Last Thursday (17/08) we invited 12 people for a little get together in our place in order to finally inaugurate our apartment and showcase a bit of our Mexican and Venezuelan cuisine. For the night my wife and me cooked:
Pollo al Mole: Chicken in a mole sauce. Mole is a typical Mexican sauce which is composed of between 17 to +30 ingredients (depending on the Mexican state or taste of the cook)
Pollo desmenusado: Chicken breast boiled, then minced into small pieces and cooked with spices
Empanadas de Pollo y Queso: Empanadas are a typical Colombo/Venezuelan dish made of corn flour shaped as a semicircular and filled with Chicken or cheese (those were the 2 fillings we had) and then fried
Chicharrones: Normally fried pork skin but in this case they were made out of flour
Arepas: Typical Venezuelan dish made of corn flour in a round shape, they are normally eaten instead of bread or filled with anything available.
Tacos Dorados: Tortillas filled with potatoes and then fast fried for it to be crusty
Of course that all accompanied by 3 different types of spicy and non spicy sauces, it was definitely a very good dinner.
Next one should be in the end of September or early October as I will be out almost all of September so Maria and Goncalo, please let me know when you guys are available.
I was just looking at old posting which I never posted and found this interesting things of crazy stuff that happened to us before the wedding trip. It was definitely worth posting it:
I cut my hand 1 day before leaving to Venezuela, a deep long cut in my left hand while chopping some fruit for Daniela, which translated into me having a bandage over my hand for 3 days(now there's almost not even a scar).
The Flower shop did not arrange for the calla lilies to be delivered before the wedding, so 3 days before they had to run and find them; we almost didn't have any flowers nor bouquet.
The van in which we picked up my wife's family had no air conditioner but only a hole on the roof. I take my hat off for them as they made the best out of that situation, but we were really afraid on what to do if it rained.
Money Exchange: It was truly a challenge, because if you change dollars in an exchange office they would pay you about Bs 2000 per dollar, if you do it in the black market about Bs 2300 per dollar, and my family wanted some dollars and they were buying them at Bs 2500, but they ran out of cash on the 3rd day.
We did not have much time to go to the church before the wedding, so we did not rehearse the ceremony or had any idea what to answer during it, it was truly an adventurous experience with the priest telling us softly exactly what to respond during it.
The priest had written in his agenda that the baptism was at 9:00am but told us at 9:30, so he left after 9:15 as nobody arrived and we had to wait until 11:00 for some friends to pick him from his residency and return to do the ceremony.
Due to several intercultural misunderstandings, my wife's family ended up not even wanting to enter our house for the celebration of the baptism, which resulted with everyone being uncomfortable and not feeling welcome. But hey at the end it worked out.
The road to go down to La Guaira Airport was closed several minutes before us leaving Caracas, so we had to take the old 2 way street through the mountains, but thanks to god for that extra toast in my sister's apartment, otherwise we would have been stuck in the traffic without making it to the airport on time.
On the flight back a crazy Portuguese guy that was sitting next to us read the newspaper for 7 HOURS straight, thus not letting Daniela or anyone else in the part of the plane sleep properly. You never know where you will meet the next asshole with insomnia.
