Adventures in food

There's probably a few things I could write under this category, and I feel like I've thought of more things than I'll list here and then forgotten them, thus cementing this blog as irrelevant. Good for me.

1) Sunday was Barbroba, the festival of St. Barbara, during which it's customary to make lobiani, a delicious bread-and-beans triangle thingie, kind of like the bread-and-cheese khachapuri but stuffed with beans instead of cheese. Protein!

2) I accidentally made 20 pounds of fried rice for a 20-person Christmas party on Saturday. Apparently, that's too much.

3) In a more generalized observation, I recently wrote for the benefit of the G7s (incoming volunteers) that they should be prepared for a low variety of food. It's not really because Georgian food isn't varied-- how much American food can you actually list?-- but the thing is that every day, you eat Georgian food. They ask me what we eat in America, and I can't even begin to list it because we eat Italian food and Mexican food and Chinese food and Japanese food and Indian food et cetera, to the extent that we get sick of any of the above if we have them too many times in one week. Here, if you make borscht on Tuesday, you will eat it three times a day until it's gone, which can be half a week later. I can't really put my finger on it, but it doesn't bother the Georgians any, so they must have a completely different outlook on food than Americans do.

This is also manifested in the offerings at local restaurants, namely that every restaurant serves the exact same thing with little variation except in quality. I didn't really realize how strange I found that until I saw an ad in an American newspaper that one of the other volunteers had, and it was for a restaurant that featured crab and Gouda cheese soup. "Mmm," I thought, "that might be good." And it occurred to me that despite the plethora of available ingredients, there's almost no food experimentation going on in the restaurants or at home. There was a cooking show on TV that showed a woman putting cheese in eggs, and my host mother was fascinated. I was thinking, "Eggs and cheese have been around as long as Georgians have. You never thought of that?" Maybe the thinking is that if the food was good enough for ancient Georgians, why mess with it? Maybe the thinking is completely different and is outside my scope of understanding because I'm from a different cultural background. Politically correct response: What a fascinating display of cultural variance. Instinctive response: Why are they so resistant to change???

Don't quote me on that.