Anna moved out on Friday (I'm writing this days afterward, as usual), so she wanted to have a potluck as a farewell party. A potluck is a meal where the attendees contribute a dish to share. It was fun :) The living room area of this "Zenhouse" was filled with fourteen people: nine Zenhousemates, plus two of the four who live in the separate ground-floor apartment, and three strangers, friends of Jamie (female) who didn't eat but were waiting to go out for the evening. There would have been a fifteenth if the owner hadn't been unwell.
Of the current ten housemates, only three were here when I arrived nearly four months ago: Mark, from Scotland, Anais, from France, and Claude, from Mauritius. All the others who have since moved in - owner Jocelyn, her boyfriend Adam, Ian, George and Jamie - are Canadian. On Friday evening French girl Audrey moved into what was Anna's room. Of the four who live downstairs on the ground floor, there are two who I've seen perhaps only once and whose names I don't know. Naomi, who when I arrived had the room next to mine, and Anais' French colleague Nico, we see fairly frequently.
Naomi had topped a focaccia loaf with tomato paste and cheese to make pizza; Adam bought some vegetable sticks and dip; Claude made a salad and guacamole; Nico made a tasty butternut squash soup, and Anna topped slices of persimmons and tomatoes with cheese and walnut halves. I made a Moroccan chicken stew and, although the dried cherries I'd bought turned out to still have the stones in, everyone said they loved it, which I was really happy about. For dessert Anais made a lovely choc-chip pumpkin loaf cake, and Jamie made what was supposed to be a sort of chocolate-biscuit-coconut granola bar but ended up as a rich gooey yummy mess that could only be removed from the baking tray by being scraped out with spoons. Nico brought up some grapes, too - really nice purple ones that actually tasted like grape-scented or -flavoured things (like shampoo or soda) smell and taste like. I think all that was leftover were a few tomato slices and a bit of the chocolate thing.
While the presence of Jamie's three talkative friends made me not quite as comfortable as I might have been in their absence, I enjoyed the evening and potlucks should definitely happen more often. When everyone dispersed around 10pm, Anna, Anais and I washed everything up (as you might imagine, there was a lot) and returned the kitchen and living room to a clean and tidy state.
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