Electric rides and Kimchi

Tuesday:

This is my “car”.  It’s electric.  It goes about 30km/hr which is about 18 mph.  Better than walking.  I can get around easily with the three older kids and when I have to, I can strap Ajay to my front and still manage.  This is a bicycle/motorcycle culture.  Many people have electric bikes as well.  There are bike lanes all over town.  It’s mostly safe.  I promise.  And the best part is, I never have to pump gas!  I really hate to pump gas!  I just run a long extension cord out my patio and plug it in!  It charges overnight and last me about 5 days.  Very nice. 

We ate lunch at the jiaozi (dumpling) restaurant near our front gate today.  It’s convenient, cheap and quick.  Those round wooden trays stacked up have holes in the bottoms and loosely woven tops to allow the steam to travel through.  The steamed jiaozi are my favorite!  

I decided to make kimchi today.  No, it’s not a chinese dish - Korean.  But I thought this might be a good time in general to talk about life in my kitchen.   

I have a small oven - very small and 2 portable electric burners for a stove.  In this picture we are using said portable electric burner to eat hot pot for supper.  

The Mr. Melty cookies came out of the oven 5 at a time.  It took a while to make them all!  A friend told me about the Mr. Meltys.  I'm so glad she did.  They are a fun Christmas tradition addition for us now that we're living in the tropics!  No dish washer of course.  But at least in this apt, since we finished out the insides ourselves, counter tops are tall and there are plenty of cabinets.  We are almost outgrowing our fridge and we had to buy a free standing top loading freezer to hold the extra stuff (it's on the back patio).  Our best option for buying cheese is to get it from a restaurant supply store in the capital city.  We split a 50 lb block with some other foreign friends about 2-3 times a year.  So, we've got to have enough freezer space to store 25 lbs of cheese.

We are also into green smoothies lately.  The kids love them.

 Have a great day.  Tomorrow I'll put up more pics.  This is definitely a blogging records for me!