Since yesterday I've been feeling homesick and I blame the chicken. You see, Alex's mom is working two jobs. She leaves at 8, comes back at 1, goes to another job at 3:30 and comes back and midnight. Yuck, I know. And Alex works early to about 4-5. And I work at home, unless I happen to be working in Athens. So the duties of housewife sometimes fall on me. Yesterday I worked, cleaned the house, went running, and came home just as Alex's mom arrived back from her first job. She had vegetables and chicken with her. (The chicken was not nice clean AMERICAN chicken where you aren't even sure it is chicken, it was the kind of chicken where you cannot avoid the fact that it is chicken.) So she looks at me tap typing away and asks me if I could make lunch. Sure, I say. (I was planning on it. I was thinking pasta. One of the two things I can cook.) Can you make this? She asks. This? I ask. She explains me how to make a sort of baked chicken casserole thing. Incredibly, I understand. (This was done in Greek, for those of you who have forgotten my situation.) Anyway, I'm a little annoyed because I only like cooking if I can be creative (perhaps why I'm not the best cook) and it scares me to try to recreate one of her dishes. But I say yes, and she goes to take a nap. (Poor dear she is ALWAYS exhausted.) Then I push my work away (again, this is difficult, this working from home thing.) and take out all the ingredients I'll need. We don't have any potatoes. I go to the store and end up spending 20 euros on god-knows-what. I come back. I cut up vegetables, peel potatoes (with a KNIFE) and throw some spices in. (That was what she said to do, pointed to the spice rack and said, "eh, afto" Now that I think about it, perhaps she meant something specific...) Then comes the chicken. It is soaking in a bowl in the sink. I take a piece out. It has a strange congealed blood-like substance on it. I bring it over to the cutting board (remember kids, never cut chicken on a wooden cutting board) and try to cut the thigh from the leg. But there is a BONE in there. Should I break the bone? Do knives CUT bone? I AM NOT A SURGEON HERE. (And if I was the chicken would be very dead anyway.) I start to panic. I'm already borderline vegetarian and I cannot handle raw meat. The skin begins to peel from the leg. I want to throw it away. It doesn't look edible, anyway. Finally I take out our biggest knife and hack at it until the bone breaks. Then I do that two more times. Somehow I don't cut off any of my fingers. I put the chicken in the casserole dish and shove it in the oven. Now the vegetables are ruined with the gross chicken on top. I leave it in the oven and refuse to look at it. Alex gets home about an hour later. I tell him the story. He says "my princess cut CHICKEN?" I'm not sure if he was being sarcastic or not.
Anyway, turns out the chicken was good, even though I refused to eat it. I might not ever eat chicken again, actually.
And how does this relate to being homesick? I have no idea, but after the chicken incident I kept thinking about two things. A) cooking at home with the family and how most of the time we ate what I wanted when I was home and no one ever made me cut up chicken or onions and B) cooking with Shannon and being afraid TOGETHER of things like chicken. Which is why we ate a lot of salads. Which led to me thinking about home and how long it has been since I've seen anyway (nearly a year now) and then I got worried that everyone is going to forget me. So, uh, don't forget me, loves.
(that was very therapeutic.)
Also, story Alex just told me. The guy who was is in Eurovision from Russia was in Greece a few years ago and all the girls loved him and told him to say, "Ego poli oraeo pethi." And he said, "Ego poli oraeo pedi."
How do you write the dth sound in English?
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