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:

Dan & Paula went to London Part 2

Paula also practiced her skills in London.  Here she worked hard to become a London Crane.

Their last morning in London they had delicious Pannenkoeken (large crepes, basically).  Yummy!

And here's the London Eye:

They had a super time in London!  

Thank you to the Voges for their generous hospitality.  It was a great trip and the perfect stop on the way to Israel!

Dan & Paula went to London

They saw lots of cool things like Parliament & Big Ben (well, they didn't actually see the bell), Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, Tower of London, Parks, more buildings, Twinings Tea Shop store, visited with a few of Dan's friends, and enjoyed lots of different food.  They mostly got around by The Tube, by bus, and lots and lots of walking.  But a few times they were able to ride bikes with the new bike share program.

Some things are different in London.  This is a men's bathroom at a lovely park called Hampstead Heath.

One day they went to Dover and admired the Castle.  "I want to live here" Paula said.

Dan also liked the castle and was able to see some places there that he hadn't when he was there 5 years ago.

But somethings hadn't changed much...

At the end of the day Paula was surprised by finding Candy Floss (Cotton Candy) at a local carnival in town.  What could be better than that?!

Back in London Dan practiced his Shakespeare at the Globe Theater.

Wisconsin

The last 2 weeks have been spent visiting with family and friends in Wisconsin.  We started our trip with a stop in Madison to see Fred, Virginia, and the newest member to the Moore family, Lewis.  Then we unpacked the truck in Merrill with the help of Dad & Mom Moore and our friend Ben.  We had that truck packed very, very tight!  The next day we left for a camping trip up near lake Superior at Pattison State Park.  We got back from that last Thursday and have spent the rest of the time catching up with our friends in Merrill, visiting grandparents, a day trip to Camp Forest Springs to see Brad & Dana and other people we knew from working there ourselves, and seeing my family when they came up this weekend.  Joy just returned from a mission trip to Europe.  I'll be in London just a few days after she left there!  Here are some pictures of what we've been upto.  We leave tomorrow for our week in London tomorrow evening.  We're excited!

Pictures of JUC

A few people have asked about pictures of where we'll be living.  So here are a few pictures  of the Jerusalem University College (JUC) campus from the last time I was in Israel.

This is a picture of the school taken from a park across the valley. 

The door on the left was my door last time I was there.  I shared the room with 3 other girls.  It opens upto the the beautiful gardens where they grow flowers, grapes, and pomegranates.  The picture on the right is looking down at the garden side of campus from the roof top - which is a great place to watch the sunset!  The stairs going up lead to the dining room then another set of stairs go upto the kitchen.

This is the kitchen where we will spend a lot of our days. The back room has more of the equipment, but this is the only picture I have of it right now.  You'll be seeing lots of the kitchen in the future, though :)

And of course we can't forget the serving line (this must have been taken during breakfast) where the students will be wowed by our delicious meals!  Or at least be fed by them...

I hope you enjoyed this little mini tour.  There is much more to see of the campus, but this will do for now.  We have 3 weeks left to pack up all our things and move out of our apartment.  Then we'll head to Merrill for 2 weeks before flying out.  It's nice to take it in steps.

Vanishing Furniture

Our apartment is emptying fast!  Last weekend April & Jason came to pick up a number of pieces of furniture.  Then yesterday my parents took a pile of boxes and some more furniture.  It's strange to see all of the gaps in the apartment and our choices in places to sit are dwindling fast!  But we both find it less overwhelming to think of packing up all our stuff with more if it gone already and it will leave less work for us to do at the end of July.  So thank you to my family for your help!

The volunteer visa applications are in.  Now we have to wait for them to be processed.  The hope is that in about a month we'll be able to pick up our visas in Chicago.  We can stay in Israel for about 3 months as tourists, so the visas would give us permission for the whole year without any trouble.  Hopefully everything goes smoothly with that.

Not a whole lot else to report on our plans.  Just lots of decisions as we choose what to pack to take with us, store, donate, or just throw away.  If you know me at all you'll know that decisions are not one of my strengths.  We've had some nice breaks from figuring all that out, though.  This weekend we got to meet our little nephew Lewis up in Madison.  We also saw Joy before she headed off for training for her mission trip and had time to visit with my parents.  Next weekend we're going to Houston, Texas for the 4th of July and to visit our friends Jeff & Melissa.  It's going to be hot!  But the summer heat up here has been preparing us :) 

Does anyone have any good packing or storing tips to share? 

Tickets!!

Dan & I got our tickets!  We are leaving on August 16th.  The best part?  We're spending a week in London!!  But hopefully it doesn't have the same effect on Dan as it did last time....

Mountain Man

We're excited about our stop in London!  I asked Dan where he'd like to take me and he rattled of a long enough list of places to keep us busy all week.  It will be fun to see where he was the semester I was in Israel.  With everything else to figure out, it will be great to have a vacation that requires no planning.  I married my tour guide ;)

There hasn't been a whole lot of cooking going on lately.  I've been leafing through cookbooks and we did try one Middle Eastern recipe, but that's about it!  We've been working lots and squeezing in other needed tasks (like getting tickets!).  Things are moving along now, though.  We have lots of things to figure out.  I will be working full-time a little bit longer, but I should have more time to work on this stuff soon.  Maybe then I'll miraculously feel confident about cooking for 70 people.  I told Dan yesterday that he should become an expert in carving meat - the butcher (a manly job, don't you think?).