Adventures in Cooking

Part of the PC experience is to share the American culture and what better way than to cook for my host family. I wanted to cook spaghetti and garlic bread with my favorite dessert - chocolate chip cookies to top it all off. Sounds simple enough right? Little did I know how difficult this would be.

I went to the ye-ye (yuppie) supermarket where all the extranjeros in David go. Most stores in the campo have only rice and sardines. This one has it all, except for brown sugar for the cookies and garlic powder for the garlic bread! Another part of the PC experience is learning how to improvise to I baked a cake and nixed on the bread idea.

Gabi, my host mother, was curious and enthusiastic about the whole thing. (She has 2 small children so she was probably thrilled she didn´t have to cook for once). She watched me cook. I put the spiral noodles in boiling water, which she had never seen before. In a sauce pan, I emptied the jar of spaghetti sauce which seemed foreign to her as well; she examined it for quite a while. I then cut up tomato, onion, and pepper to put in the sauce, explaining that I forgot to get mushrooms too. She told me that she has never eaten them before. I also got some parmesan cheese to sprinkle on top. She told me that she had seen this product in a store before but never knew what it was. In no time, the food was done. I gave Gabi a spoonful to try. Success! She liked it!

Now came the cake. Gabi luckily had a pan for it, but no measuring cups! I had to make an educated guess with the amounts of oil and water with what I thought was a tea cup. 20 minutes later I was pulling the cake out of the oven. The kids were excited because they rarely, if ever, eat chocolate. Gabi was particularly excited about the frosting on top.