Kari_ITA5

So, after we went to the grocery store and proved that I have a short attention span when it comes to new things-we went back to Keith's house where the rest of his friends arrived for the rest of the night. There were 11 of us total. For the next 2 hours they were all bustling around the kitchen preparing ingredients for the soup like squid, shrimp, crab, tofu, mussels, thin sliced beef, 2 types of cabbage, Japanese mushrooms, and the ramen noodles. While bustling around in the kitchen, one of the Vietnamese guys was making chips! He had a pan of oil and was taking these really thin slivers of dried potato and when put in the grease, they would expand and he would form it and stretch it with chop sticks. They turned out to be really fluffy and really tasty! Earlier in the day, Keith had made the broth for the soup, which tasted like it had Cayenne pepper and a lot of other salts and flavors in it (it was really similar to a Cajun broth). The coolest part was yet to come though-in the middle of two tables, they set up portable burners and split the broth in them. Then the raw ingredients were put in bowls all around the burner. Everyone sat at the tables, and once the broth was brought to a boil, everyone just put in whatever they wanted to eat and let it cook. Once the ingredients were cooked, you took your chopsticks and pulled out whatever you wanted, put it in your little soup bowl and ate it! It was so cool because it was such a communal dinner! Oh and the squid--it was awesome. The Japanese mushrooms were also really good-they had a TON of flavor to them and were kind of salty, unlike portobello or other mushrooms you get in Publix. While we were eating this fabulous dinner, we also watched the opening ceremony to the Olympics, and what was funny was whenever a country would be announced, we came up with this game to guess that country's capital. Whenever we didn't know one, we would look it up on the Google. Apparently a lot of us don't know our geography...