Wanderlust: A Mexican Thanksgiving, in April, in Germany

After two and a half months of gorging ourselves on stuffed cabbages, homemade schnitzel, dumplings of all shapes and sizes, and every native Wurst in Eastern Germany, we finally returned to the kitchen to cook up the one thing we missed the most from home--Mexican. I had the idea a week or two ago (when I started missing the always-nearby Chipotle, my hometown El Dorados, and the three Springfield El Toro's) and asked our German friend Lisa if she thought a Mexican meal would be a fun idea. She confessed she had never had Mexican, and always up for a new experience, she immediately jumped on to the idea and we set a date for the feast. It took three German "supermarkets" (nothing here is even mildly reminiscent of a Kroger's) before we could locate all of the correct ingredients. Luckily Lisa stuck with me as I was trying to find translations for words like "cilantro" and "refried beans," and never wavered when I insisted we needed at least 6 jars of salsa (food quantities are also quite subjective here, nothing comes bigger than a quart generally, especially the "exotic" foods like salsa).
So with ingredients in tow and the kitchen reserved, we set to work Wednesday afternoon, taking turns at the stove and using every available flat surface on the first floor for various stations: guacamole making, vegetable dicing, salsa doctoring (German bottled salsa is much like ketchup and needed a little help), and meat preparation. We started to worry we wouldn't have enough food, and so Katherine ran out about an hour in to buy 10 chicken breasts, returning in record time to marinate them in lime juice and stuff the skins with tomatoes and peppers (she works magic with chicken). The labor was so incredibly worth it, however, as by 7:00 we had prepared one hell of a feast.

Taylar takes on shredded chicken

Hannah and Lisa share veggie duty

I forget about Nat's dislike of all tomato-products and assign him to salsa doctoring; when that doesn't work he assists Katherine in chicken-magic and has great success