A Nice Day, but a Terrible Dinner!

Another nice day.  Looked at pictures, played and visited.  Vitalik is WEARING Eugene out!  That kid will play sports all day and not run out of energy!  This adoption may turn out to be a good get-in-shape plan for Eugene!  We won't be visiting them tomorrow - chasing papers all day so maybe Eugene's old tired body can get a rest. :o)

Last night's dinner was a bit of an adventure.  There are a lot of types of pasta here any varieties of frozen tortalini.  We buy the frozen stuff not really knowing what will be in the middle of the pasta since we can't read the lables.  The real kicker is that anything we consider normal pasta sauce is very hard to find.  Yesterday we brought home some sauce that looked promising.  Our goal was to have tortalini (sp?) and red sauce plus canned corn.  Well, we are not good boyscouts and don't really know how to safely use the very basic handheld can opener tool that is provided here.  As Eugene man-handled the can of corn, we both were quite nervous that he might slice off a finger or something and we both decided that we are finished with canned goods for this trip unless they have the easy-pop top. :o)  Still, we managed to get the corn out without a major injury.  We boiled the mystery pasta, and the next challenge was opening the jar of sauce.  The lid was one we are totally unfamiliar with and had no idea how to open it.  When Eugene finally pried it open, it (of course) splattered all over the floor and chair, but we persevered.  Next came the big (though not totally unexpected) problem.  This was a jar of SALSA!  ARGH!  We both laughed and decided that pasta goes with corn, sort of, so we poured it all together for a scrumptious meal... well, not so much... but we ate it and laughed till we cried and decided we're finished with pasta sauce too.  Thankfully, our facilitator went to the market with us today and helped me choose some italian pasta sauce, so now we are good to go for next time. :o)  As for tonight, we bought some precooked chicken and enjoyed it with some left-over bread.  Not necessarily a well-balanced meal, but it was easy! :o)

MMM MMM!  There are left-overs in the fridge, but we're gonna have to be pretty hungry to eat them!

This is funny!  I just tried to check my spelling on this post - which I usually don't do, but it was irritating me that I didn't know how to spell tortalini.  Anyway, the spell checker in this region is obviously in Russian (duh!), and it highlighted every word.  Oh well! :o)