Hello Everyone,
It's Claire, the one who used to keep you updated all the time. Well here I am, back again, and attempting to not be so terrible at keeping a blog going. Perhaps my absence deserves some sort of explanation. I wish I could tell you that I have been off doing amazing things, meeting new people, seeing new places, but the truth is that I've been studying. As I said before, I took my level exam from my last course, had a week off, and they started back into second level Hebrew. I've also taken Greek and Hebrew back up... but only when I have time to actually look at them. The reason, this Hebrew level is literally blowing my mind. I can't even believe that the entire class is in Hebrew... and that I actually understand what is being said most of the time... I also can't believe that I have four more levels to go after this. I dream in Hebrew sometimes, or more like have nightmares about my class! (ha) But seriously, this 25 hours of Hebrew class a week is no joke. I never thought I would be so focused on anything in my life. Well, I would now like to bring you through some of the things that I have been doing in my weeks apart from you.
1. I've been cooking a lot. This of course is my attempt to save money and have some semblance of a budget. I've made salads and all types of rice, but this is more than that, this is the story of my first whole chicken:
It all began with a sale on meat. If I spent 150 sheckles I could 6 kilos of meat for 60 sheckles. (I split the meat with Anna). So I walked out of the store with 3 and a half chickens and 2 pounds of ground beef. Just to give you an idea, usually the beef a lone would cost 60 sheckles (around 12 -14 dollars.) The only issue was that neither Anna or I had ever cooked a chicken before...so I called Mom. The following pictures where stolen from Anna.
This is the subject. Notice the chicken has a neck, something Anna and I had never seen before, so because we had never seen this and it looked so strange...I cut it off. Believe me it hurt me more than it hurt the chicken. Later I found out that I could have left the darn thing on the body. Figures. I also gave it a nice bath and rubbed with some chicken seasoning that I bought soley because it said "Chicken Seasoning" on it in English. (This tells you the kind of day I was having.)
Here we see the chicken in our "oven." Anna told me that she's seen ovens like this on house hunters, so apparently its completely normally to plug your "over sized toaster oven" looking oven into the wall and call it a day in Europe. The thing is I had no idea it was a real oven until some told me that the tempture dial was in celcius and I could cook anything I wanted in it. I think a cake should be next...
This is the finished product. Actually it can out really well, other than being small and neckless. I am happy to debut this as my first chicken, may it not be the last. Anna and I have been enjoying eatting it for the past few days. (That night I enjoyed it with some mac n' cheese... mmm classy).
Well the rest of my pictures are currenly not loading on my computer... so I will try and update you again in the next few days! Sorry about this.
Love,
Claire in Israel .
In my opinion, the neck is the worst part of the chicken. The worst. You weren't missing out.
ReplyDeleteI started using the metric system as much as possible about a year ago, it really is a smart system if you ask me. Especially measuring temperature in Celsius: It makes sense that water freezing and water boiling would be 0 degrees and 100, respectively.
I hope you are well.