This Great Work

 Last Friday I got a message on WeChat from one of our friends saying he and his wife were coming on Sunday at 4:00 to make dinner for us.  "I'll bring the ingredients to your place to make something delicious."   We moved things around to accommodate. And that is how chicken feet made their debut in my kitchen (at least since we've lived here).   They showed up with the works.  Fish.  Crabs.  Chicken.  Broad beans.  Red bean spring rolls.  Tofu. Several types of mushrooms. Artemisia Verlotiorum.  (Well, that was the translation...) Ginger.  The only things we needed from our kitchen was salt, sugar, peanut oil, soy sauce, black vinegar, MSG, and yellow wine.  (I didn't have the latter two.)   I watched and tried to learn.  Nothing was written.  She speaks less English than I speak Chinese so our communication was by gesture only.  She would sprinkle about a teaspoon of something.  L...

To be frankly honest, living in China is difficult. The language barrier is huge--it's one thing to not be able to understand, but to not be able to read is even more difficult (try ordering something online or finding your way on a map in Chinese....), in-person shopping is so difficult (not having a vehicle to carry enough supplies for the week requires you to make multiple trips; nor can all shopping be done at one store), the red tape in China is ever present, online school is very stretching for the girls (and therefore to parent),  not to mention the difficulty of being away from family and friends.  Thankfully, many things have become easier as we have learned lots, figured out a little bit and received at least some pay (as of yet, we still haven't to receive the additional amount the US company is sending over and the back pay for the months we didn't get paid).  But there are still pretty big frequent struggles. To mitigate the difficulties we face, it is absolu...

 I'm told that you can order anything on TaoBao (Chinese Amazon).  We tried it the other day to see if we could get some baking powder.  It worked! The baking powder came to us from Beijing and cost us about $3.00. Tom messaged me saying that it had arrived and so Greta and I went down to the lobby of our building to see if we could find it. All deliveries are put on shelves and you have to sort through many packages to find things.  It took us quite a while to find it. After arriving back upstairs, she grabbed the first package opener she could find. Careful there. Hooray!  Now we can make biscuits!  The baking powder arrived without a hitch so we tried it again with vanilla.  Look at this!  So familiar! I feel so at home! This cost, with delivery fees, $32--which is about what I paid for this same vanilla in the states the last time I bought it so I didn't feel awful about paying that kind of price here for something hard to find. Look out Easy ...

 The process: Cut the recipe in half so that the bread will fit in your teensy tinsy oven. Convert everything to metric--- ingredient amounts and water temperature. Get your purified water to the right temperature. Measure ingredients out. Mix it up.  Humidity changes things.... Hope you did it right. Shape and let rise. Convert oven temperature to Celsius. My little oven heats up nicely, but you get to guess when it is preheated. Notice there are no smoke alarms in your kitchen. Hmm.   Decrease the cook time and cross your fingers that is right.  Add a cooking thermometer to the shopping list. Let it cool for a long time because you only have a small serrated knife for cutting it. Slice and eat.  It probably could have tasted pretty awful and we would have thought that bit of home tasted very delightful!  But it was quite good! Needs a little more salt, but that is an easy adjustment.   And it could have been crustier, but we're at a point o...

 I'm not sure how many posts are going to be called "Food".  Perhaps I should get a little more creative with my titles.  But for now, it's such a big part of this adventure so there is much to be written and "Food" is inclusive enough to house all musings.  Food is a persistent problem.  This part of our adventure is giving me a run for my money!! 1)  I don't have much cooking equipment (pans, dishes, utensils, appliances...) and I don't want to buy it if is going to be arriving in the shipment because storage is going to be a problem.  So *what* I can cook is severely limited. In addition to this, we are slowly acquiring things like plastic wrap, hot pads etc---things you don't always remember you need until it's too late! 2)  What food I do know how to cook is limited because I can't get ingredients.  For example, you can't buy salt in the grocery store.  Thankfully I found some in packets at Sam's Club, but it is table salt an...