An American in Dubai: Alone Again and Julia Child

This morning our visitors left. :( We had a fabulous 10 days hosting Brett, Scott, and Jess, but they sadly flew out this morning. I thought I would be excited to get back to normal, but after I woke up for the second time (the first was at 5:45am to drop them off at the airport, which we clearly went back to bed after), I actually felt really sad and missed them already! We literally did EVERYTHING and it was just so much fun again to 'take the time to smell the flowers' of what Dubai has to offer that we don't usually do while going about normal life here. I will post tons of pictures of all the fun we had in the next couple days..

After we woke up for real we headed to our friends Melissa and Dom's for an Easter Brunch. Chocolate bunnies, omelets, and bacon. What could be better! 4 hours later and multiple card games of bullshit (which apparently the Brit's and Aussie's call 'Cheat,' less offensive I guess, but less fun to shout out) we headed out to refill our empty pantry and refrigerator in to attempt to get back to normal life, following lots of eating out with our visitors.

I was actually really excited to start cooking again, because I just got Julia Child's Cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Jess, being the wonderful friend that she is, let me weigh down her suitcase on the way here with lots of toiletry requests from Target and also an Amazon.com order which included Julia's cookbook. I've been reading her autobiography on my Kindle (my favorite little gadget at the moment) and so after reading about all the delicious food she ate living in France, Jared and I have been dying to try making some ourselves. So we brought the book to the market and decided to make her "Chicken Fricasse" as our first foray into authentic French cooking. It turns out French cooking takes a lonnng time and TONS of pots and pans (3 hours and more than a dishwasher full of dishes). We improvised a little bit because we didn't read the recipe carefully enough at the market (French cooking is also complicated), but in the end it turned out really well. We couldn't find an Easter ham for tomorrow despite a valiant search, so we'll be continuing our French experimentation tomorrow with stuffed leg of lamb for Easter dinner. We'll see how that turns out. For now, to bed to go back to our normal work routines tomorrow, after our truly lovely week with visitors!