I haven’t had time to blog in a while, and frankly, I’ve been busy in general and a bit lazy besides. The most unusual country I’ve done in a while was Ghana. My Granny lent me an authentic West African wrap skirt and head scarf, which looked utterly unauthentic on little white me. Oh, well, it got the point across.

We did Thai curry for one week, something we eat often and love, and lasagna on Christmas Eve, which I counted for Italy. I’ve been meaning to cook Egyptian food for about two and a half weeks, but I couldn’t find any recipes that sounded appealing. I’m also looking to make Honduran food soon because my brother is there on a mission, but I keep forgetting to ask him for ideas of what to make. So really, the last couple of weeks have kind of not happened. Maybe I can count the aebelskivers I made for breakfast Christmas morning for Denmark. Hahaha.

Since we eat tacos, burritos, and enchiladas on a regular basis in our house, I wanted to make something that was perhaps more authentic. I found a recipe for pork carnitas that sounded (and looked) delicious, so I tried it out.

Mostly it was a success. I served the pork more or less as shown in the video linked to above: on slightly fried corn tortillas with chopped avocado, salsa, and lime wedges. I didn’t do cilantro because we don’t care for it, and I did put cheese, sour cream, and tomatoes out for those who wanted them.

We talked about Spanish (Lego has had some exposure to it thanks to Dora and Diego), found Mexico on our new-to-us globe (thanks, Granny and Grampy!), looked at some pictures of Grandma O’s trip to Mexico last spring, listened to some Mexican music on youtube, and talked about Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos. I wanted to make a Mexican dessert too, but I had made gingerbread earlier in the day and just didn’t have the energy by the time dinner was over. Maybe in a day or two. We’ll see.

In the past few weeks, Duplo has had a major breakthrough in terms of speech. He had made almost no noticeable progress since he turned one—and he’s now eighteen months old. I wasn’t really worried because he seemed fine developmentally in other ways, and because he did have a “vocabulary” of about twenty words or so if I was generous and included words he used once a week or more (and to be fair, a lot of them fell into that category). I was more concerned that for a long time, he wouldn’t point to objects, or even people, when we named them; he seemed to understand about as much as he said, which wasn’t much. Again, he seemed to fit the textbook definition of how a toddler should be progressing, but Lego had been such a talkative little guy that Duplo’s development was surprising.

About two or three weeks ago, though, Duplo started learning about ten words a day, and using the words he already knew much more often. After about a week of that, he started stringing words together—all done, there (you) go, uh oh car, etc.—something Lego didn’t do until he was about four months older than Duplo is now. He talks often now and tries to learn the words we are using if he doesn’t already know them. His pronunciation isn’t perfect, naturally, but it’s good enough that we’re not usually struggling to understand him. Anyway, I guess it’s proof that every child develops differently. They gotta keep their parents guessing, I suppose.

Well, I decided to go with pasties (they’re Cornish, and my roommate’s dad brought the recipe home from England years ago). They’re basically pie crust with a dry meat and vegetable mixture inside. The recipe I used called for ground beef, but elsewhere I saw that beef cut into tiny cubes was more traditional, and since I had a roast, I did that instead. You mix your beef with tiny pieces (or gratings in the case of the turnip and carrots) of potatoes, carrot, turnip/rutabaga, peas, and onion, and season it a little. I used beef bouillon, salt, pepper, and sage. One thing I didn’t do but wished I did was to add a little of the beef drippings so that the pasties weren’t quite so dry and dense. I made my own pie crust, but the recipe actually suggested buying refrigerated; you could do either. Since I didn’t really stick to one recipe, I’ll post what I did for the filling.

• 1 lb. beef roast, finely diced
  1 large carrot, shredded
  1 small turnip, shredded
  1/2 onion, finely minced
  3 medium potatoes, cut into pea-sized cubes
  1/2 cup frozen peas
  1/2 cup beef drippings
  2 tsp. beef bouillon
  1 tsp. salt
  1/2–1 tsp. black pepper
  1/2 tsp. ground sage
  1 egg
  1/3 cup milk

Mix beef, vegetables, drippings, and seasonings in a large bowl. Place 1 cup of mixture on one side of a rolled-out circle of pie crust dough. Fold over the other side and fold the bottom edge over the top and roll under to seal. Mix egg and milk and glaze the top of each pasty with egg mixture. Cut vents in the top. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Serves about 6. (Mine made two large pasties and a full-sized beef pie that I froze for later.)

We had British bread pudding with lemon sauce for dessert, a recipe Jon Boy got somewhere, and which go the stamp of authenticity from a British guy his family made it for once. It’s not at all like any bread pudding you’re thinking of. The essential difference is that it uses bread crumbs instead of small pieces of bread. The result is a “pudding” that’s actually more the consistency of a sweet bread, such as zucchini or banana bread, but somewhat moister and denser, seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg. The lemon sauce is superb with it.

We also had “tea” this afternoon. Hahaha. It was about the least authentic thing ever, but for the purposes of educating a three-year-old, it was great. Being Mormon, we had apple juice instead of tea in our tea cups, and I served animal crackers, saltines, and cheese with the “tea.” We sat at a little table on little chairs (me on the floor). I spoke in a terrible British accent the whole time and called the animal crackers “biscuits,” which had Lego in fits of laughter pretty much nonstop. Afterwards, he asked me to keep talking like I was while we were having our tea party.

This is fun.