Entertaining

Tonight we celebrated my birthday. Having guests made my week because I had stuff to do to get ready. It kept my mind occupied with thoughts of decorations, necessities like wine and cloth napkins and all the myriad other things that one does when having guests. The menu was the easy part because I only know how to make a certain number of dishes, so I made the "company" dishes. Thankfully we have been here long enough that I have been able to find (or have sent to me) all the ingredients for the dishes tonight.

The menu consisted of Persian Rice, my famous coleslaw, and salmon (found it on sale) in orange juice, along with the pound cake recipe that I found in metric. Plus I made a green salad that I put a homemade vinaigrette over.  Plus ice cream and tea to go with the cake.

It was a long day, I started with cleaning the whole apt., got some help from my family. Then I started cooking, baked the cake first (7 eggs!!) and realized while it was cooling that I would need the same Pyrex dish to marinate and poach the fish.

Managed to get it all done and on the table an hour after the guests arrived!

It was a lovely evening, the host family is helping us to learn Finnish and they have a daughter the same age as ours so the two girls would slip away to play cards (thanks Jenna!) and talk in English. I am looking forward to the day that we can go back and forth from English to Finnish easily. Classes start next week at the University and I will be there!

At some point in the evening I realized that time was passing and that we were so immersed in the conversation and the food that it was a delight just to be there. Even my husband, an introvert, stayed and chatted the whole time. It is very nice to have someone to ask about all these little things that are on our minds. Like what does "oy" mean? It stands for company or corporation, which is what I had figured out but wasn't sure of. Of course it means something else in Yiddish!!

My one gaff of the evening turned out okay in the end. The middle of the pound cake was wet, as in batter wet. So I cut those pieces out and put them back in the oven, They cooked so that the outside is crunchy and the inside soft and now finally cooked. Twice baked pound cake-Yum!!

We are learning to light candles, it helps to dispel the night. I guess our caveman days are not so far behind us. Fire represents warmth and security and hot food. We had those tonight and it was lovely.