This is my 101st post on here. Cool.
Tonight marked the occurrence of my first pancake date. It wasn't really a "date" in the traditional sense because it was with my friend Anca, her husband and their daughter, but I like how the phrase "pancake date" almost rhymes, so I'm sticking with it. Despite having lived here for a year and a half, tonight was the first time ever that I invited people into my apartment and prepared food for them. This might seem surprising, but considering the fact that I can not recall a single time when I did such a thing for friends in the states, it's pretty status quo for me. I just don't invite people over, and I particularly don't cook for people, unless it's with them (I secretly love cooking with people). I don't know how to cook and have little desire to learn. But, I can do pancakes. I really like Anca and her family. They have invited me to their home countless times and shared their food with me, they've taken me on hikes in the mountains, on trips to Brasov (where Anca's mom feeds us copious amounts of goodies) and on strolls through the city, they've played ping pong with me, taught me how to paint eggs, helped me run part of the drama week and written an article for the local newspaper about me and the Peace Corps. All of this, and the most I've done to reciprocate has been to produce a bag or two of cookies at dinner time. It's tough, even for a non-entertainer introvert who relishes an empty apartment and a silent phone, to take in so much kindness without doing something more significant than cookies in return. Well, tonight was the night. My little mediocre pile of pancakes and sticky saucer of "mock syrup" hardly make up for what Anca, Doru and Dodo have done for me, but it's a start. A start that I was nervous about all day, but will remember for a long, long time.
On a side note, pancakes are called clatite here and are cooked super thin and rolled up with jam or chocolate in the middle, more like the French crepe than our puffy version. The family was very curious about the process that goes into making and eating American style pancakes, so it turned into a pleasant little cultural exchange, as well.
1 comment:
I am sure that everyone had a great time. It is fun to introduce people to new food.
I think that some people are just hosts and others are not. I love to cook and know that I am good at it, it just doesn't often occur to me to invite people over to eat.
But good friends don't mind if you never invite them over to your apartment and instead just go to their house all the time to watch movies and drink rum until the wee hours of the morning. And occasionally we return the favor in some small way.
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