International Food Festival

            These past few days have been pretty jammed packed with running around, carrying heavy things, and cooking! The University of Macau's Open Day is a day where hundreds of people come to campus for tours, activities, lectures, and a bunch of other stuff. One of the other stuff is the International Food Festival, and a bunch of the exchange students and

foreign full time students take part. We formed teams, bought ingredients, and had to make a lot of food in order to get people to vote for us as the best. I decided to form a group with Natasha and Vanessa, but since they are local students and not American, we got some pretty confused people. But we did it anyway, cuz friends.
            I decided on making mac and cheese, due to the fact that it's simple and I don't know how to cook, let alone for hundreds of people. BUT. I didn't want to make boring mac and cheese, instead, I decided to make Sausage and Pepper Mac and Cheese, and they get capital letters because it's epic. It's basically mac and cheese with cut up hot dog, bell peppers, and onion.
            First we had to get all the ingredients, which is a little difficult on everyone participating because while there are international food markets, it's not like they have everything. The only thing we had a bit of trouble with was the cheese, but for the other more unique dishes, they had to get a little creative. I brought my suitcase with us to the stores to carry all the heavy stuff (life hack). We actually bought way too much stuff, since I'm not very bright sometimes and thought that we were giving everyone much bigger serving sizes than a tiny scoop of food. But that's ok, I suppose we will be having a macaroni night sometime soon!
            Now that it was time to cook, we had to do all the nitty gritty measurement conversions and figure out how much we could make at a time. I'm so glad Natasha and Vanessa were helping, they're pretty good at figuring it all out. Me, not so much. So we embarked on shredding A LOT of cheese, we probably went through at least 6 pounds of it. We made the sauce and, while the pasta was cooking, cut up all the veggies. On the second batch, we actually accidentally put in too much pasta and we ended up burning it to the pot... 😅 Took us a while to scrape that off with a spoon. Eventually, we got it all in the tins and put the hot dog in and voila! All done. It did take us 6 hours though. If you want to find out how we made our masterpiece and make this mac and cheese for yourself, follow our nifty 6-step tutorial video right here!
            The next day, we brought all our food, equipment, and decorations to set up our tent. I must say we had some of the better decor around the festival 😎. I also got to represent America in a parade with the international students before the festival started, it was so much fun waving a flag around like I was entering the Olympic Games or something! I decided to wear my iconic, slightly obnoxious, bejeweled USA hat for the day, I needed something that would rival Japan's kimonos after all!
            The actual food festival was great, a lot of people came back for more and said how good it was. Especially the kids, they really liked it. Before we knew it, we went through the 5 tins of food! I even started giving out the extra milk we had! I really wish we could have made more, but that would have been impossible. I managed to get some of the food around the festival, not a lot though, since most of the places also ran out of food by the time I got there. But of what I did try, it was all very good. The African team blew everyone else out of the water though! They had a ton of food, the line was endless, and they were all dancing, we all knew they were going to win. But they got more than double the votes of the runner up! Over 300 votes! As for us, we got 28 votes, earning us fifth place among the nine teams. But that's ok with me, I wasn't expecting to win at all, and it's still a respectful spot. I know a lot of people enjoyed it.
            It was a lot of work, but it was a really good time. And I can say "I'm a cook" now. Because I know how to make a roux. Yeah, that's right 😎. And now I have to get back to my real work, the end of the semester is on the horizon and I have a lot I need to accomplish within the next couple of weeks. Wish me luck! Until next week,

再见！

TL;DR: We had an international food festival, and I don't know how to cook, but I do know how to pizzazz up a macaroni and cheese, see my 6-step video tutorial to see just how we made our masterpiece!