we got an oven

we bought it yesterday. chinese people don't cook with an oven, so no normal apartment in china has one built in. we have been doing more cooking lately, and we have this new neighbor - from san antonio - that really likes to cook and is pretty good at it. so we decided to get a small oven. it cost about US$55 and was sitting on out dining room table last night as we tried to make snickerdoodles using SR's new cook book. the only ingredient we couldn't find was cream of tartar, but they tasted pretty good without it. i had never mixed cookies by hand before - it wasn't easy. They came out alright, and we are now plotting our next cooking project.

we also made homemade dumplings yesterday. dumplings are one of my favorite foods, and this was my first time making them. we bought pork and cabbage (you can use a lot of different things for filling), and chopped them up very very fine and add some ginger and salt and cooking alcohol. you can make your own wrappings, but we took the easy way and bought some. they are little circular pieces of dough about the size of your palm. then you have to wrap the dumplings. SR was the expert at this, but i eventually kind of got the hang of it. then you boil them, then eat them with vinegar and they were sooooooooooooo good. it doesn't get much better than homemade jiaozi.
-elias