On food
I am living in a household in which the concept of boiling food, meat or vegetable, appears to be absolutely foreign.

Last Thursday I cooked for myself for the first time, rice and a stirfry, which consisted entirely of carrot, onion and garlic.  Aside from potatoes, that is all that is currently available here in the way of vegetables...things that can keep year round in a cellar. So it loooks like I'm going to have to get creative cooking with carrrots!  Anyhow, because I cooked on Thursday afternoon, I was aware of the half litre of oil that was in the cupboard. This was empty by Friday evening.  If that doesn't repulse you, I don't know what will.

There is no food in this household that is served without first being doused in an exorbitant amount of either, oil or mayonaise (and in some cases, such as the chicken innards 'salad' we had last weekend, both).  Also, when it  comes to the home made real fruit juices that they so love, sugar is king...drinking a glass is is not unlike what I imagine it would be like to drink a very tart melted popsicle, after adding a few extra tablespoons of glucose.

A couple of weeks ago, I rejoiced in the success of effectively communicating that I cannot eat wheat...the celebration was premature.  In hind site I'm pretty sure what this was really taken as was, she just doesn't like bread, so lets continue to feed her things that are thickened with wheat flour and she probably won't know the difference.  Thus I spent the entirety of last week with an crampy, bloated, gasy stomach, and a foggy, aching head.  I wasn't sleeping well, and I couldn't function properly, so by the time Sunday rolled around, with bags under my eyes, feeling quite miserable, I decided it was time to bite the bullet.

I couldn't afford to be polite about it anymore. I could not continue to eat things just because they were placed on my plate  accompanied by a hearty, and often times forceful 'chame! chame! chame!' ('Eat! Eat! Eat!') . So me and google translate had a very frank conversation with my host brother, mother and sister, and eventhough the word gluten does not translate at all whatsoever into Georgian, things have been pretty good since then.

All that having been said, Wednesday morning when I was going to heat up some cornmeal type substance, that had been boiled til thick, and left to harden the night before, for breakfast, my host mother poured what must have amounted to at least 8 table spoons of oil in the pan (which was only little, about 6 inches in diametre).  I cannot understand where this excessive tendency comes from, as no one else I talk to seems to be having the same problem, but it really appalls me and I haven't the slightest intention of conforming to it.  I poured the oil out.

--I have just melted to bottom of my right slipper. My space heater is slowly having its way with everything I own.--

On Saturday evening, Mirian and Giorgi were chopping up the better part of a pig in the chicken.  Most of the fat was served with salt for dinner. What was not cooked however, was marinated in a pot with onions and garlic overnight, and 'barbecued' on skewers the next afternoon.  The barbecue consisted of an overturned wheelbarrow as a windbreak, and a bed of coals, collected out of the woodstove in the multipurpoose room, strewn on the ground in the back yard.  Wine was used to douse the flames, adding flavour at the same time - awesome.  Now I'm not a huge fan of pork, but compared to what had been served the night before, this looked gourmet (it was a solid 70 percent actual meat).  When they reheated it on the stove for dinner that night however, it was drowned in the usual cup or two of oil...ruined.  The solid mix of fat and oil in the bottom of that pan the next morning was almost an inch thick.

Before I sign off however, there do exist a few positive things on the topic of food that I would like to report as well.  The first is corriander.  They use it in so many things, and it is so good! Soups, salads (both real and mayo salads), garnishes, meats, (not just in this household, but in the country in general).  The next is something called a churchjela, a string of nuts, (so far I have encountered almonds, walnuts, hazlenuts, and something like brazil nuts) wrapped in dried fruit.  The result is something that looks like an oversized string bean, but who's colour varies depending on the fruit, and makes for a great healthy snack.  Then there is kakali (walnuts).  I had never before seen a walnut fruit, or even thought of walnuts as coming from a fruit for that matter.  But of course they do, and we've got the tree in our back yard, along with the peach tree, the apple tree, the cherry tree and the plum tree, to prove it.  I came to this realization when I was offered to take and eat from a bowl of little black ball-like things, not overly sweet, with an outer shell that was not soft but not hard, and that was altogether unlike anything I had ever tasted - preserved walnuts.  This delicious little treat, is achieved by soaking ripe walnut fruit in a bucket of baking soda and water for a week, then rinsing them, and boiling them for about 8 hours...who would have thought.

Those so far are my favourites. Unfortunately most typical Georgian dishes are made of bread, so I haven't been able to fully partake in the country's cultural cuisine.  It's khatchapuri (cheesebread) and Khinkali (duplings stuffed with any variety of meat and cheese...and more rarely vegetables) are particularly celebrated.  In many households, khatchapuri accompanies most evening meals, and apparently it's a feat of manhood to eat 20 khinkali in one go.