"The Joy of Cooking" with Friend!

This month my childhood best friend, Janelle (aka Friend) came to visit me in China.  We traveled around for the first couple of weeks while the rehab center that I work at was closed for Chinese New Year and then she spent a week in Kunming with me.  During her week in Kunming, she took it upon herself to domesticate me... what a task!  Next week I'll be moving to a new city in China that is less Westernized and I will not have access to Walmart.  Sooo Janelle decided that we ( I ) need to learn to cook using just the available things in the open air market.  

Herein lies the tale of two girls desperately trying to avoid becoming vegetarians in a world lacking prepackage frozen meat : ) 

Meal One:  Chicken Breast and Couscous:

Step One: Go to the market and choose a sad, dead chicken.

Step Two:  Put that dead, sad chicken in a plastic bag and walk half a mile home.

Step Three:  Take numerous pictures of this poor chicken that has given you it's life.. post some of them on facebook and harrass your friends (the chickens feet really do look like the fingers of one of my friends in her baby pictures... it was unreal!)

Step Four:  Hack the poor thing into pieces with little idea of what you are doing (at least I had little idea, Janelle seemed to know what she was doing)

Step Five: Cook and enjoy... try not to think about its sad, cold face as you sink your teeth into its flesh. 

Meal Two: Fish (not sure what kind) and Pasta:

Step One:  Go to the market and pick out a live fish (briefly consider letting all of the frogs sitting in a mesh laundry bag free... I don't get why they don't jump away, if they all modilized at the same time there would be no stopping them... Using the name of a popular children's book as their battle cry "JUMP FROG JUMP!")

Step Two: Gasp in horror as the fish seller takes the fish out of the basin, holds it over his head and throws it against the ground as hard as he can to kill it (I was not expecting this, I thought that they hit them on the head which isn't much better but at least its less dramatic)

Step Three:  let the horror continue as the seller scales the fish and puts it into a plastic bag and you take the dead fish to another store where you are stopped on the way out to practice English with a child and asked to take a picture with a child that you have never met.  During the entire encounter and photoshoot, Janelle was holding a bag with a dead fish, this may not have seemed weird to anyone else, but it seemed weird to me.

Step Four:  Watch a Youtube video on how to fillet a fish.

Step Five:  Try with no success to cut the fish apart in the way that the video said.

Step Six: Ask your friend to block the fish from falling off of the counter as you attempt to cut into it (it was much slimier than we thought it would be and slid all over the place, it was terrible!)

Step Seven:  Repent for your murderous heart as you slice into the fish trying multiple knives and eventually resort to using scissors to do the job.

Step Eight: Bread and fry the fish

Step Nine: Guiltily eat the fish and try to remember why you even like meat in the first place.  Also try to remember why you ever left a country with Giant Eagle for a country without Giant Eagle...

Step Ten:  Resolve in your heart, and try to convince the love of your life to be a vegetarian OR find a way to become the Duchess of Downton so that Daisy and Mrs. Patmore can take care of cooking from now on.  

Step Eleven:  Find out a couple of days later that the new city probably has frozen meats : ) 

But it was all worth it for THE JOY OF COOKING WITH FRIEND!!!