Tradition

We continued our Friday evening tradition tonight with yet another good old fashioned home cooked meal with friends. It's really become our tradition to have a dinner party on Friday evenings, and invite people we want to get to know a bit better to our house for dinner. And it's nice to have a good excuse once in a while to have a good meal! It's really the only time we cook something nice - we even have meat most of the time when we invite people!

Tonight we made some meatballs in a really nice sauce (of which Annamarie was the main chef). I made the vegetables (a nice stir fry of zucchini - I was SO happy to find that in the market - green peppers, carrots, onions, and of course, a lot of garlic). Jackie made the salad and the lemon cake and custard which we had for dessert.

We had an interesting group over tonight - an Eritrean friend (the one who had us over to his place for shiro a few weeks ago) and his friend (another Eritrean guy who works for the UN here), as well as a friend who works as an agriculturalist for the Anglican church here! It was a good group of folks, and I really enjoyed the time together with them, as well as the lovely meal that we put together.

There's something wonderful and warm about inviting people to your house for dinner, rather than meeting them at a restaurant. So many people in this town live in "team houses" or prefabricated containers, where they have cooks who provide meals for them all the time, or they go out for dinner at the restaurants. And it seems that people really appreciate coming to a "real" house for a nice home-cooked meal (not that we're the best cooks in the world, but people just like the home-cookedness of it, I think - or else they're all just being really polite about it all the time!). It is a blessing to have a home where we can invite people over, so we're definitely taking advantage of it!