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 that he may let me use it, if he wants to. Because in my family? Almost burning down the house is funny.

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A Nice Family Christmas

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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 I aren’t coupon people. Buy one, get one often turns into buy one, throw away the other when it goes bad. Sometimes we miss coupons because the fine print catches us up. Oh, it’s not fifty cents off, it’s 50 cents off when you buy 2 gallons of Gatorade, a loaf of pumpernickel bread and a pineapple. And still more often, coupons languish on the mail board, or in my other purse, or in the reusable grocery bag I remember to bring about half the time.

We also ought to be banned from buying avocados, as I can never catch that minute between green, alligator-skinned rocks and smooshy mess, and I feel ridiculously wasteful every time I throw them away. We were better off in China, when we would carry our avocados and gouda back from Jenny Lou’s, and then wait, checking the avocados for that perfect sandwich ripeness each time before we went out for dumplings.

But the local grocery store finally had a promotion we could use. Buy 6 gallons of milk, get the 7th one free. This is a particularly good promo because all we had to do was not lose the milk tickets, plus, we had a couple months to go through 6 gallons. I always drank milk but that year in Yantai without any really made me appreciate cold skim milk. I was so pleased to see milk in the Vanguard in Beijing (um, before we knew about melamine, obviously). Anyway, going through six gallons in a couple months isn’t hard.

The other night, mere hours before the promotion expired, we got our seventh free gallon, and since then, Stick has been inordinately proud of our free milk. He might have even done a little dance of success in the supermarket.  When I’m cooking, he wants to know if my recipe requires any Victory Milk. He can’t walk past the kitchen without asking if I’d like a glass of Victory Milk.

I would rather be traveling again, but life with Stick is good everywhere.

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Victory Milk

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(Not my own pic, from Jan & Felix’s Beijing photo page) 

We found a cool Russian restaurant, the name on the outside is Time Bar. The English name on the business card is Mirage Bar and Restaurant, the Russian name is Russian Restaurant, and the Chinese name is Squiggly-Cross Line-Dash-Hyphen West Swirly-Dash Bar. I think reading 2 characters out of 5 is doing well.

I love going to foreign restuarants in Beijing. It’s a trip to see how worlds collide, I love reading the descriptions of the dishes for non-natives and I love seeing what parts of Western cultures make it to China, and which don’t. Chicken Kiev with yangzhou rice? Why not? It also keeps me from that tragic separation from Western food when I start to dream about cheese sandwiches.

The menu had English, Russian and Chinese (and pictures!), although our waiter didn’t speak English. It’s fine because “I want this one” and “2 beers, please!” are in my Chinese vocab. We heard the waitstaff speaking Russian at other tables, though. We were seated at a comfortable green-leather booth, raised up a few steps and separated by a railing from the cellphone-chatting crowd in the center of the room. Our table had a Tiffany-style ceiling lamp and old-fashioned sepia photos on the wall. There was a bit of tinsel wrapped around, oh, everything that wasn’t a customer, but I think that’s for Lunar New Year and not an everyday occurance. The food was good, and arrived quickly, and the beer was cold.

There is one thing about half-Western dining that troubles me. I don’t mind a resonant Fuwuyuan! at Muslim noodles, but I have trouble yelling for more beer when I have linen tablecloths and pretty china in front of me.

As we were finishing our dinner, a scowling waitress brought candles in red glasses. The main lights were dimmed and the TVs, which had been playing dueling episodes of Cyrillic-subtitled MTV, were silenced. After a short introduction in Russian, a saxaphonist began to play. Sometimes our wanderings work out just right, and we stumble into a new place to find a good dinner and nice music.

Later, we stopped in a coffee shop at The Place for lattes.

“Would you like these for here or to go?” the barista asked.

“For here,” Stick said.

“You can’t have them here, we’re closing.”

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Russian Mirage

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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 (I worked in a diner for about a year), but just getting the ingredients here is complicated.

I got the hash from Jenny Lou’s a while ago, and the cheddar from the FuXingMen Parkson’s. Eggs and milk are easy to get, and I’m adjusting to our stove’s special temperment. I folded it up perfectly, and added birthday candles, which are really the best part.

I haven’t seen any for sale here, but by amazing luck, my Christmas box from my parents also contained a package of VAT 19 samples, which happened to have a box of lovely colored-flame birthday candles! (the other zany samples are magically expanding snow, pop up photo albums and an orange-scented pencil, but none of those really work with an omelette). Hurray! Crisis averted!

Stick only got 2 candles, so I shorted him 33, but honestly the birthday omelette just wasn’t big enough for all of them.

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Birthday Omelette

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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 “from home” and the Scottish accents of the women in the butchers’ or the chip shop. I remember her showing me the candies she’d liked best as a child in the highlands, but unfortunately I also remember not being very impressed, and thinking that all candy is candy, so what’s the big deal with those toffees, Granny?

Yesterday, Stick and I took a pre-Christmas cross-town pilgrimage to Jenny Lou’s. Jenny Lou’s is a Western-import supermarket, and we thought we’d get some Christmas presents for ex-pat friends and some treats for ourselves. I’ve heard it’s a chain, we went to the one at the northwest corner of Ritan Park, and I was pretty happy with the selection.

It turns out that my granny was right, and all candy isn’t just candy. Stick and I found little packets of Jelly Bellies and Haribo gummy bears, so we each had a chance to make the very romantic announcement “You can get this for my stocking!”

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Following Traditions

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