The kitchen

One benefit to having visitors, of course, is that everyone in the family is interested in having a clean-ish apartment. So with a lot of help, I found my kitchen clean enough to be low-res photographed. I can present to you after all these months, the kitchen.

There's actually a lot I like about this kitchen.  It is very large by local standards. The cabinet space is almost adequate. It is an eat-in kitchen because the landlord changed the lay-out of the apartment so that instead of a dining area outside the kitchen we have a fourth bedroom.

I do like the way the cooking surface is separated from the rest of the kitchen.  Just beyond the sink is a partial wall, and beyond that wall is the two-burner cook surface.

I've blogged several times before that Chinese home-cooking tends to be a very hot, oil-splattering process. By partitioning off the burners from the rest of the kitchen, the oiliness we've seen in other apartments is a little better controlled. This apartment and one other that we looked into renting late last year had this similar layout, but none other I've seen has. 

Another detail of this kitchen that we haven't seen in too many other homes is the plastic wrap that covers the walls in that little cooking stall.  Our landlord was definitely a fan of plastic wrap as grease-fighter.  In addition to these walls in the kitchen, she had left behind some electric soup pots that all had lids wrapped in plastic.  I'm not sure if I'm expected or even allowed to pull the wrap down from the wall.  It doesn't lend itself well to cleaning, so instead of oil on the tile, which I could do something about, I have oil on the plastic on the tile, which I now try to ignore.

All in all, the kitchen was actually a selling point of the apartment. There are, of course, shortcomings, like the too small sink, the poor lighting, and the absence of hot water to name a few.  The first photo conceals the extra refrigerator that's been a sore spot with us since moving.  We may just give in and use it, though I have to consider our electric bill from using two of these, as well as whether our apartment can handle that electical load (have my doubts). So far, though, this kitchen has served us fairly well under the circumstances, and we've been able to wedge into it our American lifestyle with our multitude of small appliances and our dozen or so pieces of bake ware and our fifty plus jars of herbs and spices.