Daily Discovery
March 2018
March 31: A new supermarket was discovered along one of my walking routes through the city, and I must say, this one seems to be right up my alley with its "Snack Kingdom." Much better than eating a selection from the Animal Kingdom, I must say.
March 30: On this Friday night, I was invited by a bunch of students in the English club to join them for an evening of KTV (which, involved less singing than I imagined, but more snacks, chatting and card games! This is definitely my style of KTV, as anyone who has ever heard me sing can attest to as the truth).
March 29: I used to think that I was spoiled by having a fantastic market so close to my campus, with such an amazing variety of fresh produce for great prices... until I saw this dog today at the market, with it's personal perch for riding through the market in (clean) style. I'm not sure anymore, who is more spoiled...
March 28: Oftentimes, each Discovery just builds upon the last ... so yesterday's tortillas became today's baked tortilla chips, with goes well with a nice corn salsa that my sister (via my dad) sent over to China for me for a day just like today.
March 27: What do you do when you make a ton of mayonnaise and are not used to eating mayonnaise so you have no idea how long it lasts or how much you actually need for a sandwich? You eat it the next day, too. Today, I made a few homemade tortillas instead of buying bread to make wraps, with the addition of a few bean sprouts. Oh, yeah, still delicious.
March 26: It was take two on the mayonnaise for me today, with a twist - this time I made a roasted red pepper mayonnaise and used it to make some pretty nice sandwiches with tofu, cucumber and carrots. My arm was a bit tired after whisking the eggs and oil for 10 minutes, but it was definitely worth it.
March 25: On the weekends, particularly on Sundays, I love to visit one of my favorite restaurants outside of campus for a great, and inexpensive, breakfast. Today, I had soybean milk (not pictured) and two little wonderful pockets of eggs and leeks, fried in a nice little dough pouch. Unfortunately, everybody had the same idea, and the place was full of customers - and delivery men and women stopping by to pick up orders. It is definitely worth the wait, though.
March 24: Last night I met a few new students from a different department on campus at the cafeteria, and today, they invited me to hang out with them - first stop, ice cream, second stop, looking at shoes. I only bought one of those two... I'm sure you could guess which without looking at the pictures.
P.S. The ice cream was actually quite delicious, and will definitely be a location for future visits.
March 23: While we were outside for the class with my final students of the week, a few students from my other class were outside enjoying some ice cream and insisted on giving me one to enjoy! I couldn't decline - and I'm glad I didn't.
March 22: One of my new culinary adventures lately has been making mayonnaise from scratch, which has been easier than I ever thought, even though I am not the biggest fan of mayonnaise, but it is one of the few things whose ingredients (besides mustard) are readily available here in Wuwei. But, I do love potato salad, and mayonnaise is a good start to perfecting that for my home-food cravings.
March 21: One of my classes this week was outside - practicing map skills in English, and giving locations of places relative to other places (i.e., the cafeteria is in front of the number 5 dormitory...) and it was quite funny to see how many of my students had no idea where any building was on campus - luckily they had these guide signs to assist them in learning the campus (and me, too!)
March 20: I've been experimenting with my pudding custard recipe (well, my grandma's actually) and trying to recreate her great coconut cream custard, and I must say, my first attempt wasn't too bad! It was quite good, and I will have to force myself to ration the remainder of my coconut flakes...
March 19: Another special day - the birthday of the best mother in the world! And another look at one of my graduation pics. Thanks, Bucky.
March 18: The Daily Discovery today is the opposite of yesterday's (and the last week) to finally return blue skies to the city. It's a happy day, and a chance for me to get outside and breathe some fresh air.
March 17: The Daily Discovery for the day has been a progressive Discovery for the last 7 days, as the weather has been uncooperative lately ... with dust storms and pollution becoming quite intense. The picture is a picture of the sky at noon, on a day with no clouds. So, normally, it should be bright and blue and sunny .. not.. well.. you see.
March 16: It's a Thursday - which as some of the fellow teachers might it call it, is my special day: AKA, no classes to teach on Thursdays. So I celebrated with a quick trip to one of my other favorite vendors around the city - a bakery that sells cream puffs ... not quite as puffy as I recall from the States, and I am not certain that the cream is from dairy products rather than an oil based substitute, but hey, it's not bad! It's a nice reminder of times gone by. Oh, and they're small, so I can convince myself it's OK to eat a lot of them. :)
March 15: Another midweek trip to the market, and another new find - though the picture isn't so good ... the smell is much better! This was the first time that I saw a man setting up his little stand (near my new egg vendor from a few days ago) where he grinds sesame seeds fresh into a paste, straight into a jar for sale. It smells great - and if I knew how to cook it, I would buy it .... that will be my next task, perhaps! But for now, the smells are a reason to come back.
March 14: One of the things that I have been real enjoying for breakfast these days is called 菜夹馍 （cai jia mo) which is essentially a piece of bread, kind of like a dense pita, stuffed with vegetables - usually potatoes, seaweed, carrots, some potato needles, or whatever else is being rotated in... it's quite delicious and only costs ¥2!
March 13: My trip to the market today resulted in me finding a new source for fresh eggs - a vendor on the far side of the market, with the best deals. I realized today that I haven't seen white eggs for so long that I almost forgot most eggs in the US are white in my experience, with the brown eggs usually a little bit more expensive! Here, one pound of eggs is only ¥4.3!
March 12: We interrupt your daily broadcast (less than daily lately, sorry for those checking this backlog...) for a special announcement: A happy birthday to the best father in the world!
