The Family that Eats Together...

A tradition has sprung up in my small-ish circle of friends here at CYA. Every Thursday, we gather at someone's apartment and have a very large (and very delicious) potluck. Since we've all gotten into the habit of referring to each other as "CYA family," these dinners almost immediately went from being called a "potluck" to the "family dinner."

The Thursday that just passed marked the second family dinner we have had over the course of our stay here in Athens. This time, it was hosted at our apartment.


Is your mouth watering? Because mine sure is.

Everyone arrived at around 8:00, their promised dish in hand. We had everything covered from a wine and a fruit platter, to bread and cinnamon croissants, fried chicken, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, ratatouille, and of course dessert: cinnamon cookies and monkey bread. It was all very delicious!

I made the mac and cheese and let me tell you, for being less than a novice when it comes to cooking, that was an adventure all on its own. I had to look up recipes that seemed delicious yet simple enough for me to do. Then came trying to find what I needed; Greece doesn't have everything, you know. I was really hoping for some pepper jack cheese to spice things up a bit but, alas, that doesn't seem to exist here. Then I had a few (many) problems while making the darn thing and, in all honesty, almost broke down into tears at one point. While I was adding the enormous amount of cheese in my sauce, I accidentally turned the dial past 0 (which is what I aiming for) and instead put it on the highest setting...which started burning the cheese to the bottom of the pan. It was a very interesting point of my life, standing there in panic trying to figure out what in Zeus's name I was going to do.But I persevered and finally ended up with what you can see in the picture above.

I'm not sure if the others knew I was very self-conscious about my cooking and tried to make me feel better or if it actually tasted pretty good, but either way people said they liked it. That definitely was the highlight of my day. 

Whoa, I didn't know knives were on the menu.

As with any family dinner, of course shenanigans have to occur in order for it to be a legitimate family gathering. So not only did we have a certain goof (cough Dylan cough) carrying around our fire extinguisher for no reason besides the fact that he could, Santa also appeared briefly in the form of Robbie wearing a bag on his chin.


And so we acted like a real family. We ate. We laughed. We got insane at many different parts of the night. We drank wine and got slightly tipsy (but that could have just been the atmosphere of having so many ridiculous people together in one small little apartment).

We didn't start to make our way back to our respective apartments (not hard for me since I was already there) until around midnight or 1:00, after we enslaved some of our friends to clean the dishes since we were hosting.