Kitchen Excitement

Last night was quite the night.  We decided to make Chicken Parmesan with the Chicken Schnitzel patties that are of plentiful supply here.  That went well - put the chicken in the oven and then added a piece of cheese on top.  We don't actually have Parmesan... but that's ok :)  We made Marinara sauce and noodles to go with the chicken.  It came out well!  When the Schnitzel was just about done our helper, Tamer, went to close the lower bottom door to the oven and lost his hold on it and let it drop.  The door fell right off.  The same thing happened a few weeks ago to our morning/lunch cook (wow, it's been long enough to say a few weeks and it still falls within the time we've been here!).  He opened the door without oven mitts, found it too hot and let go and the force of the heavy door falling caused the little loop that holds it on to break and the door fell.  When that originally happened our Campus Manager maintenance all around kind of guy welded it back together.  I guess the welding wasn't strong enough because the door is off again!  Here's our sad ol' oven with just 3 temperature settings, except now the bottom door is missing again.

  

But do not worry, that is not the end of our night's excitement.  So we had no lower oven door, but everything was baked anyway and it still worked as a place to keep things warm.  Dan and I served the students as we normally do until 6:30 when we take our own meal and either Tamer serves or everyone can serve themselves.  When we came back up after eating there was a strange smell in the air.  Tamer was in the back of the kitchen washing dishes and asked Dan if he smelled something and said his eyes were watering from the smoke in the air.  So the three of us tried to smell out and find what was smoking.  It smelled strange, almost electrical rather than a normal fire.  We couldn't see anything smoking, but it was obviously in the air.  So Tamer called William, the campus manager, and he told him to turn off the power since it could be something electrical and there is a main power something or other in the kitchen.  So Tamer shut off the power to the entire campus.  The whole place was black.  It's funny how quickly people just adjust to the power going off.  A few people found candles that they lit, others found flashlights right away and started to come up to find out what happened.  Some students started a game of Sardines.  We had to wait for awhile before William made it back to campus.  In that time we also had gotten our flashlights and I wiped down all the tables in the dark and then started putting away leftovers by the light of my flashlight.  William came and Dr. Wright also came to the kitchen to see what was going on and if help was needed.  They discovered the source of the smoke - the dryer.  There is a washer and dryer in the kitchen for the towels, rags, and apron/smocks.  It had been filled with the kitchen smocks and towels, perhaps overfilled, and the clothes caught on fire.  I didn't actually see the result, but I heard that they were inside the dryer smoldering.  The rank smell was the plastic parts of the dryer burning.  The guys pulled the dryer outside, hosed off the inside, pulled the clothes out and hosed them off too.  We are glad it wasn't an electrical problem and that there were no other issues resulting from it.  I had heard that you're not supposed the leave the dryer on when you're not home, now I know that's a real concern! 

Introduction to the Kitchen

Hello to everyone from Jerusalem!

I know that is not new news... We have been here for two weeks tomorrow.  I don't know if any of you can relate, but I've felt like I needed some time to settle in and get a bit more comfortable before talking about it too much.   That phase has passed and now I will begin to share :)  Of course I still might get distracted and have long breaks between posts.  But that's to be expected, I suppose.

Anyway!  Onto the good stuff, right?  (I know, right?)
We have done and seen a lot, but for now I will mostly talk about the cooking and daily stuff since that is what the title is about.  I don't have a lot of pictures of the kitchen yet, so stay tuned for that.  A few things that we noticed first about the kitchen:
1. Oven temperature choices are 1, 2, and 3.
2. There is an abundance of chickpeas (even though we buy our hummus), olives, pickles, water chestnuts, and okra.
3.  The pots are really heavy :)
4.  There isn't much for measuring/weighing large quantities, we end up doing a lot of estimating.
5.  Everything is in Hebrew, some things have English also.  Time to learn our Hebrew alphabet!

There are between 50 and 60 people at a normal dinner.  I'm still not entirely sure how many students there are exactly.  There are also a few staff members who live on-campus who join us for dinner.  We have cooked 9 meals now, so we're pretty much experts ;)  Ok, not really.  But we do feel like we've learned a lot since our first meal on August 27th.

Speaking of our first meal, here's a little story.  Dan and I decided to make spaghetti for our welcome meal for the students when they arrived on that Friday.  We would serve it with garlic pita (pita is the bread of choice here) and a fresh salad.  So I looked up a spaghetti sauce recipe in my huge cookbook (it took up half my carry-on!) and we multiplied it to feed 60.  First we didn't have enough canned tomatoes and had to try to figure something out with tomato paste instead (that pretty much threw following a recipe out the window), then we had to guess how much spaghetti noodles we were making since the bag wasn't in English.  Well, we ended up making WAY too many noodles.  We had lots and lots of leftovers and felt really silly about that.  But what can you do?  It was only our first time.  A few days later we made some more sauce (since our last batch was a bit shy), layered the noodles with some cheese and stuck it in the oven to create a spaghetti bake.  It was a huge hit and I think that might be the primary way we serve spaghetti here from now on :)  It seemed to retain the moisture better, too.  So that was our first night at work.  I was really stressed and worried about everything.  I've been that way on other nights as well, but so far everything has worked out ok.  We've been 5 minutes late with dinner only twice :D

And just for proof that we're actually here...

And here are the students eating some food we didn't cook: