Everything's better with food!

For the past three weeks, I have been working with my 1° ESO students in their English class on everyone’s favorite topic: food! I have to say, Elihan and I have come up with some pretty fun and successful lessons for the students. (Elihan is a “student teacher” who has been working with me in just my English classes at Alba Longa for the past four weeks. She has another two weeks to go on her “student-teaching” period and then she’ll be done and back to focusing solely on finishing up her Masters. She’s just a few years older than me, 25, and she’s extremely nice- I’ll be really sad to see her go as I’ve really enjoyed working with her!) We’ve had the students answer questionnaires about food (the usual “what’s your favorite food?” and “what do you eat every morning for breakfast”), play games of “picture” BINGO, take pretend “trips to the supermarket” to find ingredients for certain meals, etc. All of the students have really participated and had fun in the classes, whether it be by shouting out answers to let us know that they understand, competing against one another to win our in-class games or laughing as I attempt to explain that yes, we Americans do eat a much more varied diet than just “hamburgers and French fries.” (I’ve also had to debunk this myth to quite a few of my friends here this year… America’s “fast-food” reputation is everywhere!) While all of these in-class lessons have been really fun, hands-down, our best class took place last Monday when we had an “international breakfast” with the students on the school’s main outdoor patio. Working in pairs, the students had to find and prepare a recipe for this breakfast and then create a poster board containing both the ingredients and directions translated from Spanish to English. Before class last Monday morning, Elihan, Lourdes (my boss and English teacher) and I went to the local Mercadona in Armilla to buy milk, juice, napkins and plastic cutlery, etc. and spent a half an hour or so preparing the tables outside on the patio. When the students arrived at the start of the class, their “breakfast” pastries in hand, I was “hard at work” at another table, preparing banana, strawberry and chocolate chip “tortitas” (pancakes) for my “American contribution” to our early-morning feast. All the food was delicious, the students did a great job with their recipes, and when the class was over, not a single pancake was left of the 50 or so that I had made. It was a really fun way to make our lesson about food as hands-on as possibly for the students as well as practical as they had to learn and explain cooking steps and “verbs” in English. I hope that I’ll be able to make whatever English units come up in the next two months just as fun and practical for the students!

Below you’ll see—finally!—a picture of me with my 1° ESO students, all thirty-two of them, in their classroom. As I’ve mentioned before, 1° ESO is the Spanish equivalent of our 6th and 7th grades, as they are all either 12 or 13 years old. I really love working with this group of students!

Me and my 32 "7th graders"!

Speaking of food, last week I had one particularly fun night with my friends here in Granada. At the beginning of February, I met a wonderful group of university students. These students are all studying here in Granada this year, either as UGR full-time students or as “Erasmus” students (“Erasmus” is the European equivalent of “study abroad.”) We’re quite the little international group, as we all come from many different countries, including the United States, Spain, France, Germany, Finland, Italy, etc. Well, last Tuesday night, instead of going out for tapas together like we usually do a few times a week, we decided to have our own “international” dinner in my friend Jose’s apartment. Well, staying true to our goal of having an “international” dinner, we were all responsible for bringing a dish typical of our native countries to share with the rest. At first I was really unsure as to what I would bring to the dinner (what’s typical American food? It seems like we’re always eating “Chinese food,” “Italian food,” etc. And despite our reputation, I was NOT about to show up with hamburgers and French fries for everyone!) but drawing some inspiration from my English lessons, I decided to bring dessert—pancakes! A few hours before our dinner, I headed to the supermarket to buy the ingredients. I was able to buy everything easily and relatively cheaply—the fruit, the whipped cream, the chocolate chips—except for one thing: the pancake mix! I searched high and low (I went to five different grocery stores within the city, to be exact) and after an hour and a half of searching, I decided to “wing it” and bought a cake mix which basically contained the same ingredients as any standard pancake mix. So, I went to my friend Claudia’s apartment to prepare our food together. (As I mentioned in my last entry, Claudi is a friend from Germany who’s here for the year.) As Claudi was preparing Käsespäetzle, a delectable German dish consisting of noodles, cheese and fried onions, I discovered that unfortunately, cake mix doesn’t yield pancakes. So, I threw all the ingredients into a pan and made a nice chocolate-chip cake with a whipped cream, strawberry and banana topping to bring to the dinner. After finishing our food, we headed to Jose’s apartment to meet with the rest of the group. Everyone brought delicious food—and there was TONS of it!—and we spent the night stuffing ourselves and enjoying each other’s company. From Spain we had croquetas, tortilla española and queso frito con tomate. Pauline and Pauline, the two girls from France, each brought a different type of quiche. From Italy we had homemade pizza and Clark, the other American in our group, made a wonderful pot of chili that everyone was raving about, complete with tortilla chips on the side! As I stated earlier, Claudi made Käsespäetzle and Joni and Sussu, two Erasmus students from Finland, brought Finnish meatballs and Finnish licorice. It was such a good night that we’re going to try and repeat it within the upcoming month. (And next time, I’ll come up with an even better recipe!) Have a look at some photos from “nuestra cena internacional” for yourselves!

¡Nuestra cena internacional! Standing (L-R) are Pauline (France), Lorenzo (Italy), Pauline (France), Claudi (Germany), Joni (Finland), me and Clark (USA). Sitting (L-R) are Jose (Spain), David (Spain) and Sussu (Finland).

Just look at all that good food!

It may not have been "pancakes" but my dessert was still pretty tasty!