The End of the Challenge...

Just to bring you up to date on the liang kuar challenge, formerly titled the liang jin challenge until I realized my language error, the challenge is in fact complete!  The results are in, and the judges have declared it was a success.  And when I say the judges have declared it a success I am using the following criteria as a measurement: Uncle Rico’s taste bud approval and my feeling of satisfaction in using up the entire kuar of tong in just two weeks. Uncle Rico gave the challenge a huge thumbs up, except for the unfortunate basil chicken incident which I will tell you more about it a moment. And my sense of satisfaction was a 10 on the 1-10 scale.  Sadly enough after the challenge I haven’t been as committed to using up all our tong, in fact this morning I threw away a few strands of tong that were sitting on the windowsill shriveled and ugly. 

Here’s where the rest of the original batches of tong (green onions) went.  We had basil chicken that I took from this website because it sounded excellent.  It wasn’t.  In fact it was kind of gross.  But I dare say that anyone who actually has access to fresh basil might really like this chicken, don’t try it with dried basil.  I have sufficiently warned you.

Then I made my Mom’s vegetable soup because Uncle Rico got sick.  He was actually sick for almost a week, which when coupled with the start of school and onslaught of a massive about of vocabulary that needed to be learned, meant that I didn’t feel like making time to blog for awhile.

PS.  Please do not let my Mom know I added green onions to her soup.  My sweet Mom refuses to cut onions and also garlic. Which means that anything she makes usually requires the absence of both onions and garlic.  Growing up I must have had pretty good breath.  I guess I’m ruining that by not taking up her boycott on garlic and onions.  Oh well…

And finally to really make Uncle Rico feel better and because the vegetable soup was running out, I made chicken soup.  The base required white onions, but since I wanted to finish the challenge I used green. 

I’ve been inspired to blog and finish the story of the tong because yesterday a new challenge entered our household called the pinguo (apple) picking challenge! Yesterday we went pinguo picking with the international students at our school and came home with probably 30-40 pinguos.  I lined them up in the kitchen according to size, need to be eaten sooner rather then later and by sweetness.  I figure we have about 2 weeks for these pinguos before they go rotten which means it’s game time.  So far here’s what we have…

My first project was apple sauce, which came out more like baked apples.   Please if you try to make apple sauce cut your apples into chunks not strips…don’t listen to what the recipe says.  On the other hand if you want to try to make baked apples go for the strips, they taste great!

And then I made apple cobbler, which turned out looking more like an apple tart…we decided to from now on call this a cobbler-tart and eat it with lots of ice cream.  Side-note: Do you like the way all my pictures of food are half-eaten?

And because this entire post has been a collection of random thoughts and because I like writing my thoughts on this blog, here are a few more things I’m thinking about today…

1)    When you buy sugar in this country you should ask for bai tang not just tang.  I’m not sure why this is important.  Maybe the da jie at the store has brown and white sugar.  All I know is that every time I ask for it she always asks if I would like bai tang. 

2)    I fortunately will have the chance to ask the da jie for more of this bai tang soon because after I hui lai le (came home) I tried to pour the bai tang into a storage container using a measuring cup.  Unfortunately the measuring cup still had a little bit of water left in the bottom from making apple sauce and now my yi jin of bai tang is a lumpy wet mess. 

3)    When you buy chicken in this country do not ask for a jin amount.  Instead point to the type of piece that you want and ask for yi ge, liang, ge, san ge, si ge, etc. etc. based on how many pieces you need.  I am pretty sure that this is the second time the lady selling chicken has explained this to me, but it’s the first time that it stuck.

4)    This is not a food blog…as you can see from my applesauce and cobbler-tart that if this was a food blog anyone reading it might be sorely disappointed.  Or they might think I’m super creative and start trying to make cobbler-tarts themselves.  If that is the case then they should use powdered milk…I blame the powdered milk on the cobbler tart incident.  Why use powdered milk at all you may wonder.  Well it’s because the only other milk alternative is yucky milk bags.

5)    I personally blame the yucky bags of milk on global warming, the economic crisis, ethnic unrest and other major world problems.  Disgusting, who wants to drink milk that comes from a bag and sits on a shelf.  I much prefer milk that comes from a cow, is placed in a large gallon container and sits on a refrigerated shelf until it comes home with me to sit in my refrigerator.  Unfortunately I am going to have to start buying these revolting bags once again because powdered milk is just not a good substitute for liquid milk.  

6)    Today I was thinking about a point in my life when I thought two things were really dumb.  The first was blogging.  The second was cooking.  Isn’t it ironic that today on my day off that those were the two things I was looking forward to most?

7)    To explain this period of my life when I felt like blogging and cooking were dumb I should say that it was when I was single and lived next to Central Market.  Ahh…I miss Central Market, but that’s another post in and of itself.  It happened to be 2006 and blogging had just became popular.  The only person I knew who blogged also wrote comments on their posts disguised as other people so that it would  look like their blog had readers.  You can see how the combination of Central Market and self-commenters would lead to these two biases against cooking and blogging.

8)    I’m glad that God changes us and helps us grow.  Simple huh? I’m also glad that I’m getting old enough, well kind of old enough, to be able to look back and see ways I’m different then I was before.  It gives me hope that He will continue to change me.  It also gives me hope that someday I will go to the market and actually be able to understand the chicken lady the first time around. 

9)    I am now an international student.  After hanging out with and spending time with international students since 1999 I am now in their shoes.  This is a post in and of itself but I will leave you with this thought.  Being an international student means that sometimes you are privileged enough to pick pinguos with a group of Pakistanis, a bunch of South Koreans, a Japanese dude, a few peeps from Kyrgyzstan, some Romanians, two dudes from Nigeria and a bunch of Americans.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which group spent the majority of the bus ride to the pinguo grove singing and dancing…