Maybe Leaving on a Jet Plane

Some of the Asian ingredients I need to give away before next week … Let me know if you’re interested …

Earlier this week, I learned that my family and I might be heading back to Beijing, where we’d been living before the pandemic began. We’re scheduled tentatively for a flight next week, which doesn’t give me much time to pack and get a COVID-19 test. I have a cooking class today and Sunday. I also have to give away my leftover Asian ingredients and dry out my sourdough starter so I can slip it somewhere deep into my bags.

I sort of can’t believe we’re going. After all, we’re flying in the middle of a pandemic. My husband’s employer gave us two other dates that came and went. And U.S.-China relations have never been worse. Just this morning, I woke up to the news that China is shutting down the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, where I lived for two years. This is in retaliation for the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston earlier this week.

My family and I have been in the States for almost eight months. We’d decided to pull our children out of their Beijing school in mid December to take a carefree six-week vacation in the States, with no inkling that we’d still be here in summer. The ski clothes we packed are a little too hot to wear in D.C.’s July humidity.

Our departure is bittersweet. We’re looking forward to getting back to our house in Beijing and hopefully what will be normal routines with school for our children, work for my husband, and Black Sesame Kitchen and lots of recipe testing for me. And yet the last half year in the States — even with the pandemic raging — has also felt like home and given us the chance to reconnect with friends and family. The online cooking classes have helped me connect with Black Sesame Kitchen guests and a virtual community of home cooks around the world.

The hardest part of leaving the United States will be parting with my mother, who’s been staying with us since the pandemic began. After we relocated to Washington D.C. in February, she flew out to be with us temporarily to help the kids transition into a new school. When the school shut down in March, she took a lead role as the educator in our family. We could not have managed the last half year OK without her. (I don’t know how parents on their own are doing it.) It’s been the longest I’ve lived with my mother since I left home for high school, and I wish I could treat our departure the way I did back then, with the excitement of a new chapter of my life beginning. But I can’t. I’m not going off to college this time and I don’t wish to leave my mother behind. What’s even harder is the fact that we have no idea when we’ll see each other next. Maybe it will have to be after a vaccine is available and distributed widely and after China opens up again to the rest of world.

China at the moment is like the most difficult, red-roped nightclub to get into in the world. There are only a few flights going in and out of the country every week, and most of them are bringing Chinese back to China. All foreigners are banned from traveling to China, unless, like us, they’ve been granted special permission. We have dozens and dozens of expatriate friends who are waiting for that permission.

Life in China is supposedly going on as usual, with schools aiming to fully reopen in September, restaurants accepting reservations (including Black Sesame Kitchen), and even movie theaters and swimming pools in the midst of throwing open their doors. Does China have the virus as in control as they say it does? Will we make it back to Beijing? Will Black Sesame Kitchen be able to continue to stay open?

Last night, as I shared my worries with my mother, a Chinese idiom came to her mind. “The boat will straighten itself out when it gets into the harbor,” she said. Our boat is actually a chartered plane that is stopping in San Francisco, Guam, and the port city of Tianjin before we arrive in Beijing; let’s hope that we have a smooth landing.

My mom, Chinese and Tai Chi teacher extraordinaire, with my kids.

Pichet Reveals the Secrets of a Great Pad Thai

One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been reconnecting with old friends around the world and in the U.S. When I began the cooking classes a couple of months ago, my friend Gus Rancatore (who happens to be the co-founder of the best ice cream shop in the world, Toscanini’s in Cambridge, MA), joined my class and mentioned that a mutual friend of ours, Pichet Ong, was also in the metro D.C. area.

I reconnected with Pichet on Instagram and discovered that he has about 40,000 followers. He started his early career as the pastry chef at Jean Georges’ Spice Market in New York’s meatpacking district. Though I didn’t know Pichet at the time, I recall dining at Spice Market not long after it opened, in the early aughts when I was in my frivolous twenties, and feeling very hip and cool to be dining in that just-gentrifying part of New York.

