I had my first dinner guest over tonight.  As luck would have it, we're both from the same hometown: Walla Walla, Washington and we both graduated from the same high school.  Well that's not very hard because it's the only public school in town.  Anyhow, strange as it maybe, the first person I made dinner for in my apartment in Sofia from is from my tiny home town.  Population 30,000 maybe.   For more information on this great town you can check out <a title="Surprise, Surprise " href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walla_Walla,_Washington" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>.  Most of you know that Walla Walla is the town so nice they named it twice but for the rest of you who didn't know this--now you do too.

Matty T my dinner guest is keeping his own blog about his time in Sofia.  So if you get tired of reading what I have to say or want a different point of view, you might want to check his <a title="Matty T" href="http://backinbulgaria.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> out.  I think that he's off to a great start.  I make an appearance in the first video and to set the scene the cafe we are sitting in and the square that the church is in are both a part of my neighborhood.  (Just imagine, you too could be visiting me come spring and have a similar experience!! hint. hint.)

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I made a roast vegetable dish with shell pasta and crumbled cheese and served this with a great whole wheat loaf of crusty french bread.  I think that the dish is an ode to Sofia in the fall.  The veggies in the local market have begun to shift away from summer squash and cucumbers to pumpkins, onions, potatoes and other pumpkin like squashes.  But there are still peppers and tomatoes so I don't think that the summer/early fall veggies are completely gone yet but they are on their way out.

The dish was easy to make and had lots of color so my nutritionist mother will be proud of me.

Here's what I did (other people might call this the recipe):
<ol>
	<li>I sliced about one pound of pumpkin into 1" inch chunks and turned the oven on high to roast.  I poured about 2 tbs of olive oil on top and about 1 tbs of red wine vinegar.  It took about 45 minutes for the chunks to get soft and then I added about 1 tbs of white sugar sprinkled on top after I turned the pieces of pumpkin over.</li>
	<li>In the mean time, I cut up one medium onion into little pieces and one small red pepper and one green pepper into strips.  I sauteed the onion and two cloves of garlic, minced, until they started to caramelize and at this point, I also added the pepper.  A couple of minutes later I added this mix to the pumpkin in oven and mixed the whole thing together.</li>
	<li>I then put water on the stove to boil for pasta and went to work chopping two medium tomatoes.  I added the tomatoes to the pan in the oven and put pasta in the boiling water.</li>
	<li>After about 10 minutes the pasta was done.  I drained this added some cheese to it.  I served the pasta with cheese and the roasted vegetables together on the same plate. It was beautiful. The only thing that might have made it better was some slightly wilted spinach leaves but that seems to be unlikely here in Sofia.</li>
</ol>
I thought the dish was delicious and Matty T ate everything on his plate.  So I'd like to think that he enjoyed it too rather than think he was too polite to tell me what he really thought and ate it all just to be kind.  Also I think that this dish would have been great with brown rice instead of pasta.

Aside from the fact that I like to cook, it was nice to have someone for dinner because it made me clean my apartment and it's great to have other Americans to talk to.  I am especially lucky to have Matty T because he lived for two-plus years in Bulgaria with the Peace Corps and it means that I can ask him lots of questions.  He is also working on research for his master's thesis related to Bulgarian identity and the way history is taught/presented in school to students so I asked him lots of questions about this too. Of course, as soon as I write this, I am sure that it's not exactly the right description of what he's doing but it combines two things that I am interested in--school and identity formation--so I enjoyed learning more about what he'll be doing in Sofia for the next four months.

Now that I am writing this up, the one thing that I still can't quite get over is the fact that in August I moved to Sofia a city that six months ago I knew next to nothing about in a country that it 10 time zones away from parents and I just had dinner with guy I knew in high school, <em>IN SOFIA</em>!

Normally, I try to avoid being trite or using worn out turns of phrase but in this case I don't know any other way to say this: you realize what a truly small world it is when things like this are possible.