Last week, quarter grades were due at 7pm Friday night. Let’s just say the system for grade submission here is not user friendly and it takes forever. While I managed to get finished Friday afternoon, many of my colleagues did not finish until, you know, 6:51pm. Cooking for Thanksgiving also started at 7pm.
Now, for some numbers: About 16 of us international types were set to do the cooking… for over 150 people. Before I sound negative about the tradition, let me point out that the actual party and eating of the food was great fun. The cooking, well, not so much.
I arrived at 7pm to start in helping H. with the desserts. We were making cheese cake. So. Much. Cheesecake. 18 to be exact. So, I began opening Oreos for the crust. You can buy boxes of Oreos here, however, inside all cookies are wrapped in packages of 4. 20 Oreos per crust X 18 crusts = 360 Oreos /4=90 individually wrapped packages. That’s a lot of opening. Well, we finished off our crust and I was about to start in on the batter, but when we opened our cream cheese, spirits fell. It was covered in colonies of bacteria and was clearly unusable. Enter K and R. They went on an emergency run to the HIT (our local hypermarket), where they found what translated into English as “milk paste.” Unsure of this substance’s actual make-up, they opened a package (in the store) and ate some. The employees were not amused until they literally bought 80 packages.
Meanwhile, I switched over to help the other R finish making meatballs. He was worried that they were too sticky to roll into balls and needed more bread, but I took a page from the Paula Deen handbook and recommended rubbing out hands in butter (or as Paula calls it, “butta”) so they wouldn’t stick. It was a success. All the meatballs were rolled and they had more butta, so they were probably going to taste better as well.
The cream cheese arrived and I started mixing, and mixing, and mixing. H was in charge of putting the batter into the pan and getting them into the oven and I just kept mixing. Thankfully, we had a stand mixer or it would have been horrible. However, after the first 8 cakes, you memorize the recipe and it goes much faster. I even ran home to grab every large bowl Pink House had to offer so I could continue mixing. I left that night at 12:30 am.
The next morning, I arrived at 10 am to find H having a minor meltdown over the desserts. She had been there since 8am. Well, I just started mixing again and we managed to knock out all the cheese cake by noon. Then I folded in the butter to the fruitcrisp topping (our other dessert. 9 double batches, of course) and then got some help mixing in the sunflower seeds from another teacher’s 5 year old son. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure more went on the floor than into the topping. After this, I fired up the industrial dishwasher (thank you Lakeside Lab for the training and experience) and knocked out a few loads of dishes before going home at 1:30.
I watched Chasing Mummies on the History Channel (it is in English) and headed back over at 3:30 to prepare for dinner. We baked the fruit crisp, cut up some cheese (naturally) and got ready to serve. I was on gravy duty. I served well over half the guests before I was relieved and able to go out and eat. Then, it actually became fun.
My table got 2nd place at pub trivia. We only missed two questions. If only I’d paid more attention to the Mayan calendar. We put that the world ends Dec 20, 2012 instead of Dec 21. I guess, at times, being superstitious could pay off.
After the fun, came the clean up. Lots of dishes. It was exhausting, but the Bulgarian faculty was so nice and appreciative of our work, that I will certainly do it again next year. However, I probably won’t cook again until then.
I have never been so tired after a weekend in my entire life. On Sunday I caught up on the school work I couldn’t do Saturday and on Monday and Tuesday I was so tired that I told my Bulgarian tutor the date was October 24 (it was November 22). I caught up on my sleep Tuesday night and on Thursday I am heading for Vienna Austria. So, my next blog will recount my traveling adventures/traveling naps, since I am still tired from Thanksgiving.