Pichet and I met for the first time around 2009 when he visited Beijing. It was not long after my own dining establishment, Black Sesame Kitchen had opened. He took cooking class with my chefs and showed off his skills in our kitchen, and together we roamed the back alleys and wet markets of Beijing. Later, when I visited New York, I went to see him at P*Ong, the amazing dessert shop that he founded after leaving Spice Market.

It turns out Pichet and I have yuanfen – a Chinese word that means “shared destiny.” Nowadays, he’s living in Arlington, Virginia, the next town over from Alexandria, where my family and I are temporarily sheltering while away from Beijing. Like me, he’s got a spouse/partner whose work has dragged them to D.C.

Pichet and I are both cooking a lot at home while also managing eating establishments. (While my cooking school is halfway around the world, he’s managing a kitchen slightly closer -- Mama Chang, the best Chinese restaurant in the metro D.C. area.) 

So it only seemed natural to team up for some cooking classes. He did a delicious Hainan Chicken Rice class last month, and last weekend, we made his authentic and revelatory Pad Thai. Pad Thai also happens to be one of the most ordered takeout dishes since the pandemic began, according to Uber Eats, and yet few people bother to make it at home.

And, indeed, there is interest in learning Pad Thai: before the weekend, I sent out a note about the class to our newsletter list, and received more than 100 RSVP’s — in less than a day! Normally we try to cap our guest list at around 20 but I accommodated as many as I could for this class because of the overwhelming interest.

Pichet’s recipe contains some surprising elements — pineapple, for one — along with more typical ingredients you’ll find in Pad Thai, like lime and fish sauce. Before the class, when I read over the recipe, I couldn’t help noticing it seemed to use a lot of Chinese stir-fry techniques. I asked Pichet about this. It turns out that Pad Thai is an adaptation of Chinese food in a foreign land. (How unfortunate for us Americans that we end up with lo mein, while Thailand gets delicious Pad Thai!) Chinese immigrants who moved to Thailand first began stir-frying shrimp, eggs, tofu, and rice noodles together, and adding Thai flavors to it. (And for those who wonder why Thai food has taken off in so many part of the world, here’s another secret: the Thai government has worked with overseas Thai restaurateurs to promote the country’s food.)

Pichet showed us a trick with rice noodles — there’s no need to cook the noodles in boiling water before adding them to the wok to stir-fry. Simply soak the noodles in water for about half an hour or so — he recommended cold water, so that the noodles don’t stick. Before adding them to the wok, drain them and stir-fry the noodles with rest of the ingredients. This technique might take a few times to get right — you might end up with harder noodles than you expected the first time or two — but it definitely improved the texture of my final product. One of the problems with Pad Thai I’ve had in the past was a very mushy product. This time, my noodles were nicely al dente and added great texture to the dish.

One of our youngest cooking guests shows off his final dish. (I’m in the background with my daughter.)

I also learned that the amount of rice noodles in Pad Thai can vary considerably, depending on who’s making or ordering the Pad Thai. In recent years, according to Pichet, trendy and fashionable Thais began requesting Pad Thai without the noodles to cut out the carbs and to show off how well-off they are. (A similar trend has happened in China with rice — many meals at restaurants don’t include rice.)

So for those who are calorie conscious, you too can have your Pad Thai — and eat it too! Definitely give Pichet’s Pad Thai a try and share your pictures and comments on our Facebook page.

Yes, I'm on the Sourdough Bandwagon ... and Failed Miserably Until Last Week

Poor Emamaline was getting pushed further and further back on the top shelf of our fridge … until …

Every time I opened the door to my fridge, Emmaline seemed to stare back at me. I knew what she wanted to say: “Do something. Help me.” I’d known it was a bad idea to accept her, because the last time I’d been given sourdough starter by a friend, he/she had also sat abandoned in my fridge, for weeks. But I rarely ever refuse gifts of food — even if this wasn’t quite edible — and this one had a very good pedigree. Emmaline, as I was told this starter was called, hailed from San Francisco and was 150 years old. My mother-in-law had bequeathed me with it. I’d thought to myself, this time will be different. 

