food blogs

i love cooking just as much as my mom and sister, who are both fabulous cooks. but one thing i didn't quite inherit was their love for recipes and cookbooks. well, to an extent. i love cookbooks and love recipes and use them all the time, but i think the fact that i really started cooking a lot my first year in asia majorly influenced 2 things about the way i cook: 1. generalizations and substitutions. just because i can't get a lot of typical ingredients here, doesn't mean i don't make things, it just means i have learned to substitute rather liberally. and, well, i am just kind of a chaotic cook and change recipes to do it my way in whatever way seem best. i think recipes work better as guideposts than lab experiment steps, so substituting for lots of things fits right in. 2. cookbooks weigh a ton. and that means i only have about 3 or 4 that have come with me from america. i love them. especially for basic things. but needing a more extensive recipe collection led me to allrecipes.com, which is where probably over 50% of my recipes alone come from. but this past week, i took the dive into food blogs. i know that they have been all the rage for a few years, but i didn't really get into it until i was searching for an awesome pasta salad recipe with spinach, chicken, peanuts, sesame dressing and a whole lot of other things in it that i made last year, but never wrote down. anyways, i finally found it again and that led me to spend a couple hours (i know, hours) perusing some food blogs. and i just wanted to pass along my current favorites because i think they are really great. the majority of the recipes are really simple, but look absolutely delicious. but a number of them were super creative and i can't wait to try them. and why lie, i'll probably change them anyways :)

here they are:

www.yourhomebasedmom.com

www.ourbestbites.com

and here is another one that my friend marrianne told me about that is interesting for recipes, her funny story, and some pretty cool pictures of the american plains. she makes me think even i might want to live on a farm, and we all know what a stretch that would be.

www.thepioneerwoman.com

and ps- i think being paid to blog is about the coolest job ever. pretty lucky people, they are.

not moving

those 2 words placed together have a glorious ring in my ears. this is the first time in 8 years that i haven't moved for the summer. 8 years in a row, since the summer i graduated high school and went to college, i have packed up my life and moved in the spring/summer. but this summer as friends in america and in asia pack their stuff and move on to their next journey for the summer or permanently, i will be waking up in my same bed, cooking in my same kitchen, and reading in my same living room. and i could not be more excited about it! in 3 years in asia i have lived in 3 different apartments, but come this fall there will be no new apartment. no movers. no new landlord. and that is incredibly restful and refreshing. here's to looking forward to another year in my dream apartment!

Vida nostalgia

As you can tell from the title, I am a Latin expert, or at least an expert at guessing Latin. Actually, I have never studied Latin, and I can't claim any Latin heritage, other than my father in law apparently being the Latin state champion of Michigan in high school. Either way, most Latin-based language speaking countries have very talented soccer teams. I played soccer when I was 6, and never again afterwards. I have no heritage of soccer players except for my wife being the soccer state champion of Virginia private schools. So... how is it that I am enthralled with soccer right now? I admit it, I am a bandwagon sporting event fan. If the whole world is in it, I'm in it. So, with that said, I'm currently obsessed with the World Cup.

There is only one problem with this obsession. Since my wife and I don't watch a lot of television, and watch NO East Asian television, we told our landlord we did not want to pay to have cable installed in our apartment, which means no channels whatsoever on TV. Therefore, I have not been able to watch the World Cup. The rest of the world except America are enjoying this once every 4 year event, and we are left out in the cold. So... to solve this problem, I decided it was time to get cable. My plan, have the company turn on our cable for 2 months to watch the World Cup.

So I went to the cable company and told them I wanted cable in my house. After showing them my rent contract and passport, they then told me they could not install cable because I was not the owner of the apartment. If the apartment owner came, then they could install it. Only problem, my landlord lives an hour away from our apartment, and doesn't like to make trips out unless collection of the next year's rent is involved. Seriously, if a tornado ripped the ceilings out of this place, she would tell me "it's not convenient for me to come there. call the HOA and tell them." Luckily, she is also a citizen of everywhere-else-in-the-world-except-America, so when I told her we wanted to watch the World Cup so I needed to turn on the cable, she was more than obliged to come and get it turned on.

Day 2 of attempting to turn on the cable meant that I met the landlord, went and paid for a year of digital cable (2 months wasn't an option, neither was normal cable to a foreigner who didn't know the difference until he got home). I asked when they could come out to install the cable, and the guy at the service desk said, while watching a World Cup soccer match, "On Thursday, they will be on holiday for 3 days." Great timing for buying cable.

Not to be deterred, I decided that I would install the cable box myself. After getting home and following instructions to a T, we had the cable hooked up, and every channel said "no signal." I called the cable company, and they told me they would send someone out on Thursday. Don't they know that Japan and Cameroon are playing!?!? Had I wanted no signal, I would have bought a satellite dish.

Today is day 4 of no cable, and Thursday is tomorrow when they'll send someone out to help. Finally, I will be able to enjoy the World Cup with the rest of the world. Along with that, I will also be able to enjoy the golf and tennis channel and the ping pong and badminton channel. Either way, all of this has made me very nostalgic for America. I wish I could be in a place where I understood the holidays and saw them coming, where the service representative could be completely useless in English, and where TV is such a high priority that service lines are open for 24 hours and they can't even take holidays lest people not be able to watch football on Thanksgiving.

More than that, I miss the summer in America. For my entire life before this, I've had a summer vacation. Even after graduating and working full time, it was still summertime. The swimming pool was open, the tree frogs were screaming, lightning bugs were flashing, the grass needed cutting, the ice cream maker was running (not that the ice cream maker is at all seasonal in Jarred's household), and you didn't have to worry about remembering not to pass a stopped school bus (which in North Carolina carries a stiffer penalty in drivers' license points than if you actually hit a kid).

Here, students still have another month of school, and it is the rainy season, and everyone is taking a 3 day holiday based on an age old story that no one can explain, and there are no swimming pools. This is going to be my first summer where life doesn't really change all that much. We're taking a trip to a fun place in a few weeks, but even that involves the removal of my wisdom teeth.

In spite of it all, I'll be glad to finally turn on the TV tomorrow night to be able to watch the World Cup. All the while, I'll be nostalgic for my family, friends, the smell of fresh cut grass, and rude cable service operators who speak English.