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.

English Competition

This past week a friend of mine invited me to lunch in order to formerly invite me to do the honor of judging the freshman management class English competition. The winner of this class competition would go on to compete against other classes, and then against the best in the school with an opportunity to compete on live television amongst the best in the province. I agreed to help, not knowing exactly what I was getting myself into. So the next night, I showed up to a class full of students who were anxiously awaiting their classmates giving their best English speeches. I asked a fellow judge if the speeches would all be business related since they were management majors. She replied "no, it is not business." I said "then what kind of management?" She said "Just management. Just to manage some things." So apparently I was going to be listening to the future managers of anything and everything give their best speeches. The format was that each contestant would give a prepared speech not to surpass 3 minutes 30 seconds. Then they would draw a topic out of a box, and be given 30 seconds to prepare a 1 minute 30 second speech about that topic, and then be asked a random question by a judge with no time to prepare a 45 second answer. What pressure! When I received the judges' scoring sheet, the categories were as follows:

Speech and topic:
1. Pronunciation 30 points
2. Content 30 points
3. Ability to use English 10 points
4. Overall appearance 10 points (apparently you get deducted based on the judges totally subjective opinion on your ugliness...)
Answer to the question:
1. Pronunciation 10 points
2. Topic to the center 10 points (I still didn't know what this means. I wrote down totally random numbers from 7 to 9 the whole time.)

We were handed each contestant's score sheet with their name, contact information, and speech title. The titles ranged from the inspired (You only have one life!) to the confusing (What is English) to the completely unashamedly plagiarized in verbatim (I have a dream).

So far as I could tell, this is how an English speech competition works in this country-
1. All speeches must contain catchy English cliches that make it obvious the contestant has no idea what they are talking about. If the entire speech is made up of nothing but cliches, this is even better, even if they contradict each other. For example: "You only have one day, so live it like it is your last. The past is behind you, the present is here, and the future is determined by what you do with the present. Cling to your past, for the memories there are made forever."
2. If you forget part of your speech and awkwardly stand in silence, the audience must awkwardly applaud. If you say "I'm sorry. I'm a little nervous." The audience must applaud even louder.
3. Every speech must finish with bravado. Only, bravado here means loud and monotoned, with no insertation of appropriate punctuation. This must build from a nervous, shaky quiet, to a loud determined finish. Even if you are butchering one of the greatest speeches ever given in the English language. "freE AT LAST FREE AT LAST THANK THE GOD ALMIGHTY FREE AT LAST!!!!!!!!"
4. If stating facts in your speech, they don't have to be backed by any scientific evidence, or true from any standpoint. "Imagine what life is like when there is no water left in the world. That is why we have to conserve water now. For if we keep up like this, soon we will realize life without water." (Fact: a drought in your part of the world, no matter how severe, does not mean that the entire world is running out of water. Not even Al Gore would buy into this.)
5. When judging the competition, it is not considered inpolite to inpolitely criticize the contestant, even though there was no time allotted for critiquing the contestants. This is what I call the "well I have a microphone, so I should use it" syndrome. My fellow judges' critiques ranged anywhere from the Simon Cowellesque brutal "It is clear that you have a long way to go in learning English." to the take a knife and make a personal stab "You say you have never felt loved, I am sure your parents would be sad to here you say that." to the completely ridiculous and pointless "Have you heard of Obama's election speech. That speech reminded me a lot of his election speech." (this one was given after the MLK copy. He has his African American history a little confused.)

Having finished the contest, the winner was a girl who I thought honestly gave the best speech of the night. She spoke on why Marie Curie was a hero to her. The speech was completely original, and in great English. I gave it high marks. At one point in the speech, the judge beside me leaned over and said "You ask the question this time. I don't know what she is talking about." Apparently if your English is better than the judge's, they'll give you high marks. Second place? You guessed it, Martin Luther King Jr. I was so frustrated by the end of that speech that I made sure it didn't win. It was like when someone tries to cover an Alicia Keys song. Even if you are a good singer, you aren't THAT good, and the slightest mistake ruins the whole thing. My score for this girl was an outlying 63 out of 100. I even deducted points for ugliness just based on principle. If I scored her a 63, and her average was still high enough to win second place, you can imagine that the other judges were inspired, as they should have been. If that's the first time you'd ever heard that speech, you would think it is one of the greatest ever, because it is.

For those who didn't win, so long as they let go of the past and move on to the future... or cling to the past for its memories, they'll continue to try their hardest in hopes of advancing further in next year's competition.

life lately

so we haven't blogged in awhile. it's not that our lives have been completely dull and boring leaving us with nothing to report to you. it has in fact been quite the opposite. the past 2 weeks have been just so busy with lots of different things that we haven't had any time to sit down and blog. and so this update is probably welcomed at the least by my dad who has been opening his browser every morning to the same picture of max in a popcorn bag for 2 weeks now. and so while the following is by no means a full summary of our past 2 weeks, here are some of my recent thoughts.

