American Noodles

 Last week was one of my most fun weeks in China. The girls and I decided that we needed to get a little closer with our Chinese friends, so we invited them all for dinner. On Saturday we pulled it off Chinese stlye with Candice, Sparky, Chlorris, Fanny and Jesse. The apartment was burning hot with twelve people running around trying to cook and prepare for the meal, but other than that everything went soo well. We ate classic foods like cucumbers, tomatos and eggs, dried raddish, hot peppers, broccoli, rice, spicy green beans, and cabbage. All were fried in a ton of oil, and it tasted delicious as usual. We also had some salad and ranch dressing to appease the American tastes, and I attempted to make some noodles. For the past month or so I've been working on the development of an extremely good noodle recipe that I can take home to make for friends and family as a good Chinese meal; I recently perfected it, but when I went to make it for the group all I got in response was Sparky telling me over and over again that I was doing it wrong. It was pretty funny. His attention to what I was doing brought our other friends into the kitchen, and it was determined that I was making "American noodles" for everyone because obviously they weren't Chinese. Luckily, once they tried them they loved the taste and ate a ton of it, but it was evidently not authentic Chinese nor does it have anything to do with American style anything, so I guess I just discovered a great "Courtn-ian dish."
     It was so fun just sitting around our tiny table all sharing the same dishes. See, in China the way you eat your meals (even at restraunts) is not to dish up a plate full at a time. You basically just grab what you want with the chopsticks you are using, and put it in your bowl throughout the meal. You almost never have much on a plate unless it's rice. In part this is because the food generally comes out continually until you are done with the meal, but either way I dont think my dad would handle China well for this reason (I can just picture him smacking my hands or fork when I take something straight out of the bowl and put into my mouth). Grabbing food willy nilly with my chopsticks, however, is a cultural etiquette pratically designed for me.
   Saturday went so well that Jackie, Kalie, and I decided to try it again with our good friend, and Kung Fu instructor, Spring. He requested an American meal, which made the preparation and cost extremely different than the first meal, but suprisingly enough it ended up going off as good or better than the first. We certainly had a lot more bumps in the process. At one point (30 min before he was supposed to arrive) we found out that we had no way of procurring the main ingredients for our dinner nor desert, but due to some brilliant improvisation we were able to come up with a phenominal final product. If I were going to live in China permanently, I think that I would open a restraunt and serve our dinner permanently. We had fruit salad with yougurt; taco salad complete with picco de giao, lettuce, ranch dressing, fry bread, and the best beef you've ever had; my own homemade french fries; and chocolate peanut butter no bakes to top it off. It was sooo good, and we had leftovers for two days, which was actually kind of strange because you never have leftovers with Chinese food. There are always a TON of dishes, but they are a lot smaller so you finish them off. Loading as much as you can onto one plate was sort of a forgotten concept for us, but I guess it's like riding a bike and we got back into the swing of things easily. That night was definitely the most full I've felt in a long time - especially in China.
   Wednesday we were supposed to do dinner again for some friends of ours in the band at Peter's Place, but they ended up backing out last minute because of work. We'd planned with Ben (our American neighbor and drummer in the band) to make Chicken Parmasean, and it would've been AMAZING but I guess we'll just have to wait for another week!
   I cannot believe it's almost May - the time is flying by and I wish I had a remote to make it all go slower. Hopefully, when I get home I will have no regrets with how I spent my time; got to live it up! Love you all!