Life Up and Running

Through our many transitions, the way I have come to mark the settling-in phase of the transition is this: When your kitchen is sufficiently stocked to make chocolate chip cookies, you are well on your way. So it has become important to make cookies as soon as possible-- a sort of sign of the possible impending return of sanity. Interestingly, the ingredient I was lacking was not the baking soda or the chocolate chips. (Yes, I did bring a 72 oz. bag of Nestle's chips before we left.) It was the OVEN! Chinese people do almost all their cooking on the stove, so ovens are tough to find. I kick myself now for not shipping my oven from Singapore-- It was on its last leg, but it was bigger than anything I have found here! So I found one, and cookies were baking by that evening. You want to know what it looks like, don't you? It's kind of like a big toaster oven, and it comfortably fits a 9x13 pan.













As a bonus insight into our lives here, next to the oven you see our "water tong". You can't drink the tap water here, so all drinking water is bottled. 11 years ago, I brought with me a very pricey bottled filtering system to clean our water; Now these dispensers are standard. A few weeks back we heard some news reports that about half of the bottled water in our city was "jia de"-- FAKE. Not sure what this means-- tap water? people bottling water without a license? Hard to say. But our water delivery man swears up and down that our water is the very best quality-- how can we doubt?

OK, back to the cookies. A friend made a great suggestion. In the US, I used to love buying those Nestle Toll House break and bake cookies because you can cook just a few at a time. (Because assuredly, as many as you make will get eaten!) So my friend Julia showed me how she makes a batch of dough, shapes them into balls, and then freezes the balls so you can pop in as many as you want. This is perfect for my style-- After the first few days of a new batch, they start to get boring and dried out. But an occasional fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookie is NEVER boring. So here is the first batch from our new oven:

Do you think they were a hit?