Hmmm... Western Food, You Say?

One of our last stops in Hong Kong was dinner at an Italian restaurant, pictured above. In addition to pasta, we had gnocchi, garlic bread, bruschetta, red & white wine, and a trio of cheeses for dessert. That's right folks, we had cheese for dessert. Are we crazy? Maybe, but that's not why we ate cheese for dessert. For us, cheese is practically nonexistent and is only really available in Changsha (more than a two hour bus ride away). So, you could say that cheese is quite the luxury to us, hence all of the nom nom nomming on the cheese. Okay, I'll stop talking about cheese before you all vom on your nice computers.

Anyhoot, the Western food in general really inspired us to cook outside of the Chinese food box. On a trip to Yueyang, we found some Barilla pasta at Wal-Mart and decided to grab some. When we got back to Rong Jia Wan, we found some small tomatoes at a local fruit stand, and we picked up a few kilos of them. Apparently, people just snack on them like grapes, so we got a lot of stares from the folks who saw us with this large bag of 'snacking tomatoes'. Bunch of weirdos...

In all, the only ingredients we could get from our simple, little (frigging, crappy) town were tomatoes, garlic, onions and olive oil (which was way expensive). In addition to the pasta, the basil, balsamic and parmesan cheese had to be bought elsewhere.

We got back to the apartment and got straight to work on our Italian feast. In the end, we made tomato sauce, bruschetta and pasta, and all was right with the world. Until we opened the 'champagne'. This strange Chinese brew is for some reason pink, without effervescence and tastes like watermelon Kool-Aid mixed with rubbing alcohol. The taste... it's hard to forget.

On a lighter note, we also recently picked up a toaster oven in Changsha, which allows us to bake chocolate chip cookies! Of course, we also have to pick up brown sugar and vanilla outside of Rong Jia Wan, but the cookies are droooooool... I've gained fifteen pounds!

Cullen