Stick and I went to my parents’ for the traditional ham and latkes Christmas dinner, which I’d missed last year in favor of our Jenny Lou’s Christmas feast. My cousins gave us an electric kettle, with the part about “automatic shutoff” circled and underlined. Stick also got a teakettle from my aunt, with the instructions [...]
Coupons depress me. If you summed up everything I loved about our expat adventures, clipping supermarket coupons would be the opposite. It seems to sum up the repetitive mundane side of life in the US, which is of course made worse by how I’m constantly thwarted by my attempts to use coupons and promos.
Stick and [...]
Stick and I went exploring down the Russian street between the Ritan Park Jenny Lou’s and The Place. It’s at the eastern end of Ritan Bei Lu, where it meets Dongdaqiao Lu. The last time I was at The Place, it was all done up for Christmas. I thought it was fairy-light overload then, but [...]
Today is Stick’s birthday! Manfred and Xuemei invited us to celebrate his birthday with them tonight, so I cooked Stick his special birthday dinner last night. “Special” in China, that is. I made him a big hash-and-cheese omelette!
You can’t just throw a China omelette together, this is serious gourmet work! I make perfect omelettes [...]
When I was younger, right before Christmas, my family would drive to Kearny, NJ, where there was a street of Scottish import stores. We would get our all-important Christmas meat pies and sausage rolls, and eat our the traditional pre-Christmas fish-and-chips supper, followed by gigantic empire cookies.
My granny would get nostalgic over all the foods [...]
