Kakheti

One of my host brother's turned 13 and had a little party with just a few of his friends so I took a picture of some of the food.

 This was his birthday cake. I watched my hostess, Inga, make it the night before.  It consists of sugar, honey, butter, two eggs and baking soda and then placed it over heat and brought to a boil. Then she slowly added flour in to thinken it. As soon as it was as thick as sugar cookie dough, she rolled it into a snake and cut it into 5 pieces. Then she spread each piece
onto a cookie sheet very thinnly so it covered the cookie sheet and cooked it for a short time. She cooked all 5 pieces scraped them off the pans and then added sweeten condensed milk mixed with butter and glued all the layers together with it. Then she took the crumbs from scraping off the layers from the pan and put them on top. I was quite tasty and very light as far as cakes go (well light weight probably not light in calories).



We made a trip out to Kakheti with two bus loads of teachers from the TLG program. We went to a... well what I would call a school/farm.  When we go there they divided us up into about 6 groups and sent us to learn differenet things. There was animals, pickle making, bread making, chacha making, khinkali making and something else I can't remember. I volunteered for the first group that they announced, which was animals. I was secretly hoping we would be able to ride horses but, they had no horses unfortunately. I did get to do another interesting thing instead though. 

Yes I milked a cow. 

I also saw a few other animals as well.

                           

 Feeding time.

 I just kept thinking Thanksgiving Dinner.                                                      

 This was the biggest pig I've ever seen.  You can't really tell from the picture. Look at that snout.

 Pretty sure we enjoyed a friend of his a little later that day. They season and bbq pork on skewers, it's called mtsvadi.  It is one of the best things I have ever eaten in my life...mmm so delicious.  I couldn't stop eating it. As soon as it would be done cooking, they would take it off the fire and give it to us right from the skewer.

 Making khinkali. Khinkali is a ground seasoned beef wrapped in dough and looks like a dumpling.

 
 These are edible candles called churchkhela. They like to call them the "Georgian Snickers". They string together walnuts and then dip them in a gooey, boiled grape extract that turns into a rubbery shell after it cools.

They had prepared a full meal of traditional Georgian foods, very tasty. It had started raining while we were there and didn't let up much the rest of the day. When we went back to Tbilisi, we walked around the city for hours in the rain.