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tonight, i returned my bokhara rug at the traveling rug tent in the parking lot of the waltham home depot and bought one with that same design but twice the size (twice the price too unfortunately). i learned the owner is bulgarian, which explains the fact that some of his rugs are bulgarian made. later, my parents, sister and i did some shopping at the costco nearby. i got a folding table which will substitute as a cheap temporary desk for one of my bedrooms. i also found this absolutely amazing chinese cookbook, "the food of china," by deh-ta hsiung and nina simonds. it's one of these new generation of cookbooks where it's also a photo book filled with delicious photographs of the food themselves, along with images of the local scenery. and i think it's very important for chinese recipe books to have the actual names of the recipes written in chinese somewhere, sort of proof of authenticity if you will, which this one does. the recipes in the book aren't necessarily dishes that americans might find common in the local westernized chinese restaurants.
instead, the dishes are sort of a greatest hits of chinese food classics, the best of all the regions in china. my father was raving about how great it was, how the choice of recipes, though relatively comprehensive in scope, are also simple to make, spanning a wide range of styles and techniques, with very little wok cooking (wok cooking is only a small part of the chinese food universe), so i wouldn't stink up my kitchen trying to make these dishes. he said he'd get another copy for my sister as a present. we had dinner at my place, got some takeout from zoe's, sichuan style spicy cold beef and "ant climbing trees." old habits die hard, as my mother did the dishes after we finished dinner, then went ahead and rearranged the items in my kitchen cabinets. i made hot chocolate with the remainder of the expired milk i had in the fridge, heating it up over the stove. milk smells pretty nice when heated, the last time i had warm milk was a long time ago when i was kid, a cure for some sort of forgotten ailment. later, the family retired to the living room to watch some television before they left to go back to belmont.

the bokhara now sits perfectly in the center of my living room. it's one of those rugs that the more i see it, the more i like it, and i definitely think it's the best design out of all the rugs that were sold at that rug tent. i'm sort of rug obsessed these days. it's ironic, a house with such lovely nice wooden floors, recently sanded and polished i might add, and now all i want to do is to cover it up with rugs. homeowners are strange like that.