Called to Culinate Part 3

I put those veggies that I bought on the weekend to good use tonight.  A new member of our organization came to visit today, to see our town for the first time ever, so I invited him over for dinner.  And since I was inviting him over for dinner, I thought I should go all out and invite someone else. I ended up inviting a guy that I met at the last workshop that I did back in that little town.  He's come to the big city to do some research, and had come to visit our compound and to borrow some novels from our big trunk of novels.  But I know that he's been eating rather local food for the past several months, so I thought he might appreciate a nice "Western" style meal, too.  Of course, as usual, Sean came along for dinner as well!

I ended up making something easy - a big pot of spaghetti from a mix that a visiting consultant left!  But it was chock-full of veggies.  Zucchini, eggplant, carrots, green peppers, onions and garlic (of course, what meal would be complete without a few cloves of garlic!) were all in the sauce - with a bit of ground meat from my favourite new grocery store.  It turned out quite nicely.  I also went all out and baked a simple chocolate cake (which I found out after had some lumps of baking soda still in it.  Ooops.  I may have been called to culinate, but that doesn't mean I know how to properly mix the ingredients for a cake!  In my defense, though, I was doing all this cooking in the semi-darkness, as there was no power!). 

Anyway, it was a very tasty meal, if I do say so myself, and I quite enjoyed the cooking and eating process.  The company was good.  The conversation was good.  So it was an all around good evening.  At the moment, though, I'm feeling a bit hungry - I find that if I'm working as too much of a "hostess", then I forget to eat too much myself!  Oh well.  The visitor who came brought me some bagels from Nairobi... so tomorrow morning, a toasted bagel! Mmmm... a little extra motivation to get out of bed tomorrow :)

Speaking of which, I should probably go to bed.  Thankfully, the city power came back on this evening!  I almost jumped up from the dinner table and did my "city electricity" dance... but then I realized that it probably would have looked rather silly and so I restrained myself!  But a little bit of exuberance did escape, so I still got a little embarrassed in front of my guests... but it was all in the name of welcoming the city power after such a long absence.