Taboulé, Tomates-Mozzarella, Tortilla a las Patatas, Penne au Pesto, Cantaloupe Melon & Parma Ham : Lunch with Mothers

When you are living in a foreign country and you send your children to French schools there, the relationships you have with the other parents are usually quite different from what you normally have if you were just sending your kids to a local school.

We interact much more over here and it is common to invite the other kids and eventually their mothers to your place for lunch or tea so that the children could play together. As we only have half-day school here and as it is not easy to find childcare, most mothers do not work (or at least not full-time) and so we bump into each other almost everyday. In Paris, I usually chatted with grandparents, babysitters or live-in maids. What a difference.

My 3-year old daughter has been wanting to invite a few of her friends over and now that the weather is getting better, I finally capitulated. We finally fixed on 2 little boys and a little girl (and of course all their assorted siblings as well), all more Germanophone than Francophone.

The weather was great this Friday, so sunny and warm. We ate out in the terrace, the children played both in the house (we have a big playroom) and in the garden (a swing and a slide), it was really nice chatting with the different mothers each with really interesting backgrounds and interesting things to tell.

For example, found out that one of the mother’s a Baptist Pastor. More importantly, that she and her husband have been sacrificing some of their own comfort in order to send a few thousand Euros every few months to Missionaries in India. To buy young girls from parents ready to sell them to brothels and sending these girls instead to a special orphanage that will provide shelter and education for them.

I told her that this was crazy since there are so very many such girls out there and that there is no way they’ll be able to help them all. But she said that she’s just doing what she could and that every life saved is better than none at all.

It is true that we have gotten so used to thinking that something is only worth doing if there are major results or impact, that we have forgotten that the ocean is made up of many little drops of water.

I made :

tortilla a las patatas y jamon

(last week's pic minus the ham and red peppers, too few eggs and a little burnt at the top coz I was experimenting trying to caramelize it)

taboulé

penné au pesto (with bacon bits)

tomate-mozzarella

cantaloupe melon with parma ham

and finally, banana and chocolate muffins with ice cream.