Day 25: DINNER FOR THE STAFF

To show my appreciation to the Project Manana staff, I decided to make them an American dinner (since I don't know how to cook Dominican food.)

I am going to give you blow by blow how this day has gone to help you experience everything it took to make dinner.

To even get to the grocery store, the cook, whom we call Mami (or mommy,) and I took an Uber. Who would have thought Uber would be in the Dominican Republic right? So we got to the grocery and I try to find what I need to make dinner. Mind you, Mami only speaks Spanish, so it was a little challenging to talk about what I needed to buy for dinner. She told me she has to help me make dinner, which I assume is only because she wants to make sure I cook it all correctly and because the cookware (stove, etc.) is very different from the states.

I found what I needed: boneless, chicken breasts, green beans, corn (since I couldn't find baked beans) and macaroni and cheese because you can't have an American dinner without macaroni and cheese. Mami asked if I wanted to make a salad and I said sure why not. I didn't know if she meant like a side salad sort of thing or what, but I wasn't going to eat it so that wasn't a problem.

We check out and have to take a taxi home since we didn't drive over here, which I paid for.

We didn't start cooking until around 6:30 pm so that it could be done by 8.

 So the Dominican salad was prepared by dicing up two heads of lettuce and one radish as a cucumber (not pictured) and tomatoes were sliced as a side dish for the salad.

Since I am really great at making any type of pasta, I made the macaroni and cheese. I decided to saute whole, green beans before putting together the buttered corn in a small, white bowl.

The chicken was the hardest part for me (which also took the longest.) We cut the chicken breasts into fillets and added a few, ground cloves of garlic with two Dominican, chicken bouillon cubes before frying it all in a large skillet with some flavored oil (I'm not exactly sure what she added.)

Above is the pictured smorgasbord of food that Mami and I cooked for the team. Some were not able to make it, but I was happy to receive high praises that it was good nonetheless from those who did.

I thought you might want to see what kind of chef I am in the kitchen when I put my mind to it. $70 dollars and 7 full stomachs later, I was happy to have done this small gesture of my appreciation for all that they have done these past three weeks.

Please pray for us while we are down here. My supervisor, Brian, has been dealing with a cold for the past three weeks and is slowly getting better. We will not have any breaks when the next team comes in on July 5th until the end of July, so please pray he makes a swift recovery this week before July 5th. Thank you for your prayers and love!