international flavour

Today is No D Day.  George over at Ninjabetic has declared Oct 7 to be the day that we DO NOT blog about our disease.  We do NOT write about it anywhere.  not FB or Twitter, or anywhere.  click here to read all the No D Day posts!

so what to write about.  hmmmm....  i thought about this alot last night.  i tried to think of things that might be of interest to the DOC, that i enjoy. 

i enjoy reading,  listening to music, singing along with the radio, hanging with family, and i love to cook.   i have been cooking since i was about 12 years old.  i cooked for my family everynight of the week except the weekend. 

both my parents worked so it became my job to make dinner every night.  some days, after picking up my younger sister from school, i would come home to find a note on the counter telling me what to make for supper.  my mom would have jotted down whatever is was she wanted me to make, and what time to start things. 

eventually i started to collect recipes.  when we visited family, i would search through their recipe books, and write out the ones that sounded interesting.  i would go through magazines with scissors in hand.  cutting and pasting these finds in a scrapbook of sorts.  it didn't take long before i was making out a list of ingredients and sending my mother off to the grocery store with my list. (i think she secretly enjoyed this!)

over the years i have collected many, many recipe books.  some of the ones i have belonged to my gramma, and came from the local church ladies group.  some are old family favourites.  one of my aunts lived in many places all over the world including Pakistan and Brazil.  some of her recipes are my favourites. 

in the last several years, my husband and i and a group of friends have been having a monthly dinner party during the winter months.    we call them our "international dinners".  it is a great way to get together through the cold winter instead of sitting at home every saturday night watching The Leafs lose another game.   what we do is put a bunch of different countries in a "hat" and each couple pulls one out.   We then put the months of November, January, February, March, April and sometimes May (depending on how many couples we have participating) in the hat and pick one of them too.  We go from house to house.  The host house supplies the main dish for the chosen country.  each couple then brings either, a side, a salad or soup, an appetizer and a dessert.  this is all determined by a sort of schedule that works so that you get a different course to bring each month.  each item must be homemade.  nothing from a box, or frozen package (so no frozen lasagna for our italian dinner!).

we have had meals from so many different countries, and each one was delicious!  we have sampled fare from such places as Italy, Sweden, Japan, India, Morroco, Portugal, Argentina, China, Scotland, and Greece.

We will be meeting up next week to decide this years plans.  I can't wait!!  if any of you have ideas for Countries please let me know!