But it seemed like the starter was doomed. For almost two weeks, the white goo sat there in a mason jar on the top shelf of my fridge undisturbed. A layer of gray watery liquid formed on top of the gummy substance. I occasionally reached for things sitting next to it — my Thai red curry paste, my Chinese chili sauce — and it got pushed further and further back on that top shelf. 

I’d looked online at the recipes and the starter just seemed too intimidating: having to feed it regularly, doing something with the discard, and then actually using it. All the recipes for sourdough bread seemed to be a dozen paragraphs long and required three days of loving attention. I tried to give some away to a professional chef friend. “No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t want the responsibility right now.” So the starter sat. It was rapidly falling into that category of items in my fridge I know I should throw away but don’t because I’d be reminded of the tragedy and the wastefulness of not having consumed it. 

Then sourdough came up in one of my online cooking classes. A guest introduced herself as an expert sourdough bread baker. I confessed to her that the starter had sat neglected for two weeks. Should I just toss it out? I asked. “No, actually,” she said. “You can still bring it back to life.” But she added that I should get to it rather quickly. 

The idea of resuscitating something in the midst of a pandemic sounded alluring. Yet I let another 72 hours slip by. Finally, I took it out the fridge and fed it for the first time. I mixed 1 cup of flour with 1 cup of water. I poured out some of the starter. I mixed in the flour slurry. I let it sit on my counter until it got bubbly and foamy then stuck it back in the fridge. Then I tackled the discard. I’d found a recipe for sourdough discard crepes, but I wanted more crepes that the recipe called for and in my doubling of the recipe I had somehow fumbled the proportions. I discarded my discard and just made my kids normal crepes. 

But I got into the habit of feeding the sourdough every week — there was indeed satisfaction in reviving it; I wasn’t an essential worker during this pandemic but every week, I did save my starter. Every Wednesday or so, I took the mason jar out, discarded a cup of it, and added in my 1 part flour 1 part water slurry. I even successfully made sourdough crepes. Those crepes became a ritual — on a weekday! My husband thought I was nuts. “What are you doing, again, crepes on Wednesday?” But it happened to be the perfect solution to one of our ongoing conflicts over breakfast. Every weekend, we made pancakes, but he liked them huge and puffy while I liked mine thinner and chewier. He got his fat pancakes on the weekends and I got crepes on a weekday; our kids enjoyed both. 

In the last week or so, I began to feel it was silly just to feed and discard and not actually make bread. This last week also coincided with a funk — all the politics of late and the surging COVID-19 numbers have been getting me down. I thought back to one of the last periods of my life when I baked a lot of bread, and recalled a whole wheat bread I’d grown fond of baking when I lived in Cuba. I remembered how that bread had offered so much comfort the morning after Donald Trump won the election in 2016. The reassurance that bread gives us is evidenced in the shortages of flour and yeast that have taken hold since the pandemic began. 

So this past Wednesday, I took the starter out of the fridge and was determined to pony up and make real sourdough bread. I’d found a sensible recipe on King Arthur’s website. From start to finish, this recipe was supposed to only take me 12 hours, most of it inactive time. 

But then I took out the jar of starter from the very back of my refrigerator and realized that it was frozen. Augh. And I had already promised my kids the discard crepes! I knocked out a batch of normal crepes. Then I decided to take another look at the starter, remembering that yeasts and other bacterias did just as well, or even better, in the freezer. Like a lake at the beginning of winter, only the top of the starter was frozen. I chipped away at the icy layer with a big spoon and stirred up the whole thing for a good five minutes, until it reached a milky uniform color. I discarded some and fed it. 