1. the weather. the rainy season just might have started this past week. it is hard to tell for sure, but it has rained every day and it is about that time for it to begin. and normally i dread the rainy season because it can be kind of miserable to get soaked on the way to class and stay like that all day, how can you complain about rain when we have been living in a drought for 6 months and the farmers have been suffering all spring? even i can't have that bad of an attitude. and it has given me great reason to get lots of use out of the new rain jacket jarred bought me in america, as well as my rain boots (which i don't think jarred thinks are so awesome).
other than a drought and not wanting farmers to starve, the other thing (though not so significant) that has actually made me glad to have the rainy season descending on us has been the weather the previous 3 weeks. it has been sweltering. it has been sunny (wonderful) but living at 6,000 feet, sunny equals scorching (not so wonderful). every morning for 3 weeks jarred and i were in our bedroom lathering up with spf 30 sunscreen before heading out the door. and then taking it with us to put on in the afternoon. may left me with a nice farmers tan that i will probably be rocking until next february or so.
may also left my house pretty dirty. you see, the scorching heat leaves us here with a daily dilemma. the sun outside heats up our apartment like a microwave. with no ac, the logical solution is to open the windows on the east and west sides of my house to get a draft. and this would be a perfect solution if we didn't live in a construction zone. (a friend the other day told me she imagined us living in a dust bowl and that's actually pretty accurate.) but opening our windows in the middle of said contruction zone bring the contruction zone then into our house. so the daily choice was to sweat sitting in our living room or have a layer of dust and dirt covering everything from our bed to the floor. after a few nights of not sleeping well, we chose the later and didn't look back. i was happy to swiffer everyday if it meant having a breeze.
all that to say that i am glad (at least for now) that the rainy season seems to maybe have arrived. it is clearing gunk out of the air, lowing the temperature, and (hopefully) saving some farmers livelihood.

2. i have taken on the role of toddlers sunday school coordinator for the summer. me? toddlers coordinator? really? this should be an experience. i am sure there will be stories to share.

3. some other foreigners came out to where we lived the other day. they didn't really like it. they didn't like the toilets, the food, the lack of convenience, anything. we got really defensive. and then i stopped to think about last september when we first moved here. it kind of shocked me. i didn't like some things. i didn't like the lack of convenience. it took some adjusting to. but somewhere along the line, it became our home. and now we really really love this place. and when someone came in and didn't like it, i got really mad. but i hope that they will have the same experience we have had and when they leave they will feel like they are leaving a place they love.

4. and finally, this past week some of our neighbors and jarred and i gave a lecture to some college students on american values. to start off the night, i made a quiz to give each of them of stereotypes people here have of america and americans. here is a sampling of the true/false questions: (disclaimer: all of these are things people have said to us here that they actually thought were true about america. i didn't make these up myself, so please don't think i am a. anti-american b. racist c. just plain stupid)
1. all americans are racist
2. all americans own a gun
3. all black americans can't read
4. most americans have been in a gun fight
5. most american college students are lazy and never go to class
as i said, people here have said all of these things to us, claiming them as factual statements about america. my point was just to show students that you can't stereotype "all _____ people" as a certain thing because people are all different and you can't take what you see in a movie and think that all of america is like that, which is often the root of their problem.
anyways, most of them did a pretty good job in guessing false, but our favorite was a girl who checked false for all of them except for the one about most americans having been in a gun fight. really? most americans have pulled a gun in a fight? that's what you think about america? yes, yes it is.
maybe some reality tv shows should be sent over here and not just hollywood movies. but then again, that could be even more catastrophic.

conundrum

while we were in america, our friends amy and grace took care of max for us. it was a HUGE blessing to us, and we are so thankful to them. on the whole jarred has dog-whispered max into a pretty good dog. however, he is still a puppy. and puppies to stupid/ridiculous/hilarious things like get their heads stuck in popcorn bags while trying to eat the leftover popcorn:

amy and grace told us that they left him in their living room for a minute and them came out to find him like this, completely stuck. that is so awesome, i laugh ever time i look at these pictures.

myrtle beach?

our neighbor amy left yesterday morning to go back to america for the summer. it has been awesome living near her this year and we are going to miss her a lot. so friday night a few of us went out to celebrate her last night here.

and this was our destination:

no, we aren't in myrtle beach, as surprising as that might be. we are actually still in our very own city (but still like an hour from our apartment). but in this tourist part of the city they have a real putt-putt course.

here is my very own tiger woods (well, minus all the marital infidelity) warming up.

while warming up for mini-golf is not always necessary, this was no ordinary game. it was girls vs. boys and the stakes were high (well not really but it makes it sound better). here is the girls' team:

amy and grace's last night as roommates:

we all played pretty well and 5 of us even got holes in one (including one of our asian neighbors here who had never touched a golf club before), but the boys ended up winning 38 to 37. it was heartbreaking. and just for kicks because when it happened i was practically rolling on the ground laughing, here is amy picking her golf ball out of the bush that she nailed it right into:

our trip to the putt-putt course also gave me great inspiration for my constant conversations with people here. practically every day here i get asked what my hobbies are. my usual response revolves around playing sports, hanging out with friends, reading books, and cooking. my new response will be mini-golf, which just sounds funny in this language. i'm betting 90% of people will have no clue what i am talking about. i'll let you know how it goes.

and now that we have putt-putt, next up in our city:

airbushed t-shirts.

it's coming, i know it.