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: