Rachelle wanted to make chicken salad, but we didn’t have pickles.
I used to make fun of her for saving every olive jar we ever had.
I don’t do that anymore.
Fuck yeah pickles.
A lot of things we take for granted back in the states are either super-expensive or nonexistent in China. For a while we could afford to get cheese and olives and tortillas and cans of beans and tomato sauce whenever we needed them. But as money gets tighter and our stateside bills become more and more burdensome, we first learned to do without, and when that sucked too much we figured out how to make our own. Tomato sauce, usually 39 cents a can back home, can go for over three dollars here in China. One day I brought back a large-ish sack of cherry tomatoes from the market and Rachelle decided she was going to make her own tomato sauce, as it is an imperative for making our favorite foods. This ended up being almost as cheap as an American can, and a little bit tastier to boot.
The pickles cost us perhaps about a dollar to make two jars (and we could have made more had we more available jars). A single jar at the imported foods market would cost us about 39 kuai, or over six dollars.
We still can’t make good cheese or nixtamalize our own corn for tortillas, so for the time being we have to reserve enchiladas as a special meal to treat our friends.
** Rachelle Says: “Alternate Titles of Post: A Pickle A Day Keeps the Ums at Bay; What A Pickle!; Pickle Me Tickle Me Too.”
