Food and yarn

Yesterday evening was my first Greek cooking class. So at 7:00 PM the 15 other people in my section and I gathered in the tiny kitchen in the Student Union to learn how to make various items of Greek cuisine. Yesterday's menu was tzatziki, horiatiki, a kind of mincemeat roll in tomato sauce that I didn't catch the name of, and rice. Stavros, our teacher, was having us eyeball all of the ingredients and spices, which was a lot of fun for all of us because we had no idea of what we were doing and therefore no idea of how much of any spice we needed. But everything turned out really well, and there was a lot of food. I think I had more at dinner last night than I normally eat in an entire day here. But everyone was hungry enough to eat a lot, because when you start cooking an entire dinner from scratch at 7:00 PM, you get to eat at about 9:00 PM, by which time everyone was starving. In two side notes, (1) I am amazed at how the staff can manage to produce enough food to feed 160 people in that kitchen, because it's maybe fifteen feet on a side, and we couldn't even fit the entire class in there at one time and have room to turn around in, and (2) cooking for 18 people is much different both from cooking for four people and for cooking for 400 people.

Also, way to amaze roommates number 2(ish): knit, especially stranded knitting. I cast on a scarf from the yarn I obtained the other day last night (a variation on Binary from the Winter 2006 Knitty), and absolutely amazed my roommates (1) that I was knitting, (2) that I was knitting with more than one color of yarn, and (3) that I've been knitting since I was elementary school, and (4) with my description of other things I've knitted recently. The discussion branched off into tangents concerning the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Unicode, the Cthulhu mythos, and stereotypes of Catholic schoolgirls. I also ended up promising to teach my roommates how to knit if they obtained needles and yarn, which could be exciting because I'm not a very good teacher, but I couldn't really say no. It was fun, but at the same time I just don't get why knitting is so amazing to everyone. All I'm doing is following directions!