March 11: Day five in a row of food? Yep, but today ... is, well, perhaps not the healthiest food choice I've ever made. Nor the most delicious for that matter, but looking at it really reminded me of some good old treats from home. Take a look, what do you think they are?
If you guessed vanilla wafers, then yes! That is what I thought, too. But ... like most snack foods I try here, they taste good for the first one or two and then after that, maybe not so much. At least this prevents me from gorging myself on snacks, though. The name in Chinese? Little pudding cookies.
March 10: More food? OK, can do. Here was another delicious find in the cafeteria this evening. I'm not sure exactly what it is called, but as the cafeteria chefs told me: "It's a bunch of vegetables, any that we have, all together." Yeah, that is definitely what I want to eat. It came with some potato needles in a spicy-not-too-spicy soup broth, and was quite good. I'll definitely be getting it again, though I might have to bring someone to eat it with me ... it's hard to tell from the picture, but this was one huge bowl of food. ¥10！
March 9: A new semester - same cafeteria. Luckily, I think that the cafeteria food here is really, actually quite good, particularly when you consider the price. Today for lunch I got the 快餐, or fast food - not the fast food you are probably used to, but rather real food that has just been made before the students arrive in the cafeteria for lunch, so they can serve it, well, fast. It's quite delicious, and today the selection was cauliflower, green peppers, tofu and potatoes. It was great! and only cost me ¥7, or just a hair over one US dollar.
March 8: Walking back to my apartment I saw one of the water canisters that every student uses to get hot water daily - for washing hands, faces, feet, clothes, drinking ... Only this one didn't survive the latest water trip. It seems that these canisters are a little bit dangerous - designed to insulate the water, it works great until the drastic temperature difference stresses the bottle just right - and it explodes as the students are walking back to their dorm, showering the ground and hopefully not too much of their body with extremely hot water. Luckily, they are all as careful as possible!
March 7: Butter update - you know, the homemade stuff from a few days ago? Well, one of the side products of making butter is buttermilk, and a side product of that is buttermilk pancakes, which I whipped up for breakfast this morning - a reminder of weekends at home, but alas, no weekend today. Though, getting through Wednesday just got a little bit easier.
March 6: Second day of classes, which for a university schedule means it is still my first day of classes with some of my classes, since they don't meet every day. This semester, I did an interactive language-building/practice activity to establish our classroom rules and expectations; instead of me just telling them what the rules are, I allowed them to come to the same realizations themselves as to what they "should/should not" (language focus for the day) do this semester during class time - oh, yeah, and what I should and should not do as well. Take a look and see what they said!
March 5: One of my hobbies has also been baking, and cooking, with baking being the one that I am much better at... so, given the lack of butter availability here in China, but with the daily availability of fresh milk, I've embarked upon a quest of sorts for the semester - making my own butter, buttermilk and perhaps sour cream down the line, depending upon how the rest of the successes go. My first attempt today was with two pounds of milk (¥4) from which I skimmed off as much cream as I could and shook it up to make the butter. I got about a spoonful, probably like a tablespoon and a half worth of butter. Not a bad start, I'd say, particularly once I improve the process with subsequent attempts... the question that remains now, though, is much less simple: what should I do with the butter?
March 4: Classes start tomorrow - that is, the spring semester is finally beginning, just a week before my hometown's school district heads out on their spring break. It's strange how the schedules have changed so much in so little time, though I'm already used to it here. And with the beginning of the new semester comes the beginning of classes and other student commitments, like cleaning the streets/sidewalks/classrooms on campus - luckily, there was a new shipment of brooms and mops coming in to the campus today, ready to hand out to each class of students.
March 3: Today's discovery was truly a meaningful one - and one that reminded me of why I am here, which I needed a little bit. I was outside my apartment when a student from campus (not from one of my classes, but whom I have talked to a few times in the hallway!) came up to me to wish me a 'Happy New Year!' and talk about our break a little bit. While we were chatting, another student joined us (also not one of my students, but one from a midwifery class I gave a bonus US culture lecture to last semester) and we were chatting for a bit... until one of them says, 'Hey! Let's go to the park and walk around for a bit.' So we walked to the park and chatted (in Chinese with a tiny tiny bit of English sprinkled in) about school, break, college here in Wuwei and in the US, and sampled another "red fruit sugar balls on a stick" (the bing tang hu lu 冰糖葫芦 - sugar covered hawthorns from the fall discoveries) and hung out for about three hours. They told me repeatedly, "This is a happy day! We are so happy you are hanging out with us!" and perhaps even more touching, one of the students told me, "I hang out with you for the first time today AND I make a new friend (the other student she didn't previously know)." And of course, they insisted we take many many pictures.
March 2: Spring is coming back to Wuwei, as evidenced by the thawing of the lotus pond here on campus. This pond frozen over pretty early in the winter (end of November-ish) and was a huge lotus-icicle-lollipop looking pond for a bit, but now the ice is melting and I'll be happy to see the greenery returning to campus soon. Bonus Wuwei tip: It's quite nice to walk around the little lotus pond and small bridges/stepping stones situated throughout it during the fall (and I'm sure!) the spring.
March 1: Happy March! To celebrate the first day of March, I made some bread late last night to enjoy for breakfast - you might recall from the end of last month's Daily Discoveries that I had a bit of trouble finding bread pans to make my bread in ... luckily, I had a few (single use?) aluminum pans saved from when my dad brought me buttermilk nut bread from home during his visit to Wuwei... I'm glad that I saved them - another important lesson in flexibility and adaptation here for me. Take a look - I think the loaves turned out well, though in this picture it is hard for you to see just how small of loaves they actually are!
Oh, yeah, fluffy bready goodness is back in Wuwei