Now everyone who knows me well knows that I dont cook. I have two favourite sayings " I've only got a kitchen because it came with the house" and 'God created restaurants for a reason".

With that in mind it will come as a great surprise that I decided to give my spotlessly clean kitchen a test run during this National Day holiday. First challenge was working out how to use the appliances give that all instructions are in Chinese so I just pushed a few buttons till the hot plate thing turned on.....I'm not yet ready to try the gas cooker - afraid I might blow up my apartment!!

I decided to make some Chinese rice noodles - nice and easy so everyone says- simply cook the noodles then put them in cold water while you prepare and cook the rest of your ingredients etc.
Off to the markets I went and got the necessary vegetables and decided to also get some chicken pieces to go in the dish.

I happily cooked the rice (tick) chopped up all the vegetables (tick) and then started to chop up the chicken pieces...........thats when the surprise came.....getting pieces out of the bag and lo and behold I pull out the chickens HEAD!!!!!!!!!!! OMG I didnt know what to do - throw up? use it?!? bin it?

I decided the best course of action was too bin it and pretend I hadn't seen it even though my stomach was churning. On with the cooking and I have to say my dish turned out very tasty and quite delicious.

Telling one of the teachers here about my experience their response was.....oh so you didn't get the deluxe pack then?.......I asked what they meant and was told that the deluxe pack includes the chickens FEET which are considered to be the best!!!!!!!!! Now that would have totally finished me off.

Needless to say I wont be cooking again- can do without the nasty surprises and sometimes its best not to know what went into a dish. I've already had snake wontons (unbeknown to me at the time!) and heaven knows what else........

Oh the joys of the cuisine of China.....thinking I might end up vegetarian!!