Sunday Dinner

The new recipe for the night was another fantastic creation from the talented Pamela Reiss. This time we tried 'Middle Easter Squash and Couscous Soup' from Soup: A Kosher Collection. Now, given that we live in China, certain things are hard to find, like couscous as it turns out. And acorn squash. The orange beastie on the left is the squash we used. We thought it might be acorn like, but it turned out to have an unbelievably tough skin. And we do mean unbelievable. We kept thinking we were wrong and trying to cut it again only to continuously re-discover that it really was that hard. We had to hit the cleaver with another object to work it through this monster. And it had green colored flesh - kind of creepy. We thought it wasn't ripe yet, but after sawing away at the sucker for about 30 minutes, we were doing something with it, so it might as well turn into soup. Turned out incredible! And it was even better today when we finished it off.

The rest of the meal was made up of green beans with garlic, (we were trying to copy a common Chinese dish and didn't quite make it - but we will persevere) another attempt at naan, (getting closer but still not good) another successful round of chicken jhalfrazi, and some very nice applesauce gingerbread cake. Michael even made his own applesauce to put into the cake after we couldn't find applesauce at the grocery store.
This fabulous meal is being shown to its best advantage by the lovely Maya. Let's everyone give her a big hand.

This was the total crowd from dinner. There is Cherie, Maya, Michael, and Cara. We know Cherie and Maya from Friday night services. It was a good thing they were over, because it ended up requiring all four of us to make this dinner. If they weren't here, we probably would have given up sometime around 7pm and had some carrot sticks and oddly flavored potato chips for dinner instead.