Two Random Stories

4.22.11

I’m not really sure how I forgot to tell you this when I wrote about Dia de Familias, but I did. Remember how I told you we did a traditional Ecuadorian dance for the families? Well, if you don’t remember, now you do. I guess before I go on with the story I should tell you about the outfits. The women wear 2 long, heavy skirts, a long blouse tucked into those skirts, a belt, jewelry, hat, and scarf. The facilitators had to help us put on the outfits because we were clueless, unfortunately.

                Okay, so we’re dressed and ready to dance. We enter the “stage” aka basketball court, and start dancing…. My top skirt falls off during the beginning of the dance, I tried holding it up, but that was impossible while still trying to dance, so I let it go and wasn’t too worried because I had another skirt on. Cool, problem solved, I keep dancing. Then comes the part when the women take each end of their top skirt and hold it up to their sides for a short time… I did this not even realizing I had just lifted up the ONLY skirt I had on…. Yeah, you know where I’m going with this. My whole backside is showing!!!!!!! Luckily the shirt was covering up my ass, but still, HOW EMBARRASSING!!! And the worst part about it was that I didn’t realize I did this until one of the girls in the dance told me!! Ahhhhh, hahahahahaa, laugh it up if you aren’t already. Luckily, only the dancers saw this, and it could have been even more humiliating if all the families saw it, but they didn’t, thank goodness!

                So that’s my first humiliation story! Hope you enjoyed it as much as my friends and I did. Hahahahahahaa.

Onto my 1st cooking experience:

                I decided to cook peanut butter brownies for my whole host family as a thank you for their hospitality the past 3 months. I chose peanut butter brownies because they don’t eat peanut butter down here too much and are always asking me why I eat so much of it, nor do they cook brownies very often, if ever. And as a cultural exchange, I thought I would make this oh so popular dish in the States for them.

                I bought the ingredients, got all the supplies together I needed, and started going at it. The batter is ready, the oven is heated up, in go the brownies. Cook time 20-25 minutes.

 At about 10 minutes I check them: doing good, but need lots more time to cook.

 At 15 minutes: doing good, still really really gooey, not getting very solid, but rising a little.

At 20 minutes: gooey and rising a little more.

At 25 minutes: rising even more… I start to worry because they are as high as the glass pan. *I think to myself, they are going to be thick, that’s great, but I hope they stop rising*

At 30 minutes: batter is HIGHER than the sides of the glass pan

At 33 minutes: batter starts to flow over so I carefully spoon the overflow back to the middle.

At 37 minutes: some batter has overflowed and fallen to the bottom of the oven, no biggie. I open up the oven to scoop the brownie overflow back to the middle of the pan. When I open the oven, the brownies go back down to like ¾ inch thick!! Wtf!!! Whatever, I got over it. I was just annoyed that it didn’t go down before it overflowed.

Go upstairs for lunch with family. During the middle of lunch I come back down to check on the brownies… As I’m coming down the stairs, I smell burning. I open the oven and the brownie overflow on the bottom of the oven is black and burnt and then I realize it is ON FIRE!!!! And it’s on fire because I’m using a gas oven, and then brownie batter fell right next to the opening where the flame comes into the oven. I don’t panic, I just turn the oven off and blow out the brownie fire. Good to go, but wait, the brownies STILL are not done cooking. So I go upstairs to tell my host sister, who’s oven I am using, what just happened. Her husband and I go down stairs, pull out the oven racks, I scrape the roasted brownie overflow off of the bottom of the oven, we put the oven racks back in, turn on the oven, and put the brownies back in to cook a little longer.

At 1 hour: the brownies are ready.

A couple hours later when we came home from driving to a mountain and eating empanadas everyone comes over to eat the brownies. Surprisingly, they tasted awesome. There was a semi-crunchy, but not burnt bottom to them. They were really good. I served everyone a piece. Then I realized only a couple of people ate their brownie L To this moment I still don’t know if it’s because they didn’t like them or they were just full from dinner. Oh well, I tried my best and thought it was a good idea to share with them a dish from the States. After all, I have been trying new things since day 1 when I got here. Haha. Oh well, I had fun making them and I’m just going to say they were full from dinner! Haha.

Hopefully cooking experience #2 goes more smoothly AND everyone eats it! J

Heather