Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Jeff and I have this fun tradition, where we celebrate holidays that don't necessarily apply to us, by preparing lots of yummy food. Not every year, every holiday, of course. But if we notice a holiday coming up, especially one from a different country or ethnicity, we enjoy planning and preparing foods to go with it.

Once for Chinese New Year we made stir-fry, egg-drop soup, fried rice, fortune cookies, and other delicious Chinese foods, and invited another (Caucasian) couple to dine with us. The Chinese lady upstairs from us celebrated with pizza.

This year for Cinco de Mayo, I planned a delicious Mexican meal that included an appetizer (polenta), main dish (soft tacos), side dish (Spanish rice), and dessert (leche quemada). I made salsa and dressing this afternoon to go with the tacos, did my own seasoning for the taco meat, and tried a deliciously caramely rich dessert I'd never even heard of before. Here's a few pictures of our feast:

The chile onion polenta:

The tacos and rice:

The salsa:

The French Italian dressing:

The leche quemada:

The recipes are all posted here on my recipe blog.

Once again we've been letting our dishes build up. It seems we're in a rut - do all the dishes, get tired of doing dishes, let them build up for a few days, get tired of having no clean dishes, do the whole routine all over again. Today I did several loads of dishes, but in the meantime, I dirtied about as many as I washed, because of all the food I was preparing. I have sweetly asked Jeff to do some dishes tonight. Hopefully he follows through and does lots! I'll probably help him.

And then, somehow, we need to break out of this routine and get back to washing the dishes every day!

Jeff did his lab final today. It took him hours! But it's finally done! Now all he has left are three online exams. His grades are such that even if he does terribly on the exams, he'll still pass all his classes. So he's not too stressed or worried about them. Of course he'll do his best, but he's pretty confident that he's going to do fine.

He found out today that he gets to do his Clinical Rotations here at the hospital in town. We've been hoping for that. Also, though Rotations normally take a student to various hospitals throughout the summer, he gets to do the whole thing here. He won't have to drive out to the ones further away, in the neighboring towns. The one here is only about a mile and a half from our apartment, and he can ride his bike every day. That will be a major help in saving gas money! So we're really excited about that. He'll start later this month.

Let's see, besides food, dishes, finals, and Rotations, I don't think anything too extraordinary happened today. So I guess this post is over. Toodles!