In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy our latest adventures with ayi. Zhang Ayi is a marvel and I can't imagine what we'd do without her!
Every evening when we get home we have a delicious (well, with a few exceptions...more to come), nutritious dinner on the table. A typical meal consists of a sauteed vegetable (eggplant, squash, or something), a braised green vegetable (usually of Chinese varieties totally unfamiliar to us, but sort of spinach-like), soup (usually a light chicken broth with some kind of vegetable and either a little egg or a little tofu), a meat dish (she makes particularly yummy ribs!) and, of course, a bowl of rice. By the time we've left the dining room, ayi has a giant plate of watermelon cut into bite-sized pieces waiting for us (with toothpicks for eating...well...actually, those pre-strung disposable dental floss things...don't ask me...).
In addition to the ribs, some of my favorite dishes are the cold cucmber salad with garlic and a bit of vinegar, sliced tomatoes which ayi peels (and let me tell you, peeling tomatoes is a real pain!) sprinkled lightly with sugar (yes, it sounds a little odd, but it turns out to be delicious), sauteed eggplant, and, of course, jiaozi (Beijing's native style of boiled dumplings) which ayi makes entirely from scratch (she rolls the skins at home, then brings them over and fills, seals and cooks the dumplings here).
Ayi makes everything from scratch and she shops each day for fresh foods. She informs us that food must be made and eaten fresh. Store-bought dumplings (or even the skins) are no good (in fact, are unhealthy). We aren't even allowed to save leftovers (which we always have) for lunch the next day (not healthy ayi insists). Last time I went to the store with her (before I started work, obviously) happened to be a fish night. I KNOW that fish was fresh because I watched the lady in the fish section scoop it alive an flopping out of tank, whack it dead, clean it and hand it over. An hour later that fish was on our table (and it was definitely good...although I don't want to think too hard about what might have been in the water it lived its life in...).
Jiaozi are usually a Friday night treat. This past Friday dinner looked like this:
I believe jiaozi are usually a meal by themselves, but ayi didn't want us to feel that the meal was insufficient, so she gave us plenty of other dishes as well. Yes, the pale things are just what you think they are...chicken feet (aka phoenix claws)...here's a close up so you can tell for sure:
We dutifully tried them but told ayi that in the future chicken feet could, perhaps, be left out of our diet.
Ayi believes it is her job to keep us healthy. In fact, shortly after she started working for us, she told us that if we got sick she would feel she failed at her job (boy I hope my immune system is up to whatever germs hang around in Beijing that I haven't been exposed to at home or I'll feel awfully guilty!). To keep us healthy, ayi has started us on a new regime: mung bean soup at bedtime. Mung bean soup is a mildly sweet dish of mushy mong beans in the liquid they were cooked in. It is eaten cold. Ayi makes it fresh each day and we're under strict orders not to heat it, eat any day other than the day it was made or to eat it in any season other than summer. The texture of the mung beans is not horrible, but neither is it particularly nice. Other than being slightly sweet, the soup doesn't actually taste like much. It is even mildly refreshing, so we've been dutifully eating a bowl at bedtime as ordered.
Ayi has a remarkable work ethic. Although we told her when we hired her that she needn't come in for a full day when we're out of town, just stop by to feed the cats. She insists on working her whole schedule anyway (plus coming in to feed the cats on the weekends). I don't know if she actually does, or what she does when she's here, but I suspect she really does come full time and really finds work to do. This week three things happened that demonstrated the difference between her idea of what her work required of her and our idea.
First, we will be traveling for three weeks starting on Saturday. We can arrange for pet-sitting services through our building. Ayi's daughter (who lives in ayi's hometown in Anhui province which isn't exactly just around the corner) has a birthday this month. We thought, since ayi has been doing such good work for us, that we'd use the building's pet-sitting service for a week and, as a bonus, buy ayi a train ticket home so she could visit her daughter (and, of course, the week at home would be paid time as usual). We thought we were offering her a very nice bonus. She thought we wanted to fire her. Oops! After much reassurance that we are very happy with her work and don't know what we'd do without her, ayi is not going home. She's working as usual.
Second, on Wednesday or Thursday I had a meeting scheduled to last until six. I like to leave the office by 5:30 at the latest so I have time to get home and eat in time for ayi to clean up and leave pretty close to when she's supposed to get off at 7. When it became apparent that the meeting was not going to end at 6 (it ended sometime slightly after 7:30), I texted Ben to let him know I would be a while. He tried to send ayi home, but she refused. It's her job to serve us dinner, even if dinner is very late. It was close to 8:30 by the time I finally made it home. I was pretty surprised to see ayi still there. She finally agreed to go home as soon as dinner was on the table and leave the dishes until the next day (but under no circumstances were we to touch them, not even clear the table, let alone wash up!). I felt terrible keeping her two hours after she was supposed to get off, but she refused any overtime pay or offer of equivalent time off the next day.
Third, as she was leaving Friday night, she suddenly became very concerned about what we would eat over the weekend. She tried to insist that she would come in on Saturday and Sunday to at least cook our dinner. That we managed to head off. We managed to reassure her that we could fend for ourselves over the weekend - we had plans to go out on Saturday anyway. The Chinese kitchen may exactly be familiar to me, but I actually love to cook and can probably manage eggs and toast if nothing else (or there's always the restaurant in the basement or several restaurants at the club in our complex). If she insists on staying late when I get stuck at work and working her full schedule even if we're out of town, the least we can do is make sure she doesn't work weekends when we're here!
It's a bit of an adjustment having more-or-less full-time help, but I confess it's kind of nice. I think I'll be pretty spoiled returning to the US where someone who shops, cooks, cleans, does laundry and pretty much anything else we can think up for her is definitely unaffordable!
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1 comment:
Looks delicious!!! Im jealous ... I need an Ayi!
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