by Georgia Freedman, Acting Managing Editor

Reporting a story in a foreign country is always an adventure. No matter how many plans you make ahead of time, the situation on the ground is never quite what you expected, so, to get the story you want, you learn to as flexible and resourceful as possible. The upside is that