Hooray!

We are finally moving! Found an apartment, and we're moving to Erfurt! By the end of the month! Yay!

I am very, very happy to be moving out, and I am happy to be out of reach from my MIL. She is quite sad, and has taken to hugging me and saying, "Everybody wants to leave me. You too?"

While I am sad as well, I am actually more excited at the fact that I'll be independent in a new city, and happy to be away from her meddlesome and annoying ways.

She always prides herself as a really good cook, and admittedly, she does cook well. She loves making traditional German dishes, and asks me to watch while making them. "Das ist wie meine Oma das gemacht hat." (That's how my Grandma used to make it.) Since traditional German cooking is rich in meat, potatoes, and fat, a normal meal in the household usually drips in grease and butter. Even her vegetables are marinated in heavy sauces or butter. Hearty German dishes literally are not for the faint of heart! Then she complains the next day at how big she's become.

I think I have gotten along with her for the past eight months by playing the compliant Asian. Though Thomas says that the following statements are not completely true, I think that I never complained. I do stuff around the household the way she wants them done to avoid arguments. I never answer back. I understand that because Thomas was not here to explain my behavior, and that because I can't express myself in German as well as I can in English.

I patiently waited for the day that Thomas would be done with school so we could move out of this backwater city. It is beautiful, yes, but a tad slow for my taste.

She, in turn, treats me like the provincial innocent. That was ok, because in some respects, I was. But sometimes it gets too much!

Everytime I cook something Filipino or Asian, she always has to meddle with how I should do it. Mas marunong pa siya sa akin, eh sino ba ang Pinoy dito? I tell her that I want to recreate the taste of my childhood, but she insists that her cooking methods are better than mine! She always meddles in my cooking. She doesn't want anybody to meddle with her cooking but she insists on meddling with mine, all because I sometimes cook with a recipe in hand!

Like during Filipino Food night. She insisted that I flood the freaking wok with cooking oil as I made Lumpiang Shanghai (spring rolls) so we can fry a lot in a short amount of time. People normally use up to three tablespoons of oil when frying spring rolls.

I didn't use water or egg yolk to bind the end of the wrapper because it doesn't work. The spring roll wrappers sold here are too thick, they break because of the moisture. So I let it be. Barbara told me, that won't work. But I've done it before, and it does.

So as I cook the Spring roll in the vat of oil, the wrappers ballooned and floated to the surface. She exclaimed "Scheiße, I told you so! You should've used egg!" in front of everybody! Carola, the other cooking host said "Shh, don't fight here!" I was steaming mad at Barbara, and gave her dagger looks. Thomas just ladled out the excess oil in another bowl and told me, "See, I told you, you shouldn't listen too much to my mother!"

Well, it was my fault because I was too much of a pushover. But in everyday life she is just the same as well. Typical German who wants to control everything. So anyway, I promised to cook these past few days as a thank you for allowing me to stay in her house.

Last night I made Tortang Talong (Eggplant Omelet). To remove the skin while achieving the burnt eggplant flavor, I put the eggplant over her ceramic hot plate stove, a lot safer than the Filipino method of grilling it on fire. She took a look at what I did, and said "Scheiße, what you're doing will make the stove dirty! I think you should put it in the oven instead."

Since it was her stove, I had no choice but to put it in the oven. It works just the same, but it didn't taste the same. Then as I fried the omelet on a skillet, she noted, "Cooking one eggplant at a time is so inefficient. Why don't you put everything in the oven? You can cook three to four eggplants in one go!"

Grr grr and more grrr!!!! Outside I was all calm, but deep inside I wanted to scream! "Hey, who is the Filipina here? You and your pseudo-Asian dishes are fine, but when I cook Filipino, then I cook Filipino! If I wanted to make baked eggplant omelet, then I would've done so!"


I made Maja Blanca for dessert, from scratch! I literally scraped hard coconut meat out of a shell to make coconut milk! She asked where I put the water, and I replied that I threw it away. She went, "Scheiße, why did you throw that away? It was good for drinking! We drank that in Cuba."

I couldn't take it anymore, so I made Thomas explain to her that coconut juice is only good when it comes from a YOUNG coconut. Old Coconut juice tastes yucky. Because he was in Southeast Asia for a year, he knew that.

I know she just means well, but I can't take all this meddling! I will be glad to have a kitchen I can call my own!