Happy Turkey Day!

Today started off with my host mom accusing me of leaving one of her precious forks (her ¨bebitos¨) at the Training Center (I swear I didn`t do it) and Prima´s mom nagging me for leaving my cup in her kitchen for a moment because she doesn´t want a ¨fight with upstairs,¨ as in with my host mom. What happened to not caring about material goods in good old South America, land of living simply? I can´t wait to move further away from Lima. Hopefully in Piura the culture will be different -- no caring so much about your plates and forks and no nagging about the little things. I can´t stand the nagging...I just want everyone to be laid back about the little things, and then things will be much more tranquilo. Do I sound like a hippie now?

Despite all the nagging, I ended up having a great Thanksgiving. There`s nothing like the holidays to make a Peace Corps trainee/volunteer homesick, but then again there`s nothing like mounds of delicious Thanksgiving Day food to make you happy. Feeling a bit melancholy last night, I decided to make french toast for breakfast since I bought Aunt Jemima syrup near Lima the other day. Ahhh, comfort food works like a charm!!! As for Thanksgiving and cooking for the training crew, I ended up not making the pumpkin pies and made my own little creation of crepes. First, I found a ¨recipe¨ for sour cream, which said ¨combine 250mL of cream with 2 limones (little limes) and stir,¨ and it worked like a charm. Weird, huh! Then I sauteéd the rest of my spinach and mushrooms with butter, sugar and a bit of pepper. I made a pancake batter and semi-successfully tried to modify it for a more crepe-like texture with extra sugar and made about 10 huge thin pancakes (well, 13, but I ate 3). So most of my crepes were with sour cream, spinach and mushrooms. It wasn´t a lot so then I also sauteéd the rest of the mushrooms with onions and rolled that up with slices of mozzarella cheese. The crew really liked them and I got the best type of compliment -- the type when someone compliments your food without realizing you were the chef! Because then you know they were honest. Anyhow, we gave ourselves a wonderful Tgiving feast. The turkey team did an amazing job with the turkey that incorporated Cajun spices and was so juicy...since I was a vegetarian before, it was my first Thanksgiving eating the turkey for four years! I gorged myself on cranberry sauce, 3 types of mashed potatoes, Shepherd`s pie, spinach quiche, American corn, 3 types of delicious sweet potato pie/candied yams, chick pea masala, samoas (yes, the Indian empanada thing!), mac and cheese, mud pie with real marshmallows, chocolate cracker layer cake, pumpkin pie, strawberry smoothie and I didn´t even have room for the salad, fruit salad, Cantonese-style fried rice, green beans, stuffing, pineapple upside down cake, pumpkin cake, and other stuff. At the end, we took a picture showing off our food babies as I threatened everyone that I was about to ¨dar la luz¨ if you know Spanish, haha (it means to give birth). We did a great job pampering our new extended family...HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!