I was OUT!

Last night I went to Team Trivia once again. We did much better last night than we did the previous week, finding ourselves in first place going into the final round. Once again we ended with zero points, since we didn't know the answer to the final question and had wagered all of our points. It was fun even in losing!

We are having a multi-cultural week at work, so each group had to pick a culture or country to learn about. It involves a cooking competition, judged by some picky eaters (how does that work?). I chose Israel for my group's country, since I knew I could make some interesting food and know enough about the country that I can help my kids out a lot on the "research" stuff. How it worked is that we made them research stuff and then this afternoon I had the kids share what they learned and then I told the kids more detail about the various things that their peers learned. We did the cooking this morning. I had them help me make Israeli salad, which is tomato, onion, cucumber, red pepper and green pepper chopped up and mixed together with an olive oil and lemon juice dressing seasoned with salt and pepper. We threw some parsley and cilantro in for a little bit of extra flavor, too. I made mejadra, which is a rice, lentil and onion dish. It is a typical Middle Eastern food. The only thing the kids did on that was cut the onions up. I intended to have them help more on that, but they were busy chopping stuff up and I knew that I needed to get the rice and lentils cooking, so I started that and ended up doing all of it. That was probably best, since the lentils required more cooking time than the package said they did. We also made borekas, which are phyllo filled with a cheese or spinach filling. We made some of each. They are really good, but are a mess to make. Phyllo is a pain to work with. Those went over really well, however, so the effort was worth it!

If I had to guess, I would say that the 5-7 year old group had the best tasting food with the best presentation. They made Chinese egg rolls and hot and sour soup. The egg rolls were very good and I hear that the soup was okay but not spectacular. As you might imagine, most of the work was done by their leaders. Our group had the most variety in the food since we were the only group to make three items, and our presentation was good but not great. Our kids did most of the work on our food. One group (or their leader, as I observed) made some Native American flat bread (which I did not get to try) and the other made Irish ham and cabbage with potatoes and carrots, and I think the kids probably helped a lot on that one. It was good, but much less "interesting" than the other stuff made.

I was rather tired all day from not getting enough sleep at night and then from helping the kids cook, so when I came home from work today I went straight to bed for a nap. Two and a half hours later I woke up. My roommate came home and did some stuff around the apartment and then left again before I woke up. I never heard her. My hair was pulled back in a pony tail and looked exactly the same when I woke up as it did before I went to sleep. All of these things tell me that I was out cold! I was really asleep and didn't even move. I haven't taken a nap like that in a long time, but I really needed it today!