Duke Friends and Cooking

What a wonderful few pre-excursion days I've had!  A little before the summer started one of my best friends from Duke - Pawan - told me that he might also be in Amman for a few weeks of the summer.  Last week, I found out that he had landed in the country - and of course I was very excited to meet up with him. What are the chances of hanging out with a college friends who lives across the country during the summer, much less in a different country!

We made plans to meet on Shariah Rainbow (Rainbow Street) at Turtle Green and walk down the street to find a nice place for an authentic Jordanian dinner.  Half a hour before, he called me and told me that he would be joining me with several members of his church group.  Apparently he is here over the summer as part of a Christian group (in a pre-dominantly Muslim country, so this made it very impressive for me) to work with Syrian refugees and tutor the younger children.  

Anyways we all met up at Turtle Green and decided that the cafe was too smokey to be a relaxing and healthy dinner place and wandered the streets until finding a high-class restaurant hidden next to a furniture shop.  

  

                 (Duke represent! Aww yeah)

I wasn't feeling hungry and planned to order a large appetizer, but Pawan made fun of me incessantly about this so I ended up getting grilled lamb skewers stuffed with grape leaves and herbs.  They actually tasted fantastic, so I was glad that I was goaded into ordering them.  The rest of dinner was spent catching up on how our summers had been, what our experiences here were like, and the upcoming school year. It was really nice to get an infusion of Duke at this period of my stay in Jordan.

Fast forwarding to today, I ended up cooking Chinese food for my host family.  I picked one of the easiest recipes in the book - fried rice - because of the lack of authentic Asian spices and soy sauce.  Even though I insisted on cooking the entire meal myself, my Mama pretty much took over the process when she saw how slowly I was chopping the garlic. 

Despite the utter lack of ingredients (I had to run to the super market to buy eggs and veggies because they had run out), I'm relatively happy with the way that things turned out.  We chopped up the onions and garlic, frying them on the girdle until they sizzled, then added four beaten eggs.  After the eggs solidified, we added rice and scooped in the defrosted vegetables and added in seasoning.  Stir, steam, sit, and serve! 

Zaki if I say so myself.

Now I'm busy packing for our excursion tomorrow which I could not be more excited for.  See you in four days, Amman!