International "Food Festival"

I've been attending a lot of eating related events with my friends on the 12th floor lately, and my friend Mathilde from France organized the next one, which she refered to as the "International Food Festival". Anyways, the basic idea was pretty straight-forward, each person attending brings a dish from their home country. A cheeky Australian friend suggested I bring hamburgers and pizza, however my mind was moving towards the food I miss from home. Because I was expecting an abundance of food, nothing too fancy was required. Ultimately, I decided to make Guacamole, which you might say, "thats not American!", but I was repping California, and given the influence of Mexican cuisine, (not to mention hamburgers originated as a German food), I decided it was necessary, especially given that no one else was even from the American continents, and rarely get Mexican food.

Anyways, as most of you are aware, I love eating; its one of my top five passions. Overall, the "festival" was a success, and I filled myself full of delicious meats. Mathilde made some toast with patte (sp? I don't know how to accent the E if thats even right), and also some with this pork stuff that came out of a can from France and looked kind of like tuna. She also made some duck, which withheld its rank as my favorite meat (seriously, I'm thinking duck tacos. Its like cabeza, but way better). Tomomi made some sort of Japanese pancake thing that was kind of like an omelet too, and had bacon on top and some sauce, delish. There was the more Aussie/English foods, shepard's pie with mushy peas, trifle, some sort of custard with kiwi's (made by the New Zealander of course). There was chicken tika masala, malaysian assam (tamarind) prawns, some sort of Asian noodle dish I forget the name of, and some chicken wings (which wasn't really any sort of nationalist expression). After that it was time for desert. Some sort of cake, some Chinese donuts, and some Indian deserts I never quite got the name of.

My guacamole which went over well. A few of the people had tried it when I made some a month ago and where looking forward to it. Before that previous time, Simon had always made guacamole with just mashed up avocado, salt and pepper (I laughed at him, then felt pity, and finally set him on the path towards enlightenment. I mean, its not like you can't find the recipe online, how else do you think I made it?). Also, we were all pretty packed in around the tables, and I was down at one far end, and through the various voices I heard a guy at the other end, who was scooping some guacamole onto his Dorito chip, say, "...is he from Texas?". Interestingly enough, I had made a joke earlier in the day about taking a page out of Peggy Hill's book and bringing some Frito pie, to be more American (I had actually seriously considered bringing green bean casserole but couldn't find any of the crispy onion ring things).

Choppin' stuff.
These are the tasty prawns Adilah made. She also took some of these pictures and has a digital SLR I am jealous of, but its not like I'm not usually too lazy to carry around my own small camera anyway.


The joys (and sorrows) of boxed wine know no boundaries. Pakistan, what it do.

Overall, good times. I'm a little out of chronological order, as the dinner was on Sunday, and my next post I'm planning is about a skate video premier I went to on Friday. It was pretty wild and entertaining. I'm done with classes for the semester, have the next week or so to finish my final papers, and then an exam at the end of June. I'll post again when I need a distraction from my studies and my fingers don't hurt from using the keyboard.