International Night Kickoff

When we were first married I told Joe that when we had kids I wanted to have "International Night" once a week to teach our kids about different cultures. I had forgotten about that idea until Joe brought it up recently. Sounds a little dorky:), but I thought that it too would help me be more creative in what we have for dinner. We like trying new things and typically I make new recipes most nights, but I still often stick to the same types of recipes--so hopefully this will help me branch out a bit!

Last week we started with "Guatemalan Night". Layla and I made a Guatemalan flag and everything:). You can't tell from the pic, but the little things in the food are flags too--they're just backwards:). We had chili relleno casserole, rice with chayote fritanga (except I worked with what I had in the house and used yellow squash instead), and broccoli with a dijon sauce (not Guatemalan but I found it on the same site I found the other stuff and others served it with the rice:D). In the future, I need to plan our international meals out better so they can have more unique ingrediants, but it was a good start:). Everything was really good too. I got the idea to do Guatemala b/c I noticed El Norte on our list of movies this month On Demand--anyone else remember that from high school Spanish? :) We actually started watching it too and it's not too bad--we get a lot of indepedent films on random movie channels and On Demand so we watch a lot of strange movies and I actually like quite a few of them:).

Last night was "French Night". I decided on it very last minute, so I just quick found some recipes and again, nothing was too crazy. We had a curry chicken with rice recipe (that was a little heavy on the curry for me, but not too bad, Joe liked it and Layla first was eating it and then said she didn't like it, but still ate it), a cold French carrot salad and rice pudding for dessert. Poor Gibson has missed out on the International Nights b/c he goes to bed right when we eat dinner, but he always gets our meals the next day as leftovers so really, he's not missing out:). He just often gets hungry for dinner around 5:30 and we normally don't eat until 6:30/7 when Joe gets home.

Oh, and this is unrelated to "International Night", but Elv had a seizure a couple of nights ago:(. Poor buddy. He's now had two pretty closet together--otherwise they were pretty spread out. When he first had one the doctor said it was not normal for a dog of his age to have seizures, but that medicating him could cause other problems, I'm not sure now if they'll want to put him on something or not. I just hope they don't start getting worse:(. We love our little buddy!