This afternoon I went to visit my good friends Victor and Lucia. We decided to have a cooking day, which meant Victor and I were the chefs, and Lucia bought the wine. We pooled together our resources, pulled out a few cookbooks, and got to work. With the strains of Latin music in the background, we cut up vegetables, ripped up bread, mashed potatoes, and fried some plantains. A few minutes into our preparation, some Cuban friends arrived (unannounced, of course), and suddenly there were 9 of us in the one bedroom apartment. I was getting worried about how our little meal was going to feed all 9 of us, but then I remembered our pièce de résistance, the chicken! Stuffed with butter, herbs, and garlic, we put her in the oven, anxious to eat delicious bird. (NB Lucia saw a whole raw chicken for the first time, and wasn't too impressed with the gizzard.) Fifteen minutes later, we noticed some steam escaping from the oven. We opened the oven door to a wall of smoke - our chicken was well on it's way to being burnt. The alarm in the apartment went off, followed shortly by the bell that signals the entire apartment building. All 9 of us got up to help - to fan the air away from detectors, to call the landlord, to pry a window open (by heating the ice with a blow dryer), but to no avail. Five minutes later, the firetruck pulled up, and the bomberos trudged up to the apartment. They knocked on the door and asked "Who's the cook here?" Fortunately they were good-humored about it, and had the chicken been in better shape, we would've offered it to them. Needless to say, we won't be using the oven anymore. Let's just order pizza next time.-- Victor plays a mean Cuban tres, and Lucia loves her budgies.
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