Ok. I know it's different and perhaps a little strange to most of you, but my family always has sloppy joes for Christmas dinner. It started back when I was little and we were vegetarians and my mom asked us what we would like to eat for Christmas dinner that would be special. We have not been vegetarians for many years now, but we have kept the tradition partly because it's tradition and it's fun, but also because it is quick and easy (we are usually gone all day at the various relatives homes and its easy to warm up and fix when we get home in the evening.)
Well, for Christmas I was trying to keep as many of my family traditions as possible here, to help make it not so hard being away from home and all that is familiar for Christmas. So, my roommates and I decided on a combination of our traditional family foods, made out a shopping list, grabbed Jesse, hailed a taxi, and headed to Pamctop (pronounced "ramstore.") We decided to split up the shopping list to make it go faster since we had so much that we were getting (Jesse of course stayed with me because he didn't know Russian, among other reasons...)
Well, between the four of us we managed to get all of the groceries home, although we did have to pay more for a taxi (remember taxis are anybody willing to pick you up and take you where you want to go for their price.) So we started putting the food away and I was very amused to find that R had forgotten that 1 kilo is about 2 lbs (they use the metric system like most places in the world.) I had asked for 3 lbs and she had gotten me 3 kilos, or over 6 lbs. of ground beef for my sloppy joes!
I made my sloppy joes the next day, Christmas day, but I couldn't taste it because I had a cold, so I asked my friend, C, to taste it and tell me if it needed more of anything. She tasted it and made a very peculiar face and then took another taste. Finally, she turned to me and said, "Did you mean to get lamb?" I just looked at her dumbfounded. I had no idea what she was talking about! She immediately explained herself by saying that the meat in the sloppy joes was ground lamb! I couldn't believe it! Apparently we had accidently gotten ground lamb instead of ground beef! But who would grind up lamb? and why? And how was R to know that only one of the two identical looking lumps of ground meat was beef and the other was actually lamb? Oh the adventures of living in a different culture with a language you are struggling to learn!
Needless to say I was very disappointed. I had been looking forward to having sloppy joes for several weeks, and I couldn't remember a Christmas without them, and now they were ruined by lamb meat! (which I don't really like) and I had just put a little over 3 more lbs of it in the freezer! I thought for sure they were ruined! In despair (and because I didn't want to deal with it), I put my sloppy joes in the fridge and left them there.
The next night at supper time, as I was poking around in the fridge for food, I rediscovered the despicable "lamby joes." I tasted them and was pleasantly surprised to discover that after sitting for a good 24 hours, the sloppy joe flavor had almost completely masked to lamb flavor! They actually tasted pretty good! So, although we didn't have them on Christmas day, we ended up eating the "lamby joes" after all. Ochin fkusna! (very tasty)
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