Cooking is hard...

As most of you know, IAESTE is an internship exchange program that has branches throughout the world. Every year, the individual countries and their local committees (chapters) raise jobs that they can then exchange with other countries. I don't fully understand the process, but basically for every student you host, you send one abroad. I believe that IAESTE Hungary hosts over 60 students a year, which is impressive for two reasons: 1) Hungary is about a third of the size of CO and 2) It is completely student run and mostly by volunteers who never even get to go abroad themselves. The main point that I am getting at here is there are now students from all over the world here and as I said before, we only have two from the same country (the two French girls I wrote about previously).

We have started to do country themed dinners, where we take turns cooking some sort of typical dish. Well, last night was my night to cook. My first challenge was to come up with some sort of typical "American" food...not an easy task. After many Google searches, most of which returned the well known fact that we don't really have a typical or traditional dish, I decided on fried chicken (sort of), potatoes and apple pie.

None of the recipes I found seemed too difficult so I thought that it wouldn't be that hard to make this. Well, I was wrong. The entire process was slightly frustrating. First, I could not find the proper ingredients. Everything was going well until I attempted to find vegetable shortening for making the pie crust. I looked up the word before I went and thought I was good to go. I have gotten much better at navigating the grocery store and in general can find things without too much trouble as long as I know the name of them. Well, I could not find shortening anywhere. I finally called my roommate to see if she knew where it was. After a five minute debate on what it was, she told me a different word than I had looked up and told me to just go and ask someone who worked there. Well, I did that, but the problem is she didn't speak English. However, as she was explaining to me where to find it (in Hungarian, of course), I nodded politely and deduced from her hand gestures the general area in which I could find it. Well, I found what she was telling me about, but it was lard, as in pig fat, and there was no way I was putting pig fat into my pie. Of course my dictionary did not have any of the words that were on the package so I attempted to ask a lady if it was the same thing. She then called her son over to speak in English with me, which he only said maybe two words, but then she proceeded to direct me back to the butter isle. I knew she was wrong and trying to explain to someone the difference between margarine and shortening when you don't speak the language is difficult. She kept insisting that is where I needed to go, so finally I just said thank you until she stopped talking and went back to the butter isle, where I had looked about five times. I ended up settling on attempting to make it with butter. I then could not find any pie tins in which to make the pies so I ended up having to use those instead. In the end, the pies were very ugly and were probably the worst pies I have ever made (they still tasted fine, I just know they could have been so much better).

For the main course, I made sort of a chicken nugget/fried chicken combo. I found a recipe for making fried chicken in the oven. The recipe said it would take 10 minutes to prepare and I of course believed it. However, it took me nearly 45 minutes. Then the ovens here are tiny and ours is very old and basically has no temperature control so I could barely fit all of the chicken in and one of the pans of chicken sort of burned. All of the breading fell off so all of the time I spent doing it was basically a big waste. In the end I covered it in a bbq sauce and honey mixture so it tasted pretty good.

I also made garlic and basil potato wedges, but since I needed to fit a lot of them in the pan and I was already about an hour behind at this point, they did not get crispy like they were supposed to. However, they still tasted good and I suppose that is all that matters.

We had about 17 or 18 people show up, which was fun but a little cramped. I have no idea how we all fit into the apartment. Our apartment is smaller than my apartment that I had last summer...where I lived alone. Although I was very stressed about it and not super pleased with the results of my cooking, the evening was really a lot of fun. It did make me miss my house in Fort Collins, which is great for hosting dinners, my bbq grill and US grocery stores. I have also come to the conclusion that I think I'll just go back to living off of corn flakes.