The recipe called for “fed” starter but that left me confused. Should I use it immediately after feeding it, or wait until the next day, as other recipes had said to do? The information on starter and sourdough that I found on the internet was voluminous and inconsistent; it’s as if Putin is waging a disinformation campaign against U.S. politics and sourdough simultaneously. Finally, I came across a website that seemed to make some sense - it advised me to use the starter when it got to the peak of its bubbly stage, somewhere between 4-12 hours. For the next few hours, I checked for bubbles, which seemed to be forming more steadily. 

In the afternoon, I was distracted by another baking project: cookies. Earlier that day, I’d promised my son I’d bake with him. So while my six-year-old mixed snickerdoodle dough, I finally began to knead my sourdough. It wasn’t more difficult than dough for noodles or pizza. After the dough came together, I let it rest while we ate dinner. 

After finishing dinner and doing the dishes, I went back to the sourdough — it had grown tremendously like a billowy cloud. As I touched the dough, it deflated like a balloon, just as the recipe said it would. I shaped it into two long baguettes and let that sit while I went to check my email and work for an hour. Right before putting my kids down, I went back into the kitchen, removed the dishtowel I’d placed over the dough, to reveal two baguettes that seemed to have doubled in width, just as they were supposed to. I flicked some water on them, dusted them with flour, and slid them into the pre-heated oven. 

After reading a few chapters of The Twits to my children and turning off the lights in their room, I went back downstairs to inhale a heavenly scent that had taken over the entire house. In 30 minutes, the bread had risen and turned golden brown. After I let the bread cool (over my wok), I sliced off an end, lathered it with butter and sunk my teeth into it.

It was definitely the best bread I’d ever baked, and possibly one of the best I’d ever eaten. My husband was already in bed and said he’d wait until morning, but I managed to summon my mother into the kitchen. After she’d bit into the bread, she agreed wholeheartedly. Yes, it was an unusual time to be eating bread — ten thirty at night — but it still was definitely one of the best breads she’d tried.

My final product … cooling atop my wok!

Why I Want to Cook For You

Since the pandemic began, all of our lives have been upended. The isolation, the many changes we’ve had to make in our routines, and the endless cooking haven’t been easy for any of us.

I’ve started doing live stream cooking classes as a service to the Black Sesame Kitchen community and to the wider world in general. I hope to make a small difference by virtually being with you in your kitchen.

I hope you get something out of them — perhaps a few new ideas for home cooking, a tip or two that helps make your cooking easier, and maybe just some inspiration — in and out of the kitchen.

But I have to admit I’m also doing the classes for selfish reasons: I miss being able to connect with friends, family, and our guests at Black Sesame Kitchen. The classes have given me a reason to get out of my sweatpants — though I might still wear them in some of my cooking sessions! — and to share my love of cooking with you.

And the other reason I’m doing these classes is for Black Sesame Kitchen, the cooking school I founded in 2008. It’s been going through some rough times with the pandemic. While we are restarting operations, we’re gone three months without cash flow. Many eating establishment around the world are of course in the same position, and my sympathies go out to every business that is finding itself in a quandary: whether to pull the plug or sink more money into an operation that might not make it.

My team and I have gone through those decisions — and we’re committed to continue on. Fortunately, as a small team and a small business we haven’t had to lay anyone off, but it will be a long battle to full recovery. We’re hoping to break even by the end of the year.

The classes will continue to be free. But if you enjoy them and it’s within your budget, please consider donating to our cause: bringing people together around the world through food. And to offer you some awesome wine and dining next time you’re in Beijing. Donations can be made through PayPal, Venmo or directly by credit card if you email us with the amount you’d like to donate.

I’ll be updating this page with our upcoming classes, but in the meantime, please email classes@blacksesamekitchen if you’re interested in joining our community. Thank you for your support — it means even more during this challenging period.

