Excerpt from November 2014

Anyone who’s met me or even just seen my photo could tell you that I’m not much of a Betty Crocker type. I can’t even deceive people about it. It’s so ingrained…like the dirt and dried paint beneath my chipped fingernails. Or more likely, it’s just hard to picture me in a frilly apron – which is true. I can’t even imagine it myself; lace gives me the willies. I mean, if I met someone in a dark alley dressed all in lace and frills I would probably inelegantly pass out of fright (because I’m not sure that I can perform a dainty swoon properly).

Up until just a few months ago I had baked cookies approximately three times in my life (not including the “mommy’s little helper” days): once in America, once in India, and once in China. The good thing about baking for Easterners is that they don’t know how bad my cookies actually are. They’ve never had warm, gooey chocolate chip cookies at grandma’s house. They had pork dumplings – which are delicious, by the way, but not quite like chocolate chip cookies. Naivety is on my side and I definitely take advantage of it as often as possible. “Cookies – so delicious!” they sing in my praise… but I know that the cookies aren’t gooey. I know that I could drizzle chocolate over cardboard and they’d probably still say they liked them.

Not only am I an inexperienced baker, but I tend to approach the kitchen in the same way that I approach much of my life: “Be creative, customize it, & why not give it a try?” This life tendency has guided me decently well, about 50/50. Well, sometimes it works out. That old trunk did turn into armor for the Halloween costume and that cutting board and mixing bowl will make a fine bathroom sink. But other times, like when I was about eight (among other ages), that sense caused me to wear football pants over my sweat pants…in public. I also wore my sweet, homemade ninja outfit while delivering newspapers. To this day, those newspaper-reading people probably have no idea how those papers arrived on their doorsteps.

But in the kitchen, this philosophy means that I have the urge to change the recipe (to “improve” it, obviously) on the first try…before I’ve even tasted the normal recipe. This, although “creative,” is not usually good for novices especially given that baking is like chemistry: add 1/4 tsp of X, 1/8 tsp of Y, and exactly 2.255765 oz of Z, whip gently for 90 seconds, and bam, delicious cake! My, “Nah, it’d taste better if I substituted Q,” has released many evils into our digestive systems.

So the other day when I had to prepare for three groups coming over for class parties, I needed an easy dessert to serve. It’s polite, of course, but I truly think my students would feel a little gypped if they came to an American’s house for a party and didn’t get a homemade, authentic American treat. And so it was my burden to bake. I decided on apple crisp mostly because it is not apple pie…and only has six ingredients, five of which can be fairly easily obtained in China (butter, for example, is an import and is $4 for 227g. Brown sugar, the sixth ingredient, is as rare as unicorns and costs slightly more if found). Apple crisp is traditional for the autumn season…and requires more chopping and dumping than finesse so… it was an instant winner.

Knowing my limitations and with a plan in hand, it was time to procure the ingredients! So I coerced James into picking up 35 apples. Recall, we don’t own a car. We own a tiny scooter (see old post for tales of its exploits). 35 apples is a lot of apples to haul around on your bike (it’s about three medium sacks full). They don’t sell packages of apples here. You pick them off a stack individually. Somehow, James got three sacks home between his backpack, the basket, and his feet. It was such an unusual sight that the door lady asked one of my students to bring back some of whatever we were making with them.

As mentioned, real brown sugar is not to be had in China. By “real” I mean yummy. There is brown colored sugar but it is often made of ginger…yes, ginger. I can’t even stand the smell – and I like ginger. I like gingerbread, ginger on sushi, and Blenheim ginger beer. I even put bits of fresh ginger in certain dishes but this I just can’t handle. I could’ve fed them that sugar – after all, they’re used to it. But I thought it might be some type of immoral syncretism to put it in apple crisp. So I was forced to substitute white sugar – not as good but definitely not as bad as the alternative. The cinnamon, salt, and oats were easy enough to get. Now I just had to figure out how to bake enough for 75 people in my toaster oven.

They were coming over during the regular class time in place of actual class. I know this seems like a teacher-cop out but…why not? We were going to have a class party for the autumn holidays anyway. Why not have one at the teacher’s house with warm dessert and games instead of in the cold classroom? (Cold because the government hasn’t turned on the heat yet). Also, I already knew they had time to come. So the regular class times were 8:00am and 9:55am on Thursday. Because one of the classes had 29 people, I split that one in half. That made for three groups that day. I would also host a class at 8:00am on Friday. Wednesday night I baked five dishes of apple crisp. Some neighbors came over; it was a glorious evening of apple chopping excitement.      The parties went well, I think. And I hope they liked my extravagant gifts of deliciousness although honestly it was a lot sweeter than they’re probably used too. Then again, maybe not for this Westernized, McDonalds and Oreo eating generation. But if the sugar didn’t get them the cinnamon probably did (cinnamon is used in medicine; who knew that the West ate medicine like candy?).

Since it was an autumn party, we reviewed the two big holidays: Halloween and Thanksgiving. It was a review because last year we went through a detailed history of the holidays. I always feel especially funny about teaching Halloween because my family never got into it. Somehow, we conservative kids were allowed to dress up (think sweet ninja outfit) and go forage for candy on October 31st. But if you think about it, it’s pretty weird for people who follow Jesus to celebrate a day primarily dedicated to fending off evil spirits and adolescent vandalism. Still, it’s part of American culture and it’s better for them to ask me questions about it than making assumptions based on American horror flicks. Better than their assuming that it’s only innocent or that all Christians acknowledge it (because of course, all Americans are Christians). Most people are truly there just for the candy and because a day when it’s perfectly normal to walk around in a ninja outfit is kinda cool.    For the game, I resorted to a classic: toilet paper costumes! They laughed a lot and for some reason the girls always seemed to make the few, hapless boys on their teams be the models; consequently, many of the model guys fell victim to wearing dresses. The winning group got tiny Snickers bars (about as cheap as elephant tusks) because we’re not the type of people who would give kids raisins and toothbrushes.

The second half of the party was about Thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure that there are not any true Thanksgiving games (except maybe football and something about chasing a hoop with a stick). There are just games that people attached a turkey to because there aren’t any Thanksgiving games: “let’s play pin the tail feather on the turkey” because the Pilgrims obviously played that.   So instead of knock-off games, we did the traditional thing. This is where the apple crisp came in: we ate and were thankful. We also made a paper chain of things we were thankful for and because it’s an Oral English class, we went around and said what we had written down.

And that was it.

Over the span of two days about 75 kids filed in and out of my house, all at once making it instantly lively and also making it smell like a subway car. Back in the States, I doubt I would have done this. I hope that when I go back, I will….though maybe not in groups quite so large. Perhaps a nice small recurring group – that is, of the same few, as in not many, people – would be more my speed.

But being here has been a good reminder of the importance of hospitality (per Romans 12:13). James and I aren’t naturally gifted in this area. We both enjoy being alone – sometimes even alone separately. The twin facts – my keen cooking instincts and the rash I get from domesticity – are convenient excuses (The fact that i could never fold a fitted sheet properly nearly caused me to give up housewifery all together). But there is definitely something special about inviting a person into your house and letting them see a little bit of your world – well, the part in the living room, anyway. Some fellow teachers at another school invited a colleague over for dinner (also an American) and he commented on how long it’d been since anyone had had him over for dinner – about 10 years. For my generation, traditional entertaining can seem a bit stuffy and old fashioned though I don’t doubt that Millennials are generally more social than their parents. If Strauss and Howe are correct, perhaps we’ll come closer to our grandparent’s example.

Either way, it’s easy to think that we have to measure up to some ideal like Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, or those people on Pinterest. Betty Crocker is not a real person, Martha Stewart… went to jail, and simply searching “Pinterest fails” can do a world of good. So that should take the pressure off.  Or maybe we find ourselves acting like adults. I remember one time when I acted like an adult… But really, some friends had invited us over for dinner, making two married couples. And all of a sudden, in the middle of tea time, I realized that although we had been friends for a long time, we were making idle chit chat and playing board games like we were a couple of Aunt B’s…or worse, at a bridal shower. We might as well have been watching the weather channel. Hospitality (and bridal showers) don’t have to be like that…I hope anyway, thankfully, because what we really needed at the time was either some serious joking or some solid conversation. We don’t even really need apple crisp.

…which would have saved me a lot of trouble, come to think of it. Oh well.