A Christmas Gift

I have a thing for dishes. When we lived in Singapore I discovered a kind of outlet store for dishes. It was basically a warehouse with the dishes piled on the floor all over the place. What was being sold there were seconds of dishes that were manufactured in Indonesia. Some of them had very obvious flaws, others were more difficult to see. The best thing about those dishes is that they were very inexpensive! A dinner plate was around $1.25, a salad plate was 75 cents. Over the course of the three years we lived there I bought four or five (five or six?) sets of dishes. If you come visit me for a weekend, I can serve you each meal on a different set of dishes.

So you'd think I would stop looking at dishes, huh?

Well...

Last fall I was wandering through a Crate & Barrel store (one of my favorite things to do) and a set of dishes caught my eye. They had an Asian theme to them. On a whim, I added those dishes to my Christmas list and my sweet hubby spoiled indulged me and gave them to me for Christmas.

Last night I fixed Fried Rice with some egg rolls and thought it was a perfect time to use those dishes. (See the bottle of soy sauce with the price tag sticker on top? It's one I bought when we lived in Singapore. I keep refilling it. I left the sticker on the lid because it says "Tanglin Market" the name of the grocery store I shopped at. Call me sentimental.)

Sooo many things I love about the dishes: The green square plate, the ginkgo leaf shaped plate and motif on the other plates, the little ginkgo bowls for sauces.

It just makes meal time fun when the dishes are fun.

(I like Ginkgo trees. I bought an artificial one when we live in Singapore  You can see it behind Megan in this photo.) (She's working hard on a Christmas craft.)