Keep calm and keep cooking,

Jen

An Encounter with a Dog Named Chance

One of the many previously ordinary activities that has made me anxious during this COVID-19 era is getting close to strangers on the street. You know the feeling (I hope). You’re walking in your neighborhood. You’re on the sidewalk. Someone is on that same sidewalk, coming toward you. Sometimes it feels like a slow game of chicken — one of you is going to veer off the path before the other, after which you breathe a sign of relief. I’ve never been a particularly anxious person, but I feel like I now know what it’s like to have social anxiety.

To add to that disorientation, my family and I moved to a new neighborhood, a very nice section of Alexandria, VA, after the coronavirus crisis began. It’s been a difficult time to get to know any of our neighbors. (Though by chance, someone who lived about ten doors down was in one of my online cooking classes the other day.)

One of the activities that my husband and I have enjoyed since moving to the area is taking long walks at night in this hilly suburb, called Beverley Hills. (I didn’t misspell that. I supposed the spelling differentiates it from the real Beverly Hills.) We wait until after our kids go to sleep. With the days hot and long, the evenings, flecked with fireflies, bring some respite. My husband likes to bring a beer or a mug filled with wine, and we walk anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour.

On one of these recent walks, after we’d been walking for a good half hour, I wanted to turn back home. My husband wanted to go further. It was approaching ten o’ clock at night. There are few street lamps in the area, and it was pitch dark. I grudgingly agreed, and we walked down our street, towards a busy, commercial avenue called Glebe.

As we got closer to Glebe, a dark figure came toward us, seemingly limping along. “Help me, help me,” the person said. I stopped in my tracks.

While my inclination was to turn on my heels and walk the other direction, my husband continued toward the figure. I followed, maybe ten feet behind him, until we’d come close enough to realize it was an elderly woman. She had long gray hair and was wearing pajamas. “Help me,” she said, gasping for breath. She leaned on a cane, and wiping her brow, she looked as if she were about to burst into tears. She wasn’t wearing a mask. (Neither were we.) She explained that earlier that evening, when she’d opened her front door to get some fresh air, her dog had bolted out of the house. “And no one who’s walked by is willing to help me.”

Craig, in a bold move in these COVID-19 times, promised to help her. “What’s the dog’s name?” he asked.

He called out into the darkness to Chance. Like Ceasar Milano and the horse whisperer, my husband has a special sensitivity toward animals. He whistled and clapped and scanned the street. Within minutes, the dog — a medium-sized terrier with messy fur — emerged from some bushes and trotted toward him. He scooped the dog into his arms, and we walked the woman back to her house, just a few hundred yards away.

As my husband deposited the dog in her house, she gently scolded it. The woman told us her name and that she lived alone. Her equally elderly husband had recently moved into a retirement home. We wished her a good evening and so far, even though I’ve told myself that I ought to go back to check on the woman and her dog named Chance, we haven’t.

Have you had a similar experience during COVID-19? Please share on my Facebook page.

Searching for Toilet Paper (and Its Meaning)

It’s starting to look better for those looking for toilet paper. On a recent evening, when I stopped in a Target in Alexandria, VA (where we’re temporarily sheltering), I discovered shelves stocked with the household consumable, which seemed almost as valuable as gold a month or two before. On Amazon, it can once again be ordered with a click of a button — without some enormous wait time or premium surcharge.

In the last few months, we haven’t had a shortage of toilet paper, but not because of some great hoarding skills I’ve developed. Fortunately, my mother, who’s been planning for a pandemic for the last two decades, orders plenty of it online during normal circumstances. And when we recently moved to a new temporary house in Virginia, a huge giant box of toilet paper greeted us in our foyer. Let’s just say we didn’t put a lot of effort in trying to unite the toilet paper with its rightful owners.

Lest we forget what we’ve been through in the last few months when it comes to toilet paper, I’m posting a piece I wrote back in 2017 when we lived in Cuba, where I learned how important Charmin and Quilted Northern were to my family, my fellow Americans, and me.

