Sunday, December 7, 2008

Lots has been going on the past several weeks. Here's a highlight - my colleague Patti and I were in charge of preparing Thanksgiving dinner for 110 volunteers and staff at our fall conference the week before Thanksgiving.


This pic is Patti, Katheryn and I at a calm part of the process.


We decided to spread out the labor and found several people to be in charge of various portions of the dinner. Katheryn was Sweet Potato Queen. Lindee was Queen of Pies. Dustin was King of cauliflower casserole. Brian was Director of Turkeys. You get the point.



Here are Dustin, Mimi, Austin and Patti working on the Cauliflower casserole.
















Here are two of the members of the pie team, Heather and Elizabeth. Elizabeth had worked in a bakery and turned out beautiful crusts very quickly. Heather made fillings for lemon and chocolate pies, topped w/ meringue.





The results of their efforts - some of the 16 pies they made.





this is the hotel kitchen we had to work in. Interesting seeing how an Armenian hotel kitchen is equipped. Only two ovens. Fortunately they were big enough for us to get two turkeys in each. We cooked 6 big turkeys (35 K) for the event.











Here are Eloise and Mimi putting together plates of crudities for the tables. They remained virtually untouched as the hordes dove into turkey, dressing, gravy, etc.
















Of course, Thanksgiving dinner was not the only thing that happened in the last 6 weeks.


Now I'm on a two week vacation which I will write about in another post.

And work went on during the last 6 weeks. The Armenians were very excited about US election results, very happy to hear about the outcome.

I found out during this time that a grant I had worked on w/ Caritas had been awarded. Its a big EU grant and will support a 3 year project impacting 15 villages in a 3 marz region and will involve 3 additional NGOs in the planning and execution. This will be a major focus for the my next several months. More about it later.