Christmas Dinner

This entry is all about FOOD :D

It started in November with American Thanksgiving.  Julia, an American intern at the school from Ohio, invited us to an amazing dinner. We had turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, Brussel sprouts and so much more. It was a really nice evening and on the way back we had a great view on the stars!!!

Left to right: Friend of Megan, Megan (Au pair of Julia's host family), Mary (host mother and teacher at our school), her husband, Mary's friend, Steven (teacher and fun to hang out with!), Siobhán, me, Anthony (good craic too!), Julia and one other friend of Megan.

Even before that, Siobhán and I started planning our own little Christmas dinner. She said I couldn't go home for Christmas without eating a "proper" Irish Christmas meal, consisting of turkey, ham, Brussel sprouts and, of course, good Irish spuds ;) Going through the weekends until Christmas, there was only one still free so we decided to have our dinner on December 3rd. We invited around ten people, but most of them couldn't come. Irish people, especially the ones with family, are super busy before Christmas... 

When the last two people had to cancel because something spontaneously came up on Thursday we were a bit disappointed because everything was planned already. Luckily, Paul offered earlier on to come over on Friday with a few guys after training to help us prepare all the food (or rather help us "trying out" the Apfelpunsch), so we spontaneously moved the dinner to Friday evening because we would have more than zero guests :D 

Friday morning I took a trip to ALDI in Killorglin and came back with huge bags of food and a few bugs poorer :P

So after school, Siobhán and myself started preparing all the food and since (unfortunately) a few guys from Rugby were working late and a few were ill, we had a cozy Christmas dinner with Paul, Johnny and Shane. It was a great and late night with a lot of Apfelpunsch (Irish style with Whiskey of course :P), laughter, guitar playing and singing. We were still eating the food the next three days :D

Just a "bit of shopping"

Delicious Corkery bacon

Gratin

The essential Irish spud

Mamis beste Rosmarinkartoffeln!

Chicken that kind of lost its filling ... still super tasty!

Well.... We don't have a ladle in the house so another pot had to do the job... Shows nicely how much punch we had :P

And here's the whole huge gang: Paul, Jonny and Shane

And so everything worked itself out :) 

That way now, Siobhán and I could go to the very important South Kerry GAA Football finale in town and not worry about food cooking at home. Instead we strolled around town and treated ourselves with some little titbits from "Petit Delice", a French café with all sorts of sweet deliciousness.

Parade for the game

This was one of many instances where I learned that planning ahead in Ireland is not (really) required. After three months, I am starting to get used to it and, magically, things work out after all. We were saying we should have a nice house party with singing, card games and, of course, drinks. Since January is a month where nothing really happens in town, we said we should have it then. That's about all the planning that was done up to this point so I think/hope it will happen in the near future ;)