Oven!

There have been some changes at our place in 2013.

First off, we’re hardly ever there.

In January we travelled to Bangkok, then Mr Martin went to Seoul for a few days, then we both left for our annual trip home in early Feb.

I say annual trip home, but actually it was my first trip home – since last year’s trip coincided with starting my new job, and I thought it wasn’t exactly a fabulous idea to start work and then leave on holiday a week later.

Going home was weird only in that it wasn’t. It was as if I had just been away for a weekend, rather than for two whole years. Some things had changed at home – but mostly it was just exactly the same as I had left it, and in no time at all I was driving my mother in law around just like any other weekend.

I took the opportunity of being at home to schedule some medical appointments and ended up staying an extra week – so I was basically absent from Vietnam for all of February.  That means there is no Tet madness post here this year (phew!). 

The big news in our house is that I finally bought a countertop oven when I got back.  It’s a bit crap – but that’s ok – all the countertop ovens in this country are a bit crap, I think. 

Shopping for the oven was interesting.  I visited lots of places (OK, 3 places) and found only 3 different brands available:

• Pensonic (from Malaysia)
• Sanaky (from China)
• Actual brand we bought (origin uncertain!)

They are all basically the same: glass door, rotisserie thing, fan for “convection”, ticking dial that tells you it’s on.  You can get big ones or smaller ones, and my kitchen is small so I got a smaller one, and the cheapest one – though only really because that was the one in the third shop we went to and I didn’t think it was different enough from the others to go back to a different shop. 

So long as you turn the heat up to blasting, it works OK, and so I’ve been cooking stuff that can only be cooked in ovens for the past week. I haven’t tried baking anything yet, but watch this space!

Oh look!  A shepherd's pie...  You can get purple potatoes here lately. 

I’m working full time now, so I’m slowly coming to grips with the reality of really only having weekends free to do stuff like watch daytime tv and go shopping for cosmetics.  Ms T, our housekeeping lady has been an absolute godsend – if only because we now only need to fight about doing the dishes about twice a week – and I haven’t ironed anything for ages, if you don’t count the tet money. 

I’ve recently learned that Ms T has to pay for parking when she comes to our place – which means that I finally have a use for my huge pile of 1,000 and 2,000 dong notes...