Havana, Cuba, March 2017 — We were starting to feel a little desperate when an American friend of ours, who was leaving Havana to move back home, bequeathed us with a parting gift: a couple dozen rolls of toilet paper from the United States, each roll shrink-wrapped in glimmering plastic. 

Since moving to Cuba, I’ve become obsessed with toilet paper. I'd never thought I was particularly fussy about it. But before moving to the island, we had been warned that toilet paper in Cuba was terrible and expensive —when it was available — or simply non-existent. We heard horror stories of people having to resort to newspaper. So the night before we moved to Cuba, I found myself breaking into a sweat as I stuffed roll after roll of toilet paper into the nooks and crannies of our luggage. 

The next morning, as my cousin Ray drove us to the airport, I asked him if he thought I was crazy to devote my final moments in the United States to toilet paper.

“No,” he said. “On my last trip, to Paris, I brought toilet paper with me. Just in case. I didn’t end up needing it, but it was comforting to have.” 

The toilet paper arrived in Cuba crushed and wrinkled, a result of our luggage having been wrapped and compressed with many layers of plastic, deterring any would-be thieves from opening our bags in transit. After seeing just a couple of rolls in the welcome kit that greeted us at our new home, I was glad that I’d packed the paper. And after a week or so, I’d wished I’d brought more — the dozen rolls barely lasted until our container, carrying all our possessions, arrived two months later. 

I’d bought what I’d thought was an ample supply for two years, but I had deeply underestimated. It turns out that the average American uses more than 50 squares of toilet paper per day, according to statistics from the toilet paper industry. And so, as part of adjusting to life in Cuba, I began to learn how to conserve it. Every time I had a call of nature, I carefully proportioned out my ration: two squares at a time — gone were the days of slapping the roll and letting an endless length tumble out. 

I contemplated a BYOTP (bring-your-own-toilet-paper) policy for friends and family who visited, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. When my father-in-law visited and learned of our crisis, he came to our aid. He noticed that our rolls were a particularly thick, two-ply variety. With the paper still on the spool, he pulled the plies apart, doubling the quantity of squares of each roll.  As the plies no longer were neatly etched together, the roll was now a messy cascade of paper hanging from our bathroom wall. But it did help us conserve.  

Even with such inventiveness, after a year or so into our time in Cuba, we began to get down to our last rolls. I counted them down one by one until just four sat on the shelf of the master bath (the most out-of-the-way bathroom in the house and thus the most secure place for the paper). 

With just a few rolls left, I had no choice but to explore the options that were available in Havana. There turned out to be several options: the first was the “second-quality” grade paper, in which you can still see recycled candy wrappers etched into it. I passed. Then in a small, scantily stocked market, I encountered first-quality grade paper, which is light gray and brittle. I bought some but put it in reserve, as if the rolls were a fire extinguisher behind “break this in case of emergency” glass; they would eventually be used for paper-mache projects. Then finally, I visited a new supermarket that had opened in Havana. The store contained aisles of products stacked to the ceiling, but just three aisles and maybe just a dozen products. One of those products was toilet paper from Vietnam. Though the rolls were more compact and a little firmer than the American variety, they did the job. But then, as with many things in Cuba, it suddenly disappeared from the store shelves, leaving me wishing that I had bought many more rolls. 

As I searched the city high and low, I began to wonder if my obsession with toilet paper actually said more about me and American culture than it did about Cuba. Did I really need a certain grade of toilet paper? Why did my cousin feel the need to bring toilet paper with him to Paris, of all places? I felt especially embarrassed after I talked with a Cuban friend, who told me that toilet paper truly is a luxury in Cuba. A lot of times, when it ran out in her household, they resorted to a quick rinse and an air dry.

 I was spared any more meditation on the subject as, just around this time, our friend donated the remaining American toilet paper in her stockpile. But one thing is certain, after our two years here on this island; I will never look at toilet paper the same way. 

Living with Uncertainty

Our guinea pig, Glance, who is waiting for us at our home in Beijing.

