My Cooking Adventure

I invited two of my Greek classmates (both theology students from Romania) over to our house for dinner on Sunday night. Usually, my job seems to be to invite lots of people to our house, and Pelagia’s job is to do all the cooking. I’ve been very happy with this division of labor, but she suggested that maybe I might want to try cooking some time, so I went for it this weekend.

I saw a very nice pork roast at the butcher and decided I wanted to do something with that, but I didn’t even have the foggiest notion of where to begin. Fortunately, our neighbor, James Lilly, is an excellent cook, so he gave me some ideas what to do. I took this photo when I took it out of the oven. I was very surprised, but it can out well!

One of my Romanian friends ended up having a bit of an emergency, so they didn’t come. The Lillies then we’re able to taste the fruit of their advice – we ate and played mahjong at our place. It was very nice.

Today, it’s back to the grind of learning Greek. The past month has been absolutely exhausting. Today was a bit easier for some reason, so I’m taking hope that things will start getting better and that perhaps I’m actually learning something!

Tomorrow (Tues, Nov 14) is the feast day of St. Gregory Palamas (at least according to the Thessaloniki typikon), the city’s second biggest saint. His relics are located at the Metropolitan cathedral. Our French friend Emmanuelle and I were talking about trying to go tomorrow morning before class, but I suspect it will be mayhem. We’ll see…

Anyway, we’ll have Vespers as usual here in Panorama at Agios Georgios, which will be nice.