Show & Tell: Kitchen

Here is our kitchen as it looked tonight while I was making our supper.  This is a deluxe kitchen, compared to what many Chinese have.  By American standards it's small, but because our kitchen, dining and living area is one big 15x30' room, it doesn't seem so small.  We have a mere 20" of counter space between the sink and the stove top, so we innovated a bit to create more space for chopping all those vegetables we seem to eat.  We moved the hot water pot and small glass teapot to the top of the exhaust hood, an arrangement that OSHA would frown upon.  It was Leah's idea to hang the two baskets under the cabinets to get the dirty dishes off the counter.  Why don't we just put them in the dishwasher over there to the right?  It's not a dishwasher, it's a dish sterilizer.  We wash and rinse our dishes in the sink and put them in one of the two wire "drawers" of the sterilizer, which heats up and dries the dishes.  Over the dish sterilizer is a countertop oven that looks like a nice big toaster oven, and stacked on top of that is a microwave.  To the far right is an LG side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that's almost the size of our fridge at home.  When we were looking at apartments this summer, most had dorm room size fridges.  As I understand it, most Chinese buy fresh ingredients every day if they're cooking, and they don't eat leftovers, so they don't need much fridge space.   We like having leftovers.  For her lunch at school Leah carries warmed-up leftovers in the silver Thermos you see in the wire basket over the sink, just as she did in Minnesota.

OK, I know you're curious about what's cooking.  In the wok is a chicken breast that I'd cut up into small pieces with a nifty sharp meat scissors and sauteed in olive oil with onion and garlic.  The chicken I buy here has been ranging for awhile, so it needs to braise for a least a half-hour to get tender.  About the Italian olive oil sitting on the counter by the wok:  we're on our second liter of it since firing up our kitchen here in mid-August.  The expat population must buy a lot of it, because I can find it in every grocery store in this part of the city, sometimes 5 or 6 different brands.  Next in line for the wok is the pile of onions, a couple cloves of garlic, some sliced black mushrooms, and some medium hot red and green peppers.   Last in will be the spinach that's in the colander in the sink, some dried basil, and a little more olive oil.  Meanwhile, I cook some Australian corkscrew pasta, and I use the oven to roast those delicious cauliflower florets that you see in a shallow pan to the left of the wok.  Voila, pasta with chicken, spinach and mushrooms and some roasted cauliflower on the side, which we ate with chopsticks!  We are very busy fusing food cultures here.