Class is in Session.

It's challenging to bake when you live at 12,000ft.

It's also challenging to bake when you grew up in a culture that largely does not eat bread.

But I've found, if you've ever traveled outside of this country or even just outside of this province, you'll love pizza and want to learn how to make it.

So that is why I am currently teaching some local businessmen how to bake.  They said they want to learn how to bake, but after our first meeting together, it sounds like they only want to learn to make pizza - which is just as easy here as it is at sea level.

Getting our game faces on

Teaching him how to roll out the dough

And how to hand toss

Look at that beautiful hand tossed crust.  My oven is only big enough to make personal pan pizzas, so we made a lot of those.

Another pizza going into the oven, this time accompanied by a calzone

One of the guys was so excited he invited his kids and wife to come try the pizza he made.

All done.  Leaving the clean up for someone else....

Summer continued: cookouts & the fourth of july

Uncle Chris and Aaron
Chris is literally grilling every type of meat you can imagine

turns out I only took pictures of Eliza and/or Davis
on the fourth

getting the camera set up

got it working....still an awkward angle
friends from Charlotte!  Thanks for the cookout Graham and Seth!

essentials

at least i'm calling them essentials.

These are the things that have so far made the month of December great:

the milk frother i got from ikea to make coffee
and hot chocolate with frothed milk!

egg nog!  thanks danielle for sharing your recipe

the fireplace in our tv 

the gingko trees turned yellow
fall came at Christmas time this year

homemade pizzas

hanging out with Jackie (Asian Kate's son)

pilgrim days

Thanksgiving was great.  To kick off thanksgiving, Wednesday night we had a simple meal with some friends in the city. We ate bean soup and cornbread, instead of all of the casseroles that we're used to these days on Thanksgiving.  We all played the part of either a pilgrim or an indian.  Aaron revisited his pilgrim days, and I revisited my childhood of playing in the woods and finding arrowheads.

I'm welcoming them to the harvest

it was funny at the time, but now i'm not really sure what was going on in this picture

 Also, I realize that it is considered politically incorrect to call Native Americans, "Indians" AND where we live actual Indians, from India, more readily come to mind when I hear the word "Indians", but for some reason I could not talk about Thanksgiving without saying Indians.  It just kept slipping out.  It's like I was brainwashed as a child.  The mascot for my elementary school was "Indians."  The Waxhaw Indians.  It was awesome.  But not nearly as awesome as my high school mascot - the Rebels.  I think you see where I'm coming from now, and can understand why I can't seem to let go of Indians in the thanksgiving story.  Maybe if I had grown up going to the school of Native Waxhaw Americans, this would not have happened.


Thursday we got together with some of foreign friends in town for Thanksgiving dinner.  It was kind of like the first thanksgiving in that it involved people from different cultures coming together to thank God for our blessings (4 countries represented at our dinner), but this one involved a lot more butter.

pre-thanksgiving video watching

That's right we had football on the slingbox.  Thanksgiving was complete.

carving the turkey

post meal book reading by Victoria

enjoying the meal

Friday after Thanksgiving friends came to town, and we spent the next few days enjoying the western restaurants in our city, watching our friends play football (aaron's shoulder kept him out of the game), making barbecue, and just loving hanging out with them.  We'll get to see them again for Christmas.  They are literally like our family in China, we see them every couple of months and during the holidays.  This Thanksgiving, I am really thankful for them, knowing that these years of us all living in China are sweet years.

unfortunately I don't have pictures of two of the guys that go with these ladies
so the ladies will just have to represent all of them.  Also, look at that cute little guy.

It was a nice sunny day for football.  That's right.  That's the sun.
I took a picture of it, and I'm not blind.  We debated for a long time about
whether that was the sun or the moon.  Also, it's only that yellow in this picture
because i saturated the color when editing it.

the only guy, besides mine to make the pictures.  sorry guys.

"and I pray that someday, I can find me a redneck boy."
that mustache was my "early christmas present."

Christmas decorations!

barbecue!  smoking hickory chips on the grill.

