Sorry, I need to rant...this has been in my head for a few days and I just gotta put this down in electrons to get it out of there:

The other night, Hongyun and I come home and my mother in law is standing over the dinner table cooking something in the tabletop hotpot thing we have. My parents-in-law looked quite proud of themselves so I thought to myself, "wow, they may have something good in there." I was instantly curious since it usually means something decent like steam-fried dumplings or something like that. When she pulled the lid off the pan, I saw what looked like a pizza. But it wasn't.

They had made some dough (flour, water, yeast...nothing else shudder) which they topped with:
tomatoes
bell peppers
ketchup (holy crap what did you do?)
american cheese slices (eeeewwww)
chinese sweet sausage (good, but not with american cheese)
Oranges (uh oh)
APPLES!! (oh no)

On top of that they were pan frying it so the dough was almost burnt on the bottom and the top was still doughy. "Holy crap," I thought. I was in complete disbelief. I was thinking to myself, "WTF?!? Why would you guys do that?"
Numero uno) We don't have the right ingredients for pizza.
Numero dos) We do not have any sort of recipe for pizza written down in Chinese. Why would you attempt something like this without a recipe.

And there's the rub. Hongyun's mother is a nice lady, but she drives me nuts sometimes. When they first arrived we both thought, "Wow, this is going to be cool. They'll help cook and clean and stuff. We can focus on work and school." Hongyun even assured me that it was going to be great because her mom was a great cook. I thought so too because for the couple of weeks I had stayed with them during each visit to Inner Mongolia, it was pretty good. Lo and behold that was true for the first few weeks. But after a while, we started to realize the food was the same 4 or 5 things cooked in 1 or 2 ways and rotated around. It even got to the point where we were eating stir-fried celery in soy sauce every day. We told her about how the lack of variety in our diets is quickly draining our lifeforce and she said no problem...just teach her how to make stuff and she'll make it. My issue is how do you teach someone to make stuff if they've never heard of the ingredients you are using? What if they've never even tasted that dish they're about to make?

So we've set off on trying to teach her mom new dishes, but it's been slow going. I've taught her how to make curry crab stir fry (Thai style) and that's about it so far. She's not familiar with most of the ingredients to her it's just "yellow powder" (tumeric), "brown powder" (cumin), and "orange powder" (hot curry base). I'm going to try to get her into Thai pork salad ("larb") since it's simple to make and slowly increase her knowledge of recipes. I understand it's rough when you've never even tried these foods let alone know what's in them, but it simply has to be done to maintain Hongyun's and my own sanity.