Awesome Christmas gift

My new favorite cookbook, at least on days when I feel like death by clogged artery: The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

We made her mac and cheese yesterday. Yum.

'Tis the season for yum

Back to share some Christmas Eve yumminess with you... first, we made The Minimalist's popover recipe. Wow. We meant to eat them with dinner, but they never made it to the table. Heck, we'd already eaten half of them before it occurred to me to document their glory, hence the empty muffin cups:


Then we made that awesome duck recipe again (though we used cream sherry instead of tawny port... it worked). I've photographed it before, but just a reminder of what delicious looks like:


We ate around 11pm (it took a while to defrost the duck... oops). Now we're pretty sleepy... we'll get up moderately early tomorrow (by our standards, at least) to go to a Christmas service. I think we'll open presents after we get back, because sleep is my gift to myself :)

Merry Christmas Eve

I have to say, Christmas is not a time when I love the Foreign Service lifestyle. I am far away from my family, suddenly getting pretty bitter that my parents didn't consider it worth the effort to visit. 90% of the Embassy has cleared out for the holiday (many people with kids take longer vacations during the school break, and those without at least clear out to Bangkok or Hong Kong or wherever else for the long weekend), which I would have liked to have done but couldn't for work reasons.

So suddenly, James and I are on our own, padding around our huge apartment in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas--and in a country which, I think it's unsurprising and fair to say, is not always the easiest to live in and that is currently leaving me afflicted with weird ailments.

I guess I am a bit bummed right now. I think I'll perk back up once we land in Bali next week. If Bali can't make it better, what can, right? But right now, I am kind of wishing for stability and permanence. I am kind of sick of constantly changing the billing address on all my credit cards and listening to the nasty hold music. I am sick of living in a place where I can't buy kale or wild mushrooms or proscuitto (hey, these things matter to me). I am sick of not being part of old friends' social equations. I miss bookstores and eating vegetables that haven't been soaked in bleach and malls and movie theaters and getting mail promptly and anonymity.

This will pass. Maybe next week, when the government pays for my plane ticket to Bali. Maybe next year, when I get paid solely to learn Chinese for a year. Maybe the year after, when I move to Beijing, which is, by all accounts, a thrilling and delightful city. But this Christmas Eve, I am going to sulk a bit.

I love black bean soup

And other news.

Best black bean soup recipe ever, that tastes like you cooked it for hours instead of throwing it together out of cans and jars:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 jar of salsa (or today, I used a cup and a half of fresh pico de gallo that I had on hand, which did make it taste even better, but the jar is fine too)
1 can chicken broth
2 cans black beans
1 can refried beans

Heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the salsa and saute for three minutes. Then add the broth and beans; stir it all up and cook until it simmers. Eat. Enjoy. Yum.

I am having a second bowl because it's that good.

Anyway, we got out early--the President always gives you an extra half-day off before Christmas. We were supposed to close at 1pm, though I got my act together closer to 3. Tomorrow we have Christmas Eve off. I love Christmas, though it is kind of a letdown in Bangladesh. Most people at the Embassy are away on vacation so it's pretty quiet, with only a few lonely souls banding together to entertain ourselves. But that's okay, mostly I'll hang out with James, which is always fun. Our apartment looks pretty darn Christmasy this year.

And then on Tuesday we leave for three-and-a-half weeks of vacation. I went back through all the trips I've taken, and I am pretty sure I've never been on vacation that long before. I think Spain and Morocco was only three weeks. My last R&R was almost as long, but not quite, and plus it didn't feel like vacation--it was more like stepping back into my old life in New York, except without having to go to work. Plus, we had to all sorts of practical things to do like pack up the apartment, get ready to move out, etc. that didn't feel vacation-y.

So yeah, 3.5 weeks of pure relaxation. I definitely couldn't do it all in one place--we're splitting time between two different places in Bali and many more in Australia. And first, I have the tricky task of getting all my crucial work done before I leave. Which is terrifying. I am good at starting things but hate finishing them. So knowing I have two more days in the office and three major projects that need to be totally finished? Sheer terror.

Thoughts for this weekend

1. OMG MAD MEN IS SOOOOO GOOD!!!!!!!!!!

2. Never make Christmas cookies whose recipes originate in Central Europe. They just don't get what makes a good cookie there.

3. I have totally stopped leaving my house. For anyone who actually wanted to read about Bangladesh, I apologize. For anyone interested in the Foreign Service, be afraid--at some point in a tour, you may just decide the contents of the boob tube are more interesting than the contents of the city around you. Not something I'm proud of, but hey, I blame Dhaka's prodigious traffic. Seriously, nothing is worth the trouble it takes to get there.

