"So what do you eat?"

We are asked all the time about food here in China -- what we eat, how Molly and Hudson are liking the food, how it is different from Texas. I cannot possibly explain the complexities of Chinese food in a paragraph, but I'll try to sum up a few differences. In Texas, we ate a lot of chicken, cheese, beans, potatoes, stew, steamed vegetables, ground meat, pasta, tomato sauce, deli-sliced lunch meat, waffles (with Nutella on top!), applesauce -- I could go on and on. I used the oven a lot for chicken pot pie, quiche, lasagna, casseroles, etc. Here, butter, cheese and pasta are available at a few fancy European supermarkets but certainly aren't normal fare. Chinese cooking involves a wide variety of vegetables (eggplant, tofu and many kinds of leafy greens are quite common) and meat (pork, chicken, beef, mutton) stir-fried in a wok. There is soy sauce, vinegar and sesame oil instead of butter, cream and olive oil. You go to the outdoor market and buy fresh chicken or beef from a vendor instead of finding wrapped packages of lean ground meat or skinless, boneless chicken breasts.

When we lived in northeast China 10 years ago, it took me quite a while to come around to really enjoying the food. Sure, there were dishes I liked, but it was a solid six months before I truly adjusted. This time has been completely different. I hadn't realized how much I missed the food until we arrived and I began ordering my favorite dishes. So delicious! I have been eating with gusto.

The photo above shows shao qiezi on the right, which is eggplant with pork, garlic, onions and red and green peppers. Our friend Susan says the city we're living in now has the best shao qiezi in China, and we believe her. It is excellent here! I forget the exact name of the dish on the left, but it is a type of bread (called "bing" which means pancake) filled with beef and seasonings. A Chinese meal typically has rice, but rice is not needed if you order bing or jaozi (dumplings or potstickers, as American restaurants call them).

This photo was taken on our first morning in China, at the hotel's breakfast. Molly was trying to work with her chopsticks; usually kids begin eating with them around age 5. Her plate has fried rice, a hard-boiled egg and bread, like a sticky bun. I am eating zhou, which is rice cooked in a lot of water (kind of like porridge). Another breakfast staple -- and my personal favorite -- is baozi (dumplings filled with meat). When our friend Leroy was here, we found a small baozi restaurant nearby and can now pick those up to eat on the go or bring back to the apartment.

At home, we've been eating a lot of peanut butter and crackers. We also make PB&J on wheat bread, slice cheese to go on our crackers, and eat a lot of scrambled eggs and fruit. Cooking at home has been really hard for me because our kitchen isn't equipped to cook the way I'm used to, and I am not at all familiar enough with the seasonings and way of cooking to make Chinese dishes. It's a terrible feeling to not be able to provide healthy food for your family, especially when that includes two growing kiddos. It's difficult to take our kids to restaurants -- they are 2 and 4, after all -- and it's also usually a very smoky environment (non-smoking sections are extremely rare). So we recently made one of the best decisions ever and hired a sweet Christian lady to be our cook. She does all of the market/grocery shopping and then comes to our apartment from 3-5 p.m. Monday through Friday to cook dinner for us. We explained Kevin and Hudson's food allergies to her, told her the types of food we especially enjoy, and know she is cooking with less oil than the restaurants use plus no MSG. Hopefully I can watch and learn from her, as well as practice my language skills (once I actually have some, of course). She only charges $32 a week, plus the cost of the groceries. Win, win, win!
~Dayna