Guests for Dinner

We had invited the señora who cleans the apartments, Norma*, and her daughter Paulina and Norma’s mother to dinner at 7:30 today, so after working on some homework and running some errands, we started getting ready about 6pm. I cleaned up downstairs and did all the dishes. Steph came down and started cutting carrots into little sticks to steam in the pressure cooker while I was putting together a while sauce. The cream I had bought turned out to be artificial cream. It’s made of skim milk, sodium benzoate, xanthan gum, and a few other things. Gross. I should have checked the ingredients before buying it. Most milk products are fake here, but I thought cream only came from real milk. The sauce was doomed to be a little different than I had wished. There was, however, a recipe on the back of the bag of cream. I decided to follow the recipe instead of making it up. It said to put one large onion, a little butter, half a bag of cream (the bag is one liter, so half a bag is about two cups) and some pepper together. I obediently sautéed one large onion in butter. It seemed like a lot of onion to me, but that’s what the recipe said. I added the whole bag of cream, since half wouldn’t made enough and I hoped to dilute the onion in the final product. I added some squares of sliced ham (which isn’t actually made of ham either... the only stuff I could find is made of cow, chicken, and pig meat with lots of water and salt) to the sauce to make it a little more exciting. The sauce came to a boil while I was working on the French bread, so I turned it down and let it simmer a while. The French bread is actually pretty good. Steph split it down the middle after she finished the carrots and buttered it and I cut up some garlic into tiny pieces to add to the top with a little salt. We put it in the oven at whatever the highest temperature on our Centigrade-measured oven is, hoping that it was something like broil. Meanwhile, two pots full of water on the stove were heating up to a boil. When the pasta pot was boiling, we threw in a couple of bags of macaroni elbows (I couldn’t find any fettucine, so it was elbows, spirals, or spaghetti, all sold in tiny bags of 200 grams). The elbows here are called “coditos” which is the diminutive form of elbows. It should mean something like “little elbows” but they were enormous. They were almost big enough to stuff and call cannelloni. Since we had realized that the pressure cooker we are borrowing from the bishop doesn’t have a steamer in it, we decided to just boil the carrots. When the other pot was ready, we threw in the carrots to soften them for a few minutes. With everything ready, we waited. At 7:40 no one had arrived. At 7:50 no one had arrived. At 8:00 no one had arrived, and we were almost deciding to just start eating. At 8:02, Norma and Paulina came. Norma’s mom was sick with the fever, so we didn’t get to meet her, but we served up some overcooked noodles with sauce, some cooked carrots with brown sugar and butter on top, and a basket of sliced garlic bread. It wasn’t all we had hoped for. After the prayer, Norma and Paulina picked at the food a little, not sure what to do with it. Norma began eating stoically and Paulina decided the carrots would be okay, and started nibbling at them. As I ate, I realized that the sauce was really, really oniony. It was probably about half onion, half mayonnaise-like artificial cream, and a tiny bit of fake ham. I had sort of envisioned it differently. Oh well. The conversation was rather halting at the beginning. I’m no conversationalist in the first place, but I discovered that when I’m responsible for the awful food that the guests are choking down, I have even less to say. I explained that we had tried to make something typical from our country, but it didn’t turn out quite like it usually does in the United States. Norma assured us that it was delicious and continued picking away, half a noodle at a time. Paulina had finished her carrots and tried to look interested in the noodles; she’s only thirteen years old, so she’s not a very good actress yet. The conversation picked up a little during the dinner. Paulina likes to read; so she and I had something in common. We even found a book that both of us were familiar with. Steph has been fascinated by the traditional clothing of the women, so she talked to Norma about that. When we had both run out of steam, we settled on the topic of differences between the United States and Guatemala. So the dinner conversation turned toward the prices and availability of fruits and vegetables, the austere, uncolorful cemeteries of the U.S., and Halloween traditions. Thankfully, Guatemalans have a very strong respect for food. To them wasting food is something akin to denying the existence of God—you just don’t do it. Both of them eventually finished their plates. Paulina even accepted another glass of juice. Neither of them touched the garlic bread. For me, it was the saving grace of the meal, but I’m not sure they knew what it was for. Usually there is a basket on the table with some towel-wrapped tortillas in it. This strange North American aberration from normalcy was unexpected, and since the stuff wasn’t on their plates yet, they just ignored it. When everyone had finished their food, Steph brought out the dessert. It was a little sloppier than normal pineapple dream torte, probably because the fresh pineapple had more juice in it than drained crushed pineapple from a can. It’s also usually a little sweeter. Steph had commented that it probably needed more sugar as she was finishing it, but there was no real way to mix more sugar in after having poured it into the serving dish. Between the lack of sugar in the cream cheese mixture and the not-quite-sweet pineapple, it just really wasn’t that good. Of course Norma and Paulina ate their portion, and I ate mine, but Steph decided to abstain and for once, I didn’t offer to help her finish. All in all, I guess I’ve had worse meals, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a worse meal with guests. At least it wasn’t a complete failure. Now Norma and Paulina can tell their friends about the weird American food they had at the weird Americans’ house. That has to count for something. And I can tell you about it, and that’s something too. *Names have been changed.