A couple weekends ago, we had four teen and pre-teen girls come over and help us make cookies for our new neighbors. We were looking for ways to meet our new neighbors, to begin getting to know them and to begin sharing a bit of our lives with them.
We had a great time with the girls making cookies and decorating goodie bags. We decided to make cookies only for the apartments in our building. As it turns out, there are 24 apartments in each building, and we are the seventh and final building. That means that there are 168 apartments here! We made sugar cookies from the Real Simple December 2009 issue and some devil's food cake chocolate chip cookies from one of the girls' recipes. We also got some Hershey's Kisses and Reese's peanut butter cups to fill the bags. Michael worked on printing business cards with our contact information on them.
We went out on the following Sunday afternoon to give the cookies to our neighbors. The first two doors we knocked on had no response, but we were welcomed warmly at the third door. We chatted with our neighbor there for a fifteen minutes or so before we moved on to our other neighbors. Most doors stayed closed, and we left our little bags on the doorstep, hoping they'd find them soon. Of the people we met, most of them talked to us from cracked front doors or behind screen doors, suspicious until we explained we were neighbors just saying hello. Even then, people seemed confused--one girl asked if she should pay for the cookies.
There's still another 6 buildings worth of people we haven't met. I'm feeling a little bit the way I did my first week in XZ, unsure how to connect with people. We might need to make a lot more cookies...
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tiramisu
I don't remember the first time I ever ate tiramisu, but I know that whenever that was, I transcended. My fork had brought to my tongue the very essence of what heaven must be: a thing that cannot be described save that it is complete and utter joy.
I was born a lot closer to the equator than to tiramisu. And there's joy near the equator, too, for sure: fresh tortillas, refried beans, and plantains. But our foods are not delicate foods with subtle flavors. They are bold like the hot sun, the high mountains, and the wide desert. At a very young age, I learned how to slice plantains, how to mold tortilla dough in my hands, how to work a spoon around a frying pan to get the beans thick and heavy. In my country, we eat with our hands, licking our fingers, cleaning our plates with the last piece of a tortilla.
Tiramisu is not this kind of food. It is delicate, it is refined. It is a dessert served chilled in stemmed glassware, eaten with a tiny fork or spoon. It is the clinking of silver on glass and soft opera music filling the space between tables in fashionable restaurants. And so for me, tiramisu has always been enchanting and ethereal, something so other, a foil to my brashness and audacity.
It is this foreignness that makes tiramisu so transcendent, I suppose. It is the moment in which my body, my person, my self slows down and not with greedy hands in my bowl but with conservative little spoonfuls that I contemplate the joys of being. But this "joy" was always at the hands of someone other. My hands, so rehearsed in the Honduran kitchen, could not be the delicate hands that with gentle affection layer lady fingers and marscarpone cheese. Or so I believed, all these years since that first divine taste of glory.
But I have found, at last, the truest Epicurean joy, not in eating tiramisu, but in making it. My body, my person, my self slows down with whisk and egg whites, lady fingers dipped one by one in chilled coffee, cocoa powder carefully dusted over those dainty layers. In its subtle persistence, Tiramisu, I have discovered, is bold in its own right.
I was born a lot closer to the equator than to tiramisu. And there's joy near the equator, too, for sure: fresh tortillas, refried beans, and plantains. But our foods are not delicate foods with subtle flavors. They are bold like the hot sun, the high mountains, and the wide desert. At a very young age, I learned how to slice plantains, how to mold tortilla dough in my hands, how to work a spoon around a frying pan to get the beans thick and heavy. In my country, we eat with our hands, licking our fingers, cleaning our plates with the last piece of a tortilla.
Tiramisu is not this kind of food. It is delicate, it is refined. It is a dessert served chilled in stemmed glassware, eaten with a tiny fork or spoon. It is the clinking of silver on glass and soft opera music filling the space between tables in fashionable restaurants. And so for me, tiramisu has always been enchanting and ethereal, something so other, a foil to my brashness and audacity.
It is this foreignness that makes tiramisu so transcendent, I suppose. It is the moment in which my body, my person, my self slows down and not with greedy hands in my bowl but with conservative little spoonfuls that I contemplate the joys of being. But this "joy" was always at the hands of someone other. My hands, so rehearsed in the Honduran kitchen, could not be the delicate hands that with gentle affection layer lady fingers and marscarpone cheese. Or so I believed, all these years since that first divine taste of glory.
But I have found, at last, the truest Epicurean joy, not in eating tiramisu, but in making it. My body, my person, my self slows down with whisk and egg whites, lady fingers dipped one by one in chilled coffee, cocoa powder carefully dusted over those dainty layers. In its subtle persistence, Tiramisu, I have discovered, is bold in its own right.
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