On the eve of the holiday
A few snippets you may {or may not} find interesting:
- Tomorrow is Mid-Autumn Day Festival, a day set aside to gaze at the moon, think about family members that are far away, and eat mooncakes. In preparation for the holiday, everybody scurries around giving each other this aforementioned culinary delight. This stuffed pastry, while a delicacy in some people’s minds, is more like a tightly packed circle of sawdust in my own mind. Thankfully, the foreign affairs office knows the foreign teachers well enough to know that any mooncakes delivered into our hands will soon thereafter be delivered into the nearest trash bin. So instead of a gourmet collection of cakes, they gave us a gift card to the local grocery store. I love our foreign affairs office.
- Since tomorrow is a Festival day, I am now on “vacation” for the next three days. This means that at 5:30 pm, I am already in pajamas; a state of attire I hope to continue for the next 44 hours (it would be longer, but I have friends coming over Thursday afternoon). After I wrap up this play by play of my current situation, I will quite happily tuck myself away in the kitchen to whip up a big feast in celebration.
- Speaking of big feasts, this past weekend I asked Stella to pick up a package of cream cheese for me since she was headed to the nearby big city. I had a craving for carrot cake, and knew I’d have time to whip one up over the holiday. I was imagining she’d pick up a normal sized box of Philadelphia cream cheese from the import store. Instead, she returned with a five pound block of cream cheese. I am now accepting any and all recipes involving cream cheese. Needless to say, my mashed potatoes tonight will contain cream cheese (as a sidenote, have you ever added cream cheese to your mashed potatoes? not exactly good for the behind, but in all other respects, so good).
- Also on the agenda for the night? Watching the third movie in the Twilight series with the girls. Mock all you want–after the mayhem of the start of the semester, the pure fluff and ridiculousness that is Twilight is sounding mighty fine.
Happy Mid-Autumn Day to all of you! I’ll be thinking of you as I gaze at the moon tomorrow!
Hmmm….and I thought the mooncakes I had were just not made very well. They “sound” so delicious and yet, they aren’t. Sawdust is a very good description!