Stop & Chat: March 4

Yesterday was a cooking day with L and T! L picked me up from my house at about 10:40 and we drove to T's house, where T showed us how to make squash soup and we made some healthy tacos!

Here is the pot that we filled with diced squash, apples, and onions. We boiled this until it was soft and ran it through a food processor afterwards.

Plátanos were next! L fried these in butter until they were slightly crispy and they were a nice, soft, not-banana chip.

Avocados!! Yummy! I got to dice these and we seasoned it with salt and cilantro.

I sliced some cabbage and diced some tomatoes and we mixed it into a bowl for our tacos.

Squash and apple soup. Slightly sweet, but we added some bacon bits and bacon grease from said bacon to add flavor. Then we added some cinnamon and salt if we felt it needed it.

 Setting up the table. In the orange bowl is some ground beef that we cooked and seasoned with taco seasoning (just generic taco seasoning).

Setting our spots up. In the squash soup you can see my bacon bits! Yummy <3

The table fully set up. I forget what kind of chips those purple ones were, but T insisted that they were healthy and I liked the taste so I ate them. We used lettuce instead of tortillas for our tacos. Everything was so delicious!

We sat and ate until L had to leave to pick up her son for an appointment and I stayed with T. We chitchatted and made plans to go on post and work on our arts and crafts projects in the community activities center.

L left some dumplings, or Mandu, and T and I split these to take home.

We rode the bus on post since it was a little far to walk and went to the arts and crafts room.

I don't think M took pictures of these last time, so I took a picture of this because I think it's cool!

Someone's finished, one row taller version of drawers. Apparently after you apply the hanji paper you use bleach to create the awesome distressed wood look that these projects have. It looks brown but the original paper was black! Cool!

T and I worked on our projects until our husbands got off work. They were kind enough to pick each of us up from the CAC. T and her husband went off and made their own plans, and M asked me if I wanted to go out with him and some friends to eat out. I said yes.

We went to the Garden 5 mall nearby and walked around for about 30 minutes before deciding on a place. I have no clue what it's called, as nothing was in a language I understood, but we had a good time trying to communicate with the employees. They were very good natured about it, something I am very happy for because I was initially concerned about a group of 5 foreigners almost barging into a restaurant demanding food. Okay, we weren't that dramatic but the restaurant was small and I felt like we were giants. We ordered some sort of duck meat meal and a seafood pancake. I wish I'd taken pictures, but I didn't bring anything besides my money with me into the mall. The ingredients and food is all set out on the table, and we are given grilling plates on a modern fire pit where the employees place the meat for us to cook to whatever specifications we desire. This was my first time having duck, and I have to say it was delicious. Lots of fatty bits, but delicious. I also had difficulties with the chopsticks we were given, as they were an oblong sort of rectangle shape that was hard for me to work with. I can work with squares and circular shaped chopsticks, but these metal ones were kicking my butt. Eventually the employees took pity on us and brought out forks for us to eat with.

We finished up our food and got home. By that time it was after 10pm and M and I were both exhausted. We crashed immediately. Now M's working and I'm enjoying a very lazy day of napping, eating, and now dragging my butt to the computer and working on some posts that I've needed to work on.

I hope everything's going well for you in your corner of the world!