It has been a few weeks since I’ve posted and I apologize. Between a sick baby and a three year old, there hasn’t been much time to write.

But I want to introduce one person who has saved me this month: our lovely cook, Xiao Li.

Xiao Li comes twice a week, but she has taken it upon herself to cook enough food to last an entire week (including lunches).I didn’t ask her to make that much food, but when she found out I have two kids and don’t have a full-time nanny, she informed me she would do enough cooking so I wouldn’t have to.

I know. She’s amazing.

Every Wednesday and Friday around 2pm, Xiao Li rings the doorbell, enters our apartment, puts on her supportive slippers, and gets to work. She usually carries a big bag of groceries, sometimes it’s a small suitcase, and empties it out onto the counter.

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If I’m free, this is when I ask her what everything is. She does not speak English, so I almost always have to look up her answer in Pleco (a Chinese dictionary app) and then google the definition to learn more about the food. For example:

莴笋 (wosun) –> “asparagus lettuce” –> Google: “Asparagus lettuce, also called celtuce, stem lettuce, celery lettuce, or Chinese lettuce, is a cultivar of lettuce grown primarily for its thick stem or its leaves. It is used as a vegetable and is especially popular in both mainland China and Taiwan, where the stem is interchangeably called qingsun or wosun.” (Find more here.)

After learning what the food is, I watch her prepare the new food until one of my children demands attention. In other words, I watch for a few minutes.

So I’m not learning a whole lot about Chinese cooking techniques, but I am learning all about foods I didn’t know existed. Now when I go to the grocery store and shop for produce, I actually know what things are! It feels so liberating.

Before she began cooking for us, she asked what foods we like to eat. Not wanting to limit our culinary experience, I told her we like everything. I let her know where our favorite Chinese dishes come from (Xi’an and Chengdu), but emphasized that we really want to try all sorts of dishes.

As a result, not everything we eat is delicious. There have been some really… interesting things. I learned that when lotus root isn’t cooked until it’s soft, each bite leaves a long, fine hair-like fiber stretching from the lotus in your mouth to the lotus on your fork. We happened to invite friends over when we tried this food for the first time, and one by one, each of us bashfully attempted to pull the “hair” out of our mouths until we realized it was just part of the food.

I also learned how “bitter melon” got its name. *cringe*

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Xiao Li’s specialties are jiaozi (dumplings), spring rolls, kung pow chicken, and breaded chicken. She is pretty famous in our building. She knows that A’s favorite meal is dumplings, so she makes them almost weekly. And it should be noted that even though he vomited up an entire meal of jiaozi (he was overeager and took too big of a bite), he still loves them.

She is going to make it so hard to leave here someday.

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