Happy Friday the 13th! It's hard to get excited about the weekend here, as the days all so very similar. We generally put in 12-plus hours a day, seven days a week. Not that I'm complaining - pretty much the only things to do here are work and work out. Sometimes we do try to break up the monotony with haphazardly multi-cultural office parties (particular on 'dirty Fridays', apparently a Jamaican tradition). These picnics generally consist of food cooked in the terrifically sketch kitchen (condemned by Phoenix management, but still going strong!) or on our make-shift grill.
On one such occasion, our Jamaican-American programme director grilled jerk chicken and steak, while one of the local staff prepared a traditional okra dish and flat bread. I did not partake of the meat, being a vegetarian, although they assured me it was delicious. There is an office-wide campaign to reform my meatless ways, but after watching them clean the locally-purchased chicken, I think I've re-upped for at least another decade. I can, however, attest that the okra and naan-like bread were amazing, and not just because I've been subsisting on iceberg lettuce for two months.
We also tried to prepare corn on the cob. Sweet corn is not, however, an Afghan staple and I'm pretty sure we were using livestock corn. In an effort to sweeten it, our director tossed an absurd amount of sugar into the pot when he boiled it. The end result tasted something like kettle corn. Except that it was on the cob and orange.
