About 10 days before our guests arrive I work to prepare roughly five meals that can be thrown in the freezer for later. It's nice to have the more labor intensive dishes made in advance so once our friends are here I can enjoy my time with them better, plus it breaks up my grocery shopping into two, more manageable trips and cuts down on some of the dish washing after the meal has been enjoyed!
I shared in a previous post about our friend Zhani who wanted to learn how to cook American food. She is becoming a pro at remembering my steps in constructing these meals and slowly I've been throwing in some extras like muffins and breakfast casseroles. We're becoming a team in our ballet around the kitchen as we peel, chop, boil, mash, stir, brown, and wash up.
There is definitely an art to coordinate so many dishes in one session with the limited number of pots and pans, burners, mixing bowls, and pyrex I have on hand, but what we're able to accomplish in an afternoon is very gratifying. Plus, my glossary of Albanian kitchen words is ballooning and I get to enjoy the company of a friend and her wonderful help while I work! :-).
But there's nothing more frustrating in the kitchen than going to all that work, only to discover after preparing all of the ingredients you came up short -- and that happens to me a lot because I don't exactly use recipes anymore. On top of that, my cooking pans are all shapes and sizes (some from America, some from here), and as our visitors vary in number, I kind of start filling casserole dishes on the fly til I think we have enough. The result can be a Shepherd's Pie with barely enough potatoes to cover the top, or a Spaghetti pie with a skimpy crust of noodles.
Concerned about coming up short, last week I overestimated the amount of potatoes, onions and carrots to make. So with the extra cooked veggies I decided to make up a third, smaller, chicken pot pie for my neighbor. I even happened to have one of those disposable foil baking pans with cardboard lids that would be perfect for the situation. My neighbor has been SO sweet to bring me a few of her family's favorite dishes and I had been wanting to bring her something in return. Given that she had been hosting all of the events around her father-in-law's funeral in her home the previous week, it seemed like an appropriate time to bring something over (as if I needed an excuse).
I wrote on the lid what was contained inside, including baking instructions for the oven. I even double checked my grammar and spelling on Google Translate, then put it in the freezer. The next day I was relieved to find her home when I arrived to deliver the pot pie. I tried in my insecure Albanian to tell her that she could keep it in her fridge or freezer until later. I wanted to make sure though that she knew that she needed to cook it before eating. Since most of the dishes my neighbors have given us have arrived hot and ready to eat, I knew this might be an area of confusion.
As feared, in spite of my attempts at verbal instructions, she thought she was supposed to eat it cold, but finally I was able to convey that no, it needed to go in the oven.
When I finally broke through her eyes lit up and she confirmed, "Piqem?" (bake?) I vigorously nodded my head yes.
Yay! I thought, as I walked home. Success!
A few days later my pride was knocked down a few notches when I ran into Shpresa. I learned that after I left my neighbor's home, she was confused as ever. Not wanting to do something wrong, she called Shpresa to ask if she was supposed to take the dish out of the foil baking pan and/or remove the cardboard lid before baking!
Poor Shpresa didn't even know what I had made (I'm not sure that she even knows what a pot pie is, much less what kind of pan I had used)! It hadn't even crossed my mind to write 'remove lid before baking'! I'm guessing the acrid smell of burning cardboard might have been a clue.
In the future I will only deliver ready-to-eat dishes. Or, I will cook all my dishes first for Shpresa to sample, then put her phone number under the directions if further guidance is required!
No comments:
Post a Comment