4. When you've started picking your elliptical machine at the gym based on which one you know has the least resistance (a 6 doesn't feel the same on every machine!), you may have started missing the point of working out. And by you, I mean me.

5. Aaaand, I wish my mother would hurry and up and call, as I know she will, so I can get off Skype and back to Mad Men.

The goose is getting fat

Good weekend so far. Charlotte lent us her external hard drive with season 3 of Mad Men on it, for which I am extremely grateful. Which means that thoughts of Don Draper danced in our heads today, with only a break to bake cookies (for a cookie swap tomorrow) and eat huevos rancheros.

Last night we went to a friend's place for wine, cheese, and chocolate. The amount of chocolate he'd managed to acquire from duty-free shops was incredible, and we greatly appreciated it. That might be the endorphins talking...

And pictures from our holiday party on Wednesday! Here is the spread, right before people arrived and the food got devoured:


I was especially proud of the hot chocolate bar. Yum.


And our Christmas tree:


Mostly we ate and drank, though we managed a bit of caroling too. Did I mention I LOVE Christmas???

Celebrations

La la la, sort of recovering from the cold, today is a delightful local holiday, Victory Day. It is a very meaningful day, when the Liberation War was won. But of course, I always have my less-meaningful-sounding version of holidays, so this one is "the day when everyone attaches little Bangladeshi flags to the radio antennae on their cars." Whatever, I get the day off.

We are having some friends over tonight, and Teresa is cooking up a storm. However, I will note that I made the crab dip and the onion dip myself. My onion dip, incidentally, is AMAZING, and it is taking great restraint not to buy a bag of potato chips and consume the entire vat right now. I am not sure the food we're making is Christmas-y, though I figured red velvet cupcakes work in the right color scheme. I looooooove the holidays. I will post pictures of the Christmas tree later.

At this point, work is a race against the leaving-on-vacation-soon clock. There is a lot to get done first. But vacation should be sheer awesomeness. Hooray! I just hope we get there... the night-time flights have been fogged in a lot recently.

Germ squad

Whew... back from Rajshahi. Yet alas, I did not escape unscathed. I brought home with me some delightful germs that are now battling my immune system in an epic sinus infection. Sigh, cough. Oh well.

It meant I missed a Christmas party today, which made me very sad, and I also felt too weak to decorate the Christmas tree, which James was so good as to construct (from its box... I am not a huge artificial tree fan, but we do what we must) while I was away.

But on the plus side, America Week was a huge success! We started adding up numbers of people at different events, and we reached over 17,000 people with our programs. I was quoted by the media for the first time--on my last advance trip I did a little press conference about the program. The quoting was not, er, the biggest success... well, you can read the quote for yourself. At least it gets the ideas right. Here's another article with fuller coverage as well.

And it was pretty fun in the end, after all the hard work. No bugs in my hotel room, thank the heavens. There were some minor transportation issues (it was too foggy for flying in the mornings... oops, so much for that plan), but nothing that created any serious problems for the program. Overall, I think we can give ourselves a good pat on the back.

But first, I am going back to bed... sitting up hurts :(

Reading rainbow

Just finished William Dalrymple's In Xanadu: A Quest. I don't normally seek out travel literature or memoirs of foreign climes, but living in such climes myself, I often receive them as gifts or otherwise (this one was actually purchased by James for his own reading initially--good thing I had the author inscribe it to me :). This one was certainly worth reading; Dalrymple visits mostly forgotten places (well, forgotten by all who aren't history majors at Cambridge), which, by his own admission, don't look like much now. I have never appreciated this motive for tourism--I hated Alexandria, which my friend Jay kept insisting was a wonderful place if you just imagine its past glory. No, thank you. So I think it's a testament to Dalrymple's talents that he made the places he visited on his journey come alive.

And yet, many of the places he visited are not really forgotten--not if you watch the news. His journey through Pakistan is especially interesting that way. I wonder what would happen if a couple of Brits tried to travel that way on their own now.

Best part of the Dalrymple lecture I attended a few weeks back: some loud-mouthed woman in the front row starts her question with, "I came to this lecture not thinking I had read any book by Mr. Dal... [looks around at her neighbors for help; neighbors hiss "Rymple! Dalrymple!"] Dalrymple. But now I see a picture of his books' covers and realize I have read one." Dalrymple immediately shoots back, "I am glad to hear it left such an impression on you, madam." Sweet.