after us, so it wasn't that bad. The food was delicious (I ate way too much peanut butter fudge and although there were no Indians there, I wasn't the only one cooking Indian food), and we tossed a Frisbee around for a while. There were three Spaniards there, and I kept trying to join their conversation so I could keep up my Spanish, but I always got pulled back to the English/Kiswahili side. It was a lot of fun, and I'm hoping that this will become a regular tradition (with Thanksgiving coming up, I'm hoping that we can pull off a potluck to get all the dishes there for that).