Small accomplishments

Often, it's the smallest things that determine how I feel about today. The same is true today--I feel like the day went great: I made dinner.

I also taught, of course, giving my past-tense-and-Thailand Powerpoint to the 6th graders at Qingshan, and continued work on my class-by-class seating chart I'm making for myself for all of my classes. And I got/am getting more organized, which always makes me feel accomplished; I made a calendar for cleaning duties in our apartment and am in the process of making a daily schedule for myself which will (or so the theory goes) make me actually go the gym when I plan to go the gym--I hate not doing things that are set in stone, or, you know, written on paper with ink.

But those are not today's triumphs, in my rather illogical mind; no, the triumph was making dinner.

Part of that is because today's dinner was the first I've cooked since the beginning of CNY break a month ago, but the bigger parts come from the fact that, in making this meal, I felt like a local.

No, not in flavor. But in ingredients, and how I got them. The drive back from school found me starving and ambitious, so I took a detour and found a big outdoor vegetable market I'd been to once before a few months ago--yeah, that's right, once--and was able to, not only find parking in the rush hour madness, but communicate with the vegetable vendors in Chinese, seek out the best produce and prices, and buy them without a hitch. (Getting home my creativity was not quite so productive, and involved a somewhat less planned detour, but that's beside the point.)

I ended up with a pair of onions for 30NT (~$1), a  red pepper and a good-sized yellow pepper for 45NT (~$1.50, and the more exciting for having seen my roommates' supermarket-bought peppers priced at 45NT for one), a couple of green onions the guy threw in for free, and a spectacularly massive carrot for 14NT (~$.50).

At home, I already had a chicken breast thawing, but no marinade, so I popped over to the local Taiwanese grocery store, explored their mostly-Chinese-written-and-flavored sauce section, and picked one labeled as BBQ satay which, once I got it home, smelled slightly fishy. I mixed a few teaspoons of that with oil and soy sauce and voila! Marinade. After throwing some rice and bullion in the rice maker, it was time to chop up the veggies, and boy were there a lot of them:

Then it was just a stir frying away from deliciousness and the knowledge that, for ~$2.25US plus the chicken and rice, I'd made at least three or four meals worth of wonderful, healthy food.

It's a small accomplishment, to say the least. But to make this meal, I had to navigate the city successfully to place I didn't know well--in rush hour, nonetheless, use my Chinese to get the vegetables I was after, and experiment in completely unknown sauces to make it all come together nicely. And it did! So yeah, it's small, but it also happens to have made my day.