Sunday, February 3, 2013

Celebrating with Lissethe



Thursday was Lissethe's birthday, so our friend Katia offered to make Honduran baleadas for her birthday dinner.  As we were prepping the food, Lissethe's little Siamese cat came out to the kitchen and started sniffing around the floor beneath Mike where the ham was being fried.  The dog figured out the cat was onto something and came out of hiding.  We dared sneak them some ham, since we had bought it, but that sort of thing is not the usual.




Hermana Lopez was delighted with the opportunity to eat a favorite food from home.




When he went out this afternoon for a haircut, Mike picked up some roses for Lissethe.  She was thrilled.




Since we gave her ingredients to make American chocolate chip cookies for Christmas, she got a pan and baking spatula for her birthday.  She quickly took the picture of the cookies off the pan and put it up on her refrigerator as a goal of what they should look like.




Everyone got splattered by the food as it fried.  I should have brought my apron along.  The plaintains weren't as threatening as the ham.




Before she would eat it, Sr. Lopez took a dozen photos of her Honduran food.


  

Katia suggested I get a tres leches cake for Lissethe, so that's what we picked up from the local Xela Pan bakery.  I had taught Katia and her girls how to make chocolate chip cookies the night before, so baking a cake for Lissethe wasn't an option.  I have adorable chocolate fingerprints about Natalia's height around the apartment from our cookie baking.  Mostly she licked herself clean, but when she forgot, I got the keepsake fingerprints.



There were nine of us, so we made short work of the cake.  Lissethe declined the face plant.



Armando is Lissethe's son and he painted us an oil painting of a Mayan preparing the typical Guatemalan chocolate.  He is a very talented young man who is studying to be a teacher.  Lissethe makes the best Guatemalan chocolate I have ever tasted and Armando also designed a new wrapping for the chocolate she sells.  They are chocolate disks about 6" in diameter that are combined with water and milk for a very rich and flavorful hot chocolate.

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