Food

My honey has been creating many delicious and healthy treats.

Raw, stuffed tomatoes. She took these to an office get-together, and they were gone in seconds.


A new idea from the Positive Choices cook book: Baked veggies & garlic. It was so good!



A raw, cold soup, and some salsa. It was just the thing for a hot summer supper.

A really delicious, vegan, fresh pie made out of raw ingredients. It sounded icky to me, but it turned out to be very tasty, and filling.


Our American neighbors work for Goodyear, and she is really kind. We saw her in the park on the way home, and she said there was supper waiting for us on our table at home. Since she heard that the water supply was going to be cut that afternoon, she thoughtfully made a Tex-Mex supper for us. It was perfect, because our dinner plans that evening had fallen through, and we would have had nothing to eat! Thank you Joyce. :-)


My honey made blueberry muffins and scrambled eggs for breakfast on Sunday.

My honey baked this pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. Actually, I made the filling, and she made the crust and baked the pie.
Cranberry sauce.

I won a frozen turkey in a drawing at the Embassy, courtesy of the U.S Department of Agriculture. We took it over to Joyce to fix for Thanksgiving dinner.

We all got together with other American expats to share a Thanksgiving feast together.

The pumpkin and pecan pies ready to be eaten.

My thoughts go out to all the Foreign Service colleagues celebrating Thanksgiving far from home, especially those who gave up their Thanksgiving to labor tirelessly for days to help Americans during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai/Bombay, including my family, Diplodocus, and Girl in the Rain.
A few days later, my honey and I again celebrated Thanksgiving in a more low-key fashion at home.

And last but not least, we enjoyed another round of baked vegetables the other day. Divine.

On the non-food front, I moved back to the visa section of our operations again. It was a busy week, and I did 597 interviews, including one with Miss Chile 2007. After the interview was over, I pointed her out to one of my female Chilean colleagues who passed by me, and my colleague observed that she seemed taller than most Chileans but not that attractive.

For the second time in one year, an Antarctic tourist ship from Argentina has run aground and sunk with American passengers on board Both times the Chilean navy has gone and rescued them and taken them to the Chilean base on Antarctica. This time the rescued passengers were taken to Argentina after their rescue. Last time our Consular section had to swing into action because all the passengers were flown to Chile when the weather cleared. We were ready to do so again this weekend, but at the last minute they went to Argentina. I'm still trying to figure out why the Chilean navy has had to rescue cruises from Argentina.

Our quiet Saturday afternoon lunch was interrupted by smoke filling our apartment and 4 fire engines roaring to a stop on the street 14 floors below us. We opened our door to the elevator, and smoke flooded into our apartment. I slammed the door shut and my honey and I grabbed the cat, our go-bag, and put on some shoes. On the way down the stairs, we banged on our American neighbor's door to get them out, and got the other Embassy officials as we made our way down the stairs, breathing through our shirts. We snaked our way all the way down and out to the street, where the fire department figured out that a fire in the garbage repository in the basement had caught fire from a lit cigarette. The smoke had risen up the elevator shaft like a chimney. When it was safe to go back inside, we finished our lunch.

Later in the evening we went to the Iglesia del Buen Pastor Lutheran church with some others from the Embassy to listen to a Christmas concert by the FinnAir Singers.