We got a 5 kg pork shoulder for this barbecue.  We realized, a little to late, how important it is to let the butcher know you want the butt end of the shoulder - hence the term boston butt.  Our butcher didn't know american cuts, and I didn't tell him the butt end, so we ended up with the whole shoulder (the curve of the shoulder), taking away some of the meat I was expecting.  Last time we fed like 10 people with 5kgs of meat.  This time 5 kg didn't even satisfactorily feed 6 people.  Fail.  You live, you learn.  And apparently in China, I am learning a lot about butchery.

week in review

Really it's the last week+.


Asian Kate took me to Haagen Dazs.  It was unbelievable.  It was my first time actually ever eating Haagen Dazs, and I think it is just as good here as it is in America.  Maybe even better, because it's been quite a while since I had ice cream.

I got some curtains in the mail from my mom & stepdad for aaron and my anniversary!  I have been wanting these curtains for so long (or at least it feels like so long).   and i love them.

Cute babies actually posing for a picture.  That's right, she put her arm around him just for the picture.

We hung out with some friends who are moving out of town soon.  Waah.

We went out for hot pot (cook your own meats and vegetables in boiling water at your table), where Aaron and I ate the intestines of the pig, the cow, and the chicken.  It surprisingly wasn't as disgusting as I thought it was going to be, since intestines are not the kinda things I choose to make at home.

2 different broths to cook the food in - 2 non spicy, two super spicy

one of my teaching assistants and her husband

me & phyllis

And to end the week, tip off weekend started on ESPN with Carolina playing Michigan State in the Carrier Classic.  My husband was literally jumping up and down saying, "it's Carolina and it's America!  This is AMAZING!"

He puts on as much Carolina stuff as he can find

Making dumplings

I feel like every foreigner who lives in China eventually has this experience - making 饺子 jiaozi (dumplings) with your local friends.


You may remember Asian Kate.  She's was our real estate agent, and is currently our neighbor.  She works ALL the time.  The realty office that she works at is right beside the gate of our complex.  She and her husband run the business, so they are literally there 24/7.  Twenty four hours a week, 7 weeks a year.


Actually they're there every day (Monday through Sunday) from 9:00am to 9:00pm.  When her husband's around, Asian Kate works all day long and has no time to hang out.  BUT when her husband goes to Hong Kong (his hometown) to visit his mother, Kate is free to hang out.


For months she has been telling me, "When my husband goes to Hong Kong, we can make dumplings together." "When my husband is gone, we can go shopping!"  But I was never really sure when her husband actually went on these trips.  Then about three weeks ago she knocked on my door to say, "He's going to Hong Kong November 1-5th!"


So Wednesday, Kate and I went to the market to buy fillings for dumplings, then brought them back to my house to stuff the dumplings, steam them and boil them.  It was a lot of fun to finally get some time to hang out with her, and super fun to finally learn how to make dumplings.  Kate kept saying, "I think making jiaozi is fun!"  Her mother apparently is a great jiaozi maker, and it is her family tradition (actually a lot of Chinese families' tradition) to make jiaozi together and eat them at Chinese new year.  Maybe next blog I'll write about this tradition and what I learned about the "legend" of jiaozi from my chinese teacher.


There is a specific way to make jiaozi look pretty when you are closing up the dumplings, and it took practice for me to get them done well, but by the end, Kate told me I could open up an "Jiaozi Made by an American Shop."

steamed jiaozi

making the fillings

teaching me the proper way to wrap them

Pulled noodles

There is a lot of delish-ers (delicious) dishes we enjoy here, that you can't find at Chinese restaurants in America.

One of them is 兰州拉面 (Lan Zhou La Mian, pronounced kinda like Lawn Joe La Me-An) which are noodles made by one of China's minorities (they have 56 people groups in this country).

The noodles are made fresh at the restaurant, thrown into a hot beef broth, and topped with onion, cilantro in some places, soy sauce and chili pepper - though the last two you add yourself to your preference.  They definitely help you warm up on a cold day.

Also, they come with the free entertainment of watching the guys make the noodles.  It's pretty amazing.  In fact I want to learn how to do it.  Forget about pasta makers.

Here are a couple of videos showing how it's done.  I didn't feel like editing them, so hopefully you can tell what's going on.  1st video- stretching out the dough, prepping it for making it into noodles.  2nd video - using his fingers to separate the dough and make noodles.