Many of us have been in COVID-19 limbo, displaced from our usual homes, without any idea of when we’ll get back to our usual routines and when our kids will go back to school. My family and I have been in the metro DC area since before the pandemic reached the United States, waiting to hear from my husband’s employer when we’ll be able to go back to our home in Beijing. We’d been waiting for four months and finally, in early June, we’d heard some surprisingly good news: a flight was scheduled to take us back to China in early July.

But then around June 11, a second wave of COVID-19 struck Beijing and the date of that flight was scrapped. In the last couple of weeks, we received news that we might be able to fly back sometime in July, but the key word is might. Nothing has been confirmed.

There are a lot of complications, of course. With very, very few flights between the U.S. and China, my husband’s employer is arranging a charter — we’ve been told it could be a military plane, outfitted with makeshift airplane seats made out of material resembling lawn chairs. Before we board the flight, we’ll have to get tested for COVID-19. If we test negative, we’ll be able to board the plane. The plane can’t fly to Beijing, but rather a nearby city, because of Chinese pandemic control measures. Once we arrive, we’ll get another COVID-19 test. If we pass that test, we’ll endure a long car ride to get back to our home — and stay there for 14 days under strict quarantine, not the kind of “quarantine” that Americans have been experiencing. There will even be someone sitting outside our house, to ensure that we don’t leave. It will be more like house arrest.

But we’re willing to do it, because we miss our home and our lives. I have a cooking school there, and my husband has a job. We have pets — a cute, squeaky guinea pig named Glance and Santiago, a rabbit the size of a small terrier. (Both are being cared for by a friend.) My kids might have a school to attend. (More on that in another post.)

I think that’s the hardest part about COVID-19 life: the uncertainty. When the pandemic first began, we had no idea how contagious the coronavirus was. We have no idea how many people were afflicted with COVID-19, and we had no idea whether it was safe to touch our mail or for our kids to play in playgrounds. (Even months later, we’re still feeling uncertain about these things.) Today, we have no idea if we’ve been exposed or will be exposed because there are so many asymptomatic cases. Nobody has any idea when their lives will get back to normal, when their kids’ schools will begin, or when some of us will return to their offices.

In the midst of this uncertainty, it’s very understandable that people have started going back to work (especially those who need the money), protested on the streets, congregated at bars, and held parties in their homes. Especially when you wake up the next day and you’re still alive.

Living on the edge: for us, staying sane during COVID-19 has meant picking a few things that makes us happy. Tennis seems like an acceptable risk now, even though early on in the pandemic it seemed taboo.

We understand that the rates of COVID-19 will go up as businesses and institutions begin to open up, but we still don’t know if each of us, as individuals, will be harmed.

We’ve wanted to do many things with family and friends, like go out for a meal, go on a hike, or just simply get tipsy and silly together. Our more fortunate friends with beautiful swimming pools have invited us over. (Those invitations have been painful to decline, especially because we have no idea when our kids will be able to swim regularly again.) We’ve wanted to have people over for barbecues. I’ve wanted to simply just give my friends and family hugs. But aside from having two friends over for a socially-distanced drink in our front yard one night, we’ve resisted the temptations.

For us, we are staying tight and self-isolating because beyond the fact that we don’t want to get a very unpleasant and unpredictable and nasty illness ourselves, my mother is staying with us and she’s over 70 years old. She’s in good health but she takes medication for certain conditions. We are also staying tight because of the possibility that we might get to go back to Beijing.

So we’re resisting those urges to be social and trying our best to stay sane and happy. My husband and I are picking and choosing the things that seem to be acceptably un-risky, like taking walks and playing tennis. (I’ve been playing tennis through the pandemic, even though the U.S. Tennis Association discouraged people from playing a few months back.) I’m holding my online cooking classes, which are bringing me a lot of joy. I’m even planning to hold one on July 10, my birthday, because I can’t think of a better way to celebrate right now than to cook with you … and I mean that in a good way!

