kitchen adventures

One of the fun things I have found myself doing more of lately is cooking and trying new things I'd been wanting to try for awhile. 

This morning, for example, I finally tried out this recipe for making Pumpkin Spice Latte Syrup.  We are blessed to live in a city that has a million Starbucks (at one point our city had more Starbucks than the entire state of West Virginia).  Not that I ever go...in fact, I've only been twice since we moved here 9 months ago!  But there's something comforting just in knowing that they're there.  But I digress...

Even though we live in Starbucks land, there is one very sad (dare I say, tragic?) difference between Chinese Starbucks and American starbucks....no special holiday drinks!  :*( 
That's right, no Pumpkin Spice Latte or Peppermint Mocha. (sigh)  But that's where the Market2Meal blog saves the day!  It turned out decently....might have had less to do with the syrup itself and more to do with the fact that I used the dregs of the morning's coffee and milk that came out of a bag that I heated up in the microwave.  : )

I have to share what a victory even the process for finding the ingredients to make the syrup was.  I had been wanting to make the syrup when I first saw it posted on the Market2Meal blog a month ago.  But also, I only two of the four spices I needed.  Nutmeg and cloves are rather hard to come by.  A friend kindly gifted me a ziploc baggie of ground nutmeg from her stores, and so I was left to find ground cloves.  I knew that my sweet mom was soon sending us a package which would contain all that I needed, but I felt like the need for cloves was a personal challenge.  I not only needed them to make the syrup, but also needed them to make pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, and mulled cider.  I found ground cloves online (the wonders of online shopping in China is another post altogether), but I needed the help of a Chinese friend to order it.  Last Saturday we were having some Chinese friends over, and I had it in my mind that I wanted to make mulled apple cider.  I knew that I had seen cinnamon sticks at the spice market, which got me to thinking that if they had cinnamon sticks there, they might also have whole cloves. I was determined to find out.  Thanks to Google Translator, I figured out how to say cloves in Chinese (丁香, ding1 xiang1, for all my other China-dwelling friends) and set off to the market with the girls. I was stunned at how easy the whole transaction was. I simply walked up to the rows of spice bins, asked the lady (who was nursing her baby) if she had 丁香 and 肉桂棒 (rou4gui4bang4, cinnamon sticks).  She said she did, put a bunch of both in two bags (about the same amount as you would find in the little McCormick tins in the States), and told me how much it cost.  4 kuai.  Seriously?  63 cents?  It was an I heart China moment, for sure.  The mulled cider turned out beautifully, but still the question for finding ground cloves remained.  Then along came my friend with the handy grinding attachment on her blender.  A few seconds of pulsing, and voila! ground cloves. 

Other adventures I've had in the kitchen this month...

...making my own mayonnaise (because I had run out of the kind I usually buy and really wanted to eat a BLT for lunch, plus my friend had recently been telling me how much better homemade is than store-bought)

...which I then used to make spinach dip (because homemade mayo only keeps for a day or two and I definitely had made way more than I could use up on a BLT)

...for which I had to make my own cream cheese (so easy and has inspired me with all kinds of possibilities)

It sounds like I'm boasting, huh?  I think I am, a little. Be gracious towards me in this? When you daily lose your pride because of your inability to accurately communicate your most basic needs or when you have to ask someone what the differences are between all the different kinds of toilet paper at the store because you can't read, you gotta look for confidence where you can find it!  : )

I'm starting to realize though that I may be using cooking as a form of escapism from the pressures of living cross-culturally and trying to balance a potentially unrealistic number of responsibilities.  I suppose there are much worse forms of escapism I could be pursuing, but I certainly don't want to neglect other responsibilities just for the sake of making yummy comfort foods (click here on the dangers of baking bread)

Pray for me to have wisdom in this. This one interest is such a mixed bag of motives. Do I cook because I find it more personally pleasurable than playing with the kids or studying Chinese? Or do I cook because it brings me joy to serve my family in this way and creating happy memories for them, which is pleasing to God?  Am I being worldly by being overly preoccupied with food (Philippians 3:19, Colossians 3:2)?  Or am I being godly by receiving with thanks good things which God has blessed us with to enjoy (1 Timothy 4:3-5, 6:17-18, James 1:17)?  To cook or not to cook, that is the question.  The comment is now open for advice!  : )