Some Stuff

I've really been in the mood to write this last week, and I got all mentally prepared to pump out a post a day because I've just been that chatty! Sunday night I had all these things that I wanted to talk about, and I spent most of that evening plotting out various points about some topics to discuss. It was a good feeling, being able to finally feel worthy enough to join the ranks of millions of other upper twenty somethings with a lot of opinions about things we don't necessarily understand, all of us exclaiming "Yes! I am a blogger! Look at how bloggy I am! Boo yah, bitches!"

And then it got cold.

When it gets cold, my host siblings decide to not go to school. Instead, they lurk at home all day, screaming and hitting each other, fighting over the computer, and, if you're Ani, demanding that we bake something every day.

So that's what I've been doing this whole week. I get home from school (which has been hilariously short due to the cold, and most of my students staying home (........ugh.)), change into normal clothes, come into the petchie room and am instantly and voraciously greeted with a, "Johanna! Hello! Today we will make...[insert food here]!" This is about where Ani will realize we need one ingredient from the store, so she will say, "Johanna. You want Nardi [backgammon]? If I win, you go to store. If you win, I go." She always says this with a devilish grin, and rightly so, because she knows I suck at backgammon and the chances of her having to go outside are slim if we play with that as the prize. After a very vicious ass kicking, I usually trudge down to the store, ask a very amused store clerk if they have x item, and trudge back up the slippery cobblestone street.

So far this week we've made:
- Chocolate chip cookies (red and blue ones, which made me laugh really hard but I couldn't really explain to her why I thought it was so funny without going into a huge discription of Halo and what Red vs. Blue even is, so I just told her that I was being a weird American again)
- Pizza
- Brownies
- More cookies

My host mother yesterday yelled at us, informing us that we would get fat if we kept doing this. I'm inclined to agree with her, and Ani going back to school will be a delightful day for my rear end. Hopefully the cold breaks next week and she decides to be scholastic again.

Anyway, between all the baking, backgammon, and gratuitous amounts of pictures she keeps dragging me out to take (the next post will be about that, because goodness, has that been something else!), I've managed to finally take care of something on this blog that I've wanted to do for a while.

You might notice to the right there's a new little category called "Media Whoring" with some sparkly colorful circles and weird things inside of them (all of which can be downloaded here, with even more colorful circles and weird things inside of them!) They represent the various social media timesucks I'm a part of. Well, some of them. My favorite is currently iOS only, which is unfortunate because it's a super goobery weather app called WeatherMob and the people on there crack my ass up. But that's besides the point. The ones that I can actually link to this here blog of mine are all up there. It's currently an uneven number, which is driving me crazy, so I'm trying to think of one last one I can join and post stupid things on just so I can fill that last space. Subsequently, if you know of one, please dear god inform me!

Listed are Instagram, Flickr, Soundcloud, Pinterest (no clue why I put that one on. I think I was trying to make an even eight), Facebook (which just turned ten years old this week, so they released little promotional videos for everyone that was personalized based on their specific timelines. All mine did was make me realize that I've been on Facebook for eight years, which is easily the longest relationship I've had, second to World of Warcraft, which I clocked up at six years. After that were actual human relationships...I feel like I might be doing something wrong?), Twitter, and Foursquare.

Unless you're a part of any of these platforms, and you wanna like totes be friends, the only ones of interest you'll find are Instagram, Flickr and Soundcloud. Soundcloud especially. I've been surreptitiously recording various sounds while I've been here with the intent of putting them on this blog for a full multimedia experience of this goofy country. I'm a little backlogged in going through all the stuff I've got, but I've put a few clips on that site. They're mainly sounds from the Tbilisi Metro (which I love, and can't really explain why), and a bunch of singers from a festival this past fall. Apologies in advance for any idiotic comments my friends and I make during any of the recordings.

So there we go. This post is pretty pointless, except to tell you that I've not been lazy - in fact the exact opposite - and that I've made a few minor changes that basically just make this thing look a little bit fancier. I promise I'll actually put something of substance up in the next day or two, if not tonight.

Caucasus Cookies!

We got paid yesterday. Naturally, I thought of all the things I could do with this money involving food, so I decided to bake cookies!

After a quick Google search for "baking in the Caucasus region" yielded this recipe, I decided to follow it and see what all it'd taste like!

Sans oatmeal. Cause really, that just gets in the way of chocolate.

Having no real mental scale for what grams are in terms of, well, anything (THANKS STUPID AMERICA), I went ahead and started gathering these materials at the store. Surprisingly, all of them were fairly easy to scrounge up. The hardest part was realizing that the bags of white powder that were next to the salt were, actually, more salt, and not sugar like I thought. It was also amusing to me that the baking powder and vanilla powder were by the coffees and teas instead of the other baking things. Additionally hilarious was that the butter was in a freezer.

Georgian supermarket shenanigans aside, my friend Sophia came over and we started the baking process.

Ingredients!

We chopped up the chocolate bars into little chunks, and then decided that there clearly was not enough chocolate. Not pictured above is another bar of white chocolate, so we threw that in as well. My family doesn't really have a scale or measuring cups, so instead we used a wine glass to measure things, because if there's one thing that every Georgian knows, it's that the wine glasses are 100mg. We decided to double the recipe, and soon realized that the called for amounts were going to yield bizarre cookies. In the end, we put in slightly more flour (per my sisters advice), way less sugar, and a little less butter (maybe. I'm not 100% sure how much butter I even bought, let alone how much we put in, since the package was all in Georgian and was completely devoid of any type of identifiable quantity), but the taste test of the batter confirmed that we were on the right track. The crazy German brown sugar I bought is actually large crystals instead of fine granules. I debated grinding it up, but then forgot to. However, it still tasted normal and delicious, so no harm done.

After sitting in the petchi (wood burning iron stove of amazingness) for less than 10 minutes, the first batch came out. I should mention that we didn't use the actual oven on account of it being full of pots and pans and isn't actually used to prepare food. We, instead, bake with either the crazy Russian Easy Bake oven in the living room, or the lower part of the petchi. Or, like last night, we light a fire in the fireplace and then roast meat over the glowing embers, thus causing the house to smell like pinecones, fire, and barbecued pork. But back to the cookies! Since the pan was super hot, and there was no room to put it on the table, we did the natural thing:

Yeah, that's right. We just put it on the floor.
I fucking love this place.

Ani let me do the honors of taking the cookies off the pan, and even sang me a little celebratory and triumphant tune as she handed me the scraper. Myself, Ani, Sophia, and Goga (my host brother), all armed with cookies, cheers'd one another and took our first bites at the same time.

Please let it be known that I make bomb ass cookies, even with zero measuring and with less than ideal ingredients.

The cookies themselves are slightly more cakelike, almost fluffy in texture. It was weird the first bite, but considering where we are, it's almost fitting. Georgians love cakes. I've had three cakes over the last two weeks in school for various reasons. Even the baked goods here, like their sweet breads, are more akin to cakes instead of bread or American cookie textures. I think it's a part of the result of using baking powder and not baking soda maybe? Unsure, but Ani informed me that these cookies were better than the ones her last American made and really, that's all that matters.

Yum!