Let me know what’s keeping you sane, by commenting on my Facebook page.

My live stream cooking classes have been giving me immense joy. Thank you!

We're on a Roller Coaster, as Beijing Gets Hit with a Second Wave of COVID-19

A couple of weeks ago, in early June, things were looking rosy in Beijing, where I’d be living if it weren’t for the pandemic. The city hadn’t reported a single case of COVID-19 for many weeks in a row. Schools that had partially re-opened were about to re-open completely. The capital’s notoriously bad traffic had returned, and the streets were filled with cars, electric bikes, and people.

With new COVID-19 rules in place, Black Sesame Kitchen is once again accepting reservations and hoping to ensure that every experience is safe and worry-free.

Black Sesame Kitchen, the cooking school I founded in Beijing, had re-opened in mid-May after almost four months of zero income. We were doing unexpectedly good business after our imposed hibernation, even though we’d instituted new rules that limited the number of guests we could take in one seating. We’d even pinned down a date for the opening a new restaurant that we’ve been working on before the pandemic. And, best of all, I’d received news that my family and I could return to Beijing in early July. (We’ve been in the United States for the last six months.)

Then on June 11 came the news that a worker at Beijing’s largest wholesale market had come down with the coronavirus. The authorities, through contact tracing, discovered about 70 cases linked to the market. The cases have grown to more than 200 in the last couple of weeks. (Which, relatively speaking, is minuscule in comparison to our community here in the U.S.) Within a couple of days, schools were once again completely shut down, restaurants were once again empty, and the sense of normalcy that had returned to Beijing had disappeared.

There’s been reporting out of China that the outbreak had something to do with imported salmon, with evidence of the virus on cutting boards; even though that seemed to be highly unlikely to many experts, restaurants serving the fish had to dump all of their salmon. All restaurant workers, including our staff at Black Sesame Kitchen, have been given nucleic acid COVID-19 tests. (All of our results came back negative.) And prices for everything from pork to fruit have shot up dramatically, because the market linked to the outbreak supplied the capital with so much of its food.

Black Sesame Kitchen’s business has slowed again. The new restaurant’s opening is on hold. And the plans my family and I had to travel back to Beijing have also been delayed.

Though we’ve long been known for our culinary experiences in the back alleys of Beijing, Black Sesame Kitchen is promoting its in-home chef services and new delivery service in light of COVID-19.

But Black Sesame Kitchen hasn’t gone back into full hibernation, thankfully. In the last few months, we’ve re-thought our business model. Pre-pandemic, about 50% of our guests were tourists or international business travelers. With that audience completely wiped out for the foreseeable future, we’ve promoted our in-home personal chef services and we’ve also added new services, including delivery of our famous Wine n’ Dine dinners to residences in Beijing and my live stream cooking classes. Aware that restaurants are a major conduit for the coronavirus, we’re keeping close track of the number of cases in Beijing and we’ve outlined new policies for our staff and guests to follow when they come to dine with us — including suspending our communal dining experience. Now every party that books gets their own private room.

And our three weeks of amazing business between mid May and early June — that flicker of activity — is also helping us make it through this second wave of COVID-19 in Beijing. When we re-opened in May, we had no idea how many of our regular guests could come, given that many foreigners living in Beijing, a big part of our customer base, had left China and have been unable to return due to the country’s new COVID-19 travel rules that barred all foreigners from entering. We had no idea if those remaining would be willing to make the trek across town to our courtyard near the Forbidden City for a meal or a cooking class. But the fact that guests returned to our courtyard as soon as we reopened really touched Chef Zhang, our head chef and manager. “They’ve given us a vote of confidence. They believe in us,” he told me.

And nowadays, it’s that belief — that faith in our guests, in ourselves — that is often keeping us going.

Chef Zhang has even greater gratitude for every guest that has returned to our kitchen and/or signed up for our other services. We love our guests and thank you from the bottom of our hearts and woks!