Birthday Recap No. 3: Cooking Class + An announcement!

In lieu of another long-ish row of pictures...I thought I'd do a collage of my birthday present from Sarah—a Chinese cooking lesson! So exciting. Chinese food is a mystery...a delicious mystery. There are so many different cuisines and tastes. It's a shame to live here so long and have no idea how anything is cooked.

Sarah found a cooking school that does at home lessons called the Flying Chef. They bring everything to your door from ingredients to cooking utensils. Amazing and a very good idea and something we couldn't afford to do in America.

Chef Li (love him. He was so warm and even gave me a hug) arrived promptly at 10:10 and started getting to work. The lesson wasn't so much hands on as watching, which was actually good. 1. Chinese kitchens are small and mine is quite large in comparison to most. 2. He explained why and how he did everything which was a wealth of knowledge and he had previously lived in Germany so I got the sense that he understood the differences in how East & West prepares cuisine. 3. Everything in Chinese food needs to be cut up...best to have someone with a machete and several decades of Chinese cooking under his 10 gallon chef's hat.

The class is sort of designed for a larger group than 2 so we had A LOT of food. It was like Chinese Thanksgiving by 1:00 when everything was finished. I have lots of leftovers and it's seriously some of the best, freshest Chinese food I've ever eaten (did I mention that I live in China?)

Hopefully, I'll detail the how-to's in future posts.

And...

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Hopefully you didn't scoll quickly to the end of the post to get to this announcement. It's not that exciting...but here it is...

To make sure I don't go long stretches without taking pictures of anything, I've decided that this year (the 365 days from this birthday to the next) I'm going to take at least one photo a day and chronicle them week by week. 

In addition to my Nikon D60 and my little Sony, I just got this amazing camera as a birthday present from my roommates. I had coveted it when I went to that antique market and they went back and found it well over a month later. I'm so excited. I took it on Friday to the camera market to get it cleaned out and the repair lady seemed optimistic that it would still work. I'm really hoping so. If not, I'll still love it...it's very old Shanghai.

Anyway, I expect you to keep me accountable if I don't seem to be posting any pictures.