Cena Internacional

We've had a couple of "international dinners" as Friday evening activities at ICA (my spanish school). The first one we were actually supposed to prepare a dish typical of our home country. Which poses minor problems when you're a vegetarian American. Especially when calculating the odds of finding GardenBurgers or SmartDogs in town are would make your engineering friend who works at NASA go into hysterics - we're talking 1 in 80,000!. [No, that's not an exclamation point for emphasis, that's factorial...I can already feel Jake trembling] So what's typically American, and doesn't contain meat? Our answer? Dirt pudding. For those of you who haven't been blessed with the opportunity to try dirt pudding, it is composed of pulverized Oreo's, layered with pudding (sometimes vanilla, sometimes chocolate; I think it's better with a combination.) you finish it off by scattering gummy worms throughout. The end result, once the final layer of oreos goes on, looks distinctly like potting soil. The first time I ever had dirt pudding, it was presented in a large houseplant pot, with a fake houseplant actually planted in it. It was served with a trowell. For a 9 year old boy, it was the coolest thing I had experienced in months, and made a lasting impression. So Tony (another extranjero from Indiana) and I set out to confer the same awe upon the student body of ICA, at least those who'd never had it. Personally, I'm sure that we put more work into our dish than anyone at the school. We were lucky to find a large blue sand pail, which was the perfect receptacle, early on. However, after that, the whole venture took a turn for the worse. We couldn't find gummy worms - only bears and, strangely... octopi. So we proceeded to cut off the tentacles of each octopus, fabricating relatively convincing approximations of worms. Finding pudding and imitation Oreo's was relatively easy. However, cooling down a huge pot of pudding in the 4 hours we had to prepare was more difficult, and was complicated significantly by the fact that our family doesn't have a refrigerator. Tony ended up fetching bags of ice, so that we could fill the sink (using an improvised drain plug - no, they didn't have that either) with enough cold water to cool the pudding. The cookies looked exactly like their American, brand name counterparts, and when crushed behaved exactly like oreos in every way but one. They reeked of alcohol. I'm not sure what it was. Our best theory, at the end of it all, was that they used some sort of chocolate extract....which would involve alcohol like vanilla extract. Whatever the contents, the house smelled like we were brewing moonshine in the non-existent bathtub when was all over. I got a questioning look or two from our host-mom before we explained that it was the cookies - at which point the looks changed to highly skeptical. After we convinced her to sample one though, she quickly came around.....so to speak. Somehow, a fair portion of the smell emanating from our pail had dissapated before we had to carry it up the hill to school. During this journey, the many passers-by conferred on us a multitude of looks which progressed approximately from: "Is that a huge blue bucket they're carrying?" to "What the hell are those guys doing carrying around a huge blue bucket, in the dark, on a friday night??" to "......(sigh).......crazy gringos........" One of my biggest regrets of the trip is that I never got a picture of the whole mess. Suffice it to say that it went over well. Tony and I also amused ourselves for about twenty minutes, watching the parade of people who passed by the table to peer questioningly into the bucket of dirt sitting next to the cakes, speculating with friends, poking at it tentatively with a spoon. Eventually, of course, each group made a short presentation explaining their particular dish, and the gig was up. The second dinner we had was last week, and was actually a cookoff. However the school said we were limited to either making pizza or sandwiches. So, pizza it was.... this story is significantly less exciting, we were able to prepare our eggplant and garlic pizza without incident. This time my group consisted of Tony's sister, Gina; Eva, a Dutch woman who later confessed that she loved the movie "White Chicks"....really??; and Ida, an American from Conneticut. We did not win the cookoff. The group who did made their own dough, and made one of their pizza's in the shape of guatemala. They also put mint leaves on one of their pizzas - with no tomato sauce, and some walnuts it was surprisingly good....nice and light. Try it sometime. I do have a few pictures of the second dinner, however, so I'll share: Our half-eaten, cheeseless, pizza. We made a cheesy one too, but we had some lactose-unfriendly people so we made one minus dairy. The cheesy one was more popular and got eaten before I got a chance to take a picture. Group members Ida (left) and Gina (right) Eva and Ida. Eva was excited about the german wine, because it was the closest thing to something from home she'd seen in weeks. Enrique and Yulie, the directors of ICA. Enrique refused to make a normal face for any of my pictures.