Happy holidays!

Sorry for the long gap in posts. Between much celebrating and a shortened week to get everything done that needed to be done at work, I haven't had much time to put pull my thoughts together in a blog.

Christmas was a lot of fun, we had a Christmas Eve party at our house, with Posole and dumplings made by our Nepalese staff. It was quite a mish-mash of food, but of course was amazingly delicious. Christmas lunch was at the other company house, and we had just about everything you could want, turkey, ham, stuffing, cornbread pudding, sort of a French Onion casserole.

Martha and I were in charge of the pies, though our attempts at making the crust ran into some problems. Finally, our brilliant cook (a guy about my age) stepped in and made his own crust for us. After looking in every single expat grocery store in town, we established that there was no canned pumpkin in all of Kabul. So Chef picked us up a "pumpkin" at the market. It certainly looked nothing like a pumpkin, but we figured that any hard squash would do the trick. So we hacked into this huge squash, wrapped half in tin foil, figured out how to work the oven, and popped it in. Nearly 2 hours later, the squash was mostly cooked. As soon as we tried scooping out the insides we realized that this veggie was much closer to a spaghetti squash and REALLY didn't look anything like pumpkin. Martha had the brilliant idea of putting it into the blender so that no one was picking spaghetti-like fibers out of their teeth. Ultimately it was pretty successful, tasted enough like pumpkin pie for all the gringos. I made the apple pie, and with Chef's piecrust made a very pretty laticework top.

Boxing day we had another little party, the weather was great and we decided to BBQ. We had heard a lot of South African barbecuing pride from one of our team and he did his country justice. I contributed some grilled zucchini to balance out the massive amounts of marinated beef.

We had a very nice New Years, went to a restaurant and did some dancing, came home and did the usual playing pool until the wee hours. Today we are having a big New Years meal any minute now, ham and black eyed peas, mashed potatoes. Should be delicious.

Per usual, this blog is ENTIRELY about food, but if you want to see the photos, I am having a hard time posting them here, but they are all viewable on facebook, here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2178318&id=7408617&l=cfd3064410