Jamie Sits Down for a Meal

Here's what I typically eat at my host family's house. 

Breakfast:

My host mother prepares breakfast for everyone, so when I come downstairs at 8:00, it's already laid out for me. It usually consists of a (rather large) bowl of some type of grain. Most of the time it's oatmeal, with a ridiculous amount of sugar in it. Sometimes it's buckwheat with butter and salt. Sometimes it's this other sort of malt-o-meal type grain. Not sure exactly what that is, but it's yummy. I've also a few times had pasta cooked in milk. Like regular ziti pasta. Cooked in sweetened milk. Very strange, but actually not bad.

There are also loaves of bread laid out with butter and honey, but since it's hard enough just to finish my giant bowl of oatmeal, I never have room for that. A few times a week she puts out khachapuri too. Khachapuri in a general sense is bread and cheese, but it takes many forms. Sometimes it's lasagna, but with only cheese as filling, sometimes it's the bread that we always have with meals filled with cheese slices and grilled in the panini maker, and sometimes my mom makes the bread dough, forms it into a circle, puts cheese in the middle, closes it up, flattens it, and cooks it on the skillet, so it's like a cheese filled pita bread. Usually the morning khachapuri is made panini-style.

This is all served with a cup of tea, or every once in a while, a cup of instant coffee made with milk instead of water. I've never had black coffee served to me in the morning.

Lunch:

The things that are served at every lunch, and supper for that matter, are the following:

Bread loaves 

Cheese

Tomatoes cut up with onions and sometimes parsley

Besides that, it's usually fried eggs for lunch. They fry their eggs in about an inch of sunflower oil, which, while delicious, is also setting me on my way to a heart attack before age 30. 

Sometimes she also fries up some bologna, or puts out some kind of meat, but typically eggs are just an easy thing to make after a long day of school.

Afternoon coffee:

May take place multiple times, but usually happens right after lunch.

There's two ways they make coffee in my house, and from what I've seen, in general. The first, I think, is called Turkish coffee. I've been meaning to google this. I  had no idea what Turkish coffee was, but I think if I have my stories straight, it's what we usually drink. They cook the coffee in a pot on the stove, and I'm not sure what they use, but the result is a cup of coffee where the grounds stick to the sides and settle at the bottom, so that when you get towards the last few drinks, you have to be careful and drink slowly so as not to get a mouth full of grit. That gets left in the bottom. This was quite unpleasant to me at first, but I got used to it. Lately we've just been having plain old instant coffee a lot, which dissolves all the way. My host family drinks a lot of sugar in their coffee, and no cream or milk, except as I mentioned when now and then my host mom will make me coffee with just milk, but I've never seen anyone else drink this. It took about a week for me to convince my host mom to not put so much sugar in my coffee or tea. It's still too much for my taste, but it's all about small victories, right?

With the coffee, they usually set out fruit or these Russian bite-size candy bars that are like Snickers, just not as good. The fruit is usually grapes (with seeds) from the vineyard, apples (from the apple tree) or leghvi. Leghvi is a Georgian word, which I'm using because I have no idea what it's called in English. It's this fruit that's green on the outside, but you peel the green off, and are left with a white ball. When you break it open the inside is hot pink and looks like it has tentacles or something. It's really strange, and gives the granadilla in Peru (which we nicknamed alien fetus) a run for it's money when it comes to strange looking fruit. However, it is very delicious. 

Supper:

As I mentioned under lunch, there is bread, tomatoes, and cheese. 

This is usually accompanied by a meat. A lot of the time I don't eat the meat, because I am really picky about my meat and the meat here gives me the heeby-jeebies sometimes. It's usually just chunks of beef or pork that is more fat than meat, and a lot of times it has what looks like the kind of tubes and valves that would be in a heart. Is it a heart? Or a spinal cord? Or a nasal passage? I will probably never know, but I do know it's not something I want to eat. 

One time, my mom brought out tripe stew and gave me a giant bowl. In the dim light of the porch where we were eating, I thought it might be morrell mushrooms or something. Then I took a bite, and I knew. Intestines. I tried. I really tried. But I just couldn't do it. But now my mom knows, so she always makes sure there's something else for me if they're eating tripe.

Let's talk about fish. I like fish. If it's not too fishy. I like sushi, salmon, fish sticks. I love tuna. But I've informed my host mom that I don't eat fish, like, ever. I did this because the fish here frightens me. First off, they don't cut off the head. the just take an entire fish, head, fins, everything, and fry it. I've also seen little silver fish that look like they haven't been cooked at all, being served whole. Tonight, for example, my mom served fish that had been cut into segments (some pieces were just the head) and lightly battered and fried. They've also had dry fish, again whole, that is like some sort of fish jerky, and smells disgusting. So I've thought it best to steer clear of any marine life set out on the table. 

On special occasions they usually make khinkali (see previous post) or mtswadi (I know this in America as shishkebabs - meat on a stick grilled over a fire).

Some other things we've had are: stuffed peppers, hot dogs (this is a great comfort food if you're far from home), pinto beans, green beans, fried potatoes, chadi (fried corn cakes) and pizza. The homemade pizza was not like a regular pizza. The crust was thick and made from bread dough. The sauce was the kind of ketchup-ish spicy sauce that they eat with other stuff here. The cheese was the homemade cheese that we eat with everything and use to make khachapuri. And the toppings were fresh tomatoes, peppers, bologna and mayo. Yes, mayo. This was put on before the pizza was cooked. It was quite odd. It tasted good, it just didn't taste anything like any pizza I've ever had.

Supper (and sometimes lunch, if my grandpa eats with us) is usually accompanied by the family's homemade wine. My grandpa and I are usually the only ones that drink. As is customary, he makes toasts throughout supper. He toasts to mothers and fathers, to brothers and sisters, and to Georgia and America. He also toasts to other things, but usually I don't know what they are, I just clink glasses, say "Gaumarjos!" and drink. He's gotten into the habit of trying to teach me Georgian at supper, so he always has me repeat his toasts. Or he'll grab the salt, point at it, and say "Marili!" Then signal for me to repeat. We do this about 10 times until he's satisfied that I have committed it to memory. That is actually how I learned the word for salt. The difficult part of this process is that my grandpa basically has no voice left. I'm not sure if it's from years of smoking (almost all men are smokers here) or just because he's old, but everything comes out as a screechy whisper, so a lot of times when he's asking me to repeat something, I have no idea at all what sounds he's actually trying to make. 

A note on eating habits:

I can only speak about what I've observed in my family, so I don't know if this applies to all of Georgia.

The bread that accompanies every meal is homemade bread made by my grandma. It's long loaves that are torn in half and then piled in the middle of the table. Each person grabs the loaf, tears a piece off, and sets it on the table next to their plate. This is used throughout the meal to wipe up the juices from your plate. 

At meals in America, we usually pass the different foods around, put servings of each on our plate, and then start eating. In Georgia, we use tiny plates, which means you don't have room for servings of everything, so people usually eat one part of the meal at a time. First you'll put some tomatoes on your plate, eat them, sop up the juice with your bread, then serve yourself some eggs, finish that, then put some beans on your plate. The plates of food don't really get passed around. You just grab what you want when you want it.

It's not rude to start eating before everyone's at the table. I'm usually sitting at the table alone waiting for everyone else to sit down, because they call me to dinner while they're still setting the table, and refuse to let me help with anything. So once the food is out, and I'm still waiting for everyone to sit down before I start eating, my mom usually yells "James! Tchame!!" - "Jamie! Eat!!" and gives me a look like I'm an idiot for not realizing that I'm supposed to eat all this food sitting in front of me. As someone who was raised in a culture where you don't touch your food until everyone has food on their own plate, this makes me really uncomfortable.

They rarely drink water with their meals. This drives me nuts. Wine is great, but it doesn't quench my thirst. I don't know how these people survive on coffee, wine, and coke alone. I barely ever see them drink water! And I always have to ask if I want water, because sometimes they keep it in little crockery pots, sometimes in recycled bottles. Sometimes these bottles are in the kitchen, sometimes they're in the fridge in the bedroom (yes, the fridge is in the bedroom) and sometimes they're outside on the steps. And I never know what water is for drinking and what water is for whatever else they use it for. 

The salt is not in a salt shaker. It's in a little tiny bowl and you just pinch it out with your fingers. I never do, because everything is already salty anyways, and, if you eat salt you get thirsty, which means you need to go on a water hunt. They never set out pepper, except when we're eating khinkali, but the pepper is in a pepper shaker. 

Other condiments consist of a homemade ketchup type thing, which has a little bit of a kick, or a homemade purplish salt that tastes really vinegar-y. We did have mustard once when we had hot dogs. 

And that's what the food's like.