We finally have an oven. I guess it's normal for the
Chinese homes to not have ovens here but I just didn't see us living here for the next three years without one. I mentioned it to our director a few weeks ago and he had one ordered for us the next day. A week later they came to install it and now we have an oven. The problem though is that I can't find baking dishes here. People here just do not bake in their home. I have looked and looked all week with no luck. I'll go check
Ikea this week because I'm sure they will have something. The other problem is finding the right ingredients to use. They can be found in the American store but they usually cost twice as much. I was so excited to have an oven though. Imagine being excited about something that seems so trivial.
Another problem I found is that they don't have the temperatures on the knobs. This is the knob for the oven. How am I supposed to know what temperature it is set at? My choices are 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Low or High. I'll have to do something playing around to figure that out.
Today I finally used the oven. I made
Calzones. Not quite the same as at home but we were happy. I had to use the broiler pan that came with the oven. It worked!!!! We have a Sam's club here and I went with some teachers last week. They actually had pepperoni there. It was fun to see all the different things they had. You can buy live fresh crab along with other strange things that I couldn't figure out. It was about a 30 minute taxi ride so I won't go every week but I
definitely will return.
I tried to make an apple crisp. I used
Chinese brown sugar which isn't quite the same, it was really dry. It was also difficult to convert the measurements to metric and I guessed on the amount of butter. It was o.k. but not as moist as I usually make it.
6 comments:
Congratulations!!! That is exciting news. I'll remember every time I use my oven how convenient it is to have temperatures and baking pans. Thanks for the reminder of how great it is here. :)
This is your cousin, Lynn Johnson. Saw you left a message on our blog. My mom told me that you guys were in China. She said she thought that was something we would do. She's probably right. Sounds like an adventure. I remember when I was on my mission in Korea thinking how neat it would be to have an oven and then I got transferred to a house with an oven. It was very nice. Not only to cook with but to heat our house with after the boiler blew up. People who haven't lived in Asia might take ovens for grantid but those of us who have lived without learn to love ovens even without any means of judging temperature. We'll check back with your blog. It looks like you will have a very interesting life the next three years.
Ikea definitely has baking dishes. I bought bread pans there. You can also check out City Super in Kowloon the next time you are in Hong Kong. You might also want to pick up a meat thermometer to put in your oven so you know the temperature. Also, at City Super and even Three Sixty, western products are sometimes cheaper than Silver Palate or Charlie's, so if I am already there, I tend to pick up some flour and the like. Also, the foreign products aisle at Carrefour usually has all-purpose or self-rising flour. Since Carrefour opened up, WalMart is barely worth going to.
When I bake here in China, I find that I often need to add at least one additional egg beyond what the recipe calls for. I don't know why, because they appear to be the same size as American eggs, but my quick bread and cake batters are much too dry without the added egg.
For butter conversions, bookmark this page
http://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/butter_converter.html
Also, I was at Shenzhen IKEA today, and they have a lot of bakeware, metal and glass. Casserole dishes, cookie sheets, muffin pans, tart pans. Go wild!
http://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/butter_converter.html
Argh! I don't know why the blogger comment keeps truncating the link I am trying to give you. Try clicking this.
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