Dinner Party

I have really loved living in my “little Scottish house” – regardless of the fact that we have spotty internet and that when we open the windows (they don’t have screens) that spiders like to come in and visit us! I killed a spider as big as my palm the other day in the shower! When I asked the maintenance man if he could put in any screens, he told me “the spiders here aren’t poisonous”. Hmmm…apparently that comment was supposed to calm my spider annoyance.

I decided spiders and all – to host a dinner party and “get together” for the friends that I have met in Scotland! I practiced my cooking skills and prepared Chicken Parmesan for everyone! We also enjoyed salad, homemade bread (that my friend Angharad had made), and spaghetti! It was a lot of fun to have everyone over! It was also interesting cooking everything and converting recipes from cups to grams and baking in an over using Centigrade instead of Fahrenheit – conversion tables have come in very handy on quite a few occasions!

Before the Dinner Party, I had invited over some girls to bake desserts for the Christian Union meeting at Aberdeen University, where I introduced everyone to “Puppy Chow”! Everyone loved the check mix, peanut butter, powdered sugar and chocolate concoction. Peanut butter isn’t as widely popular here in Scotland as in America and is not often used in baked goods, so I decided to treat everyone here to peanut butter cookies. They don’t even have Jiffy peanut butter in the stores here – which I believe proves my point. I also learned that they call powdered sugar – “icing sugar”, haha you have no idea how long (about 5 times up and down the sugar isle) to finally figure that out.