Mr. Lee the cook debuted last night

Here’s mr. Lee, in an old picture, from our first visit. Same kitchen but it looks a little different now. The girl is Claire Moy, Kathy Chen’s daughter and in my estimation one of the cutest kids in the world not related to me. She’s total riot.

Our three-day-a-week cook Mr. Lee came over for the first time last night. We had no idea what to expect, when he would show up, when we pay him, what he would cook or anything else. He brought a big roast and a bunch of fresh vegetables and basically made us steak and potatoes. And it was damn good. Everything was well seasoned and he cooked the roast medium rare, with ginger, garlic and other spices, which were subtle. He made really delicious pan seared taters and nicely cooked carrots and broccoli. Jacob pretty much refused to even come to the table. He had already eaten but it was really one of his first moments of bad behavior since we’ve been here and it only lasted about 20 minutes. Anna and Eli loved it.

In fact, eli has been getting hot lunch at school everyday and he asked If he could bring it in today because he wanted to have leftover meat and potatoes.

When he was done, he very neatly wrapped up all the leftovers (I too had it for lunch today) and cleaned the whole kitchen. I’m telling you, you can really get used to this lifestyle, even if I do often feel like an English colonel sipping gin and tonics in a pith helmet while Gunga Din fetches water. The power structure here is really interesting. I’m told that all the help loves to work for Americans because we tend to treat them better than the Euros not to mention Chinese. At least for now, we’re just so blown away by this level of service that we are practically kissing them all.

On the weather front, we had a couple of glorious late summer days after that one horrible bonfire pollution day and now it suddenly feels like fall. Much cooler today and it rained for the first time since we’ve been here.