Our Cooks

Our helper's name is Zhou Mei. But from here on out on our blog I will just refer to her as Joe. Joe has been with us for about 2 1/2 months. She cooks, cleans and shops for me. I have taught her (or one of our other foreign friend's helpers have taught her) to make bagels, tortillas, crescent rolls, granola, banana muffins, carrot muffins, apple sauce and many other great things. She also prepares my chicken and veggies before she leaves so I can make dinner in a snap. Although she is a very typical Asian woman in that she gives me more unwanted advice in one day than I receive in a month in the US, she is a hard worker and really eases the extra burden of taking care of our home in Asia.

I always feel like I need to explain myself whenever I talk about having a helper...I do not want to sound spoiled. Living overseas is different and living overseas while hoping to maintain our standards of food preparation and cleanliness is quite time consuming. Things get dirtier much faster and it takes longer to clean. We also are short on all those handy cleaning tools and cleansers that are in every single Walmart in the US. Also food preparation is a beast. Our chicken is tough, nothing comes frozen or prepared, and we end up making almost everything from scratch. Things just seems to take longer and at the end of the day without a helper we have neglected our children just to be able to make food and keep our homes clean. Having helpers make it possible to take care of our kids and carry out the other work that we are here to do.

Back to Joe. AB does not understand much of what she says, so she often ends up saying "no" to everything. We are working on AB telling her "I do not understand." However since she is still currently unable to say that in English, it is a stretch for her to say it in another language. One thing that Joe has going for her is the fact that AB looooooves to "help" cook. She like to sit beside the stove while I make dinner, stir when she can and especially loves to help pat out the dough when we make pizza. AB gets excited when Joe starts making lunch. Joe helps her put on her apron and AB gets to work.

Below is a pic of our kitchen...ummm...I did not choose the cabinet decor. We had them boost our countertops (as you can probably see), we installed an oven, put in the wooden table behind Joe and several racks. This is a "one butt" kitchen for sure. We have to take turns getting past each other. Since our apartment is new and not yet 40% occupied, our gas has not been turned on. So until that day we are cooking on a single hot plate. We have made it work.