Leaving a Mess

When Wendy cooks:
Wendy is our Chinese housekeeper, and also a fabulous cook. I've referred to her here before. And if you've eaten at our house over the last 9 months, I hope you have been so lucky as to taste some of her food. She cooks Chinese food exclusively - well, that and flour tortillas. This particular evening, she prepared a veritable feast for us. Six people ate 8 different dishes, and stuffed ourselves silly. When she left, as we sat down to eat she said, Do you mind if I clean up tomorrow? I've just left my prep dishes in the sink. No problem, we replied. Of course - go home! The photo above was the entire contents of the sink after she prepared her feast.

I made dinner tonight. Here's the sink afterward:

With more still sitting on the stove:


I find the differences between China and America endlessly fascinating, and one of them is the culture around food. One small aspect is the prep going into such interesting and varied dishes. Wendy generally only uses one of my knives - my largest. She generally uses one of two utensils - a spatula or chopsticks. And she only uses one pot - the wok. She steams in the wok, boils in the wok, fries in the wok. She cooks rice in the rice cooker, and she does boil noodles and make some meat dishes in a small saucepan. But that's it.

I made two dishes for our meal this evening, and don't really feel like I used an unnecessary dish in the process. Handy that I'm the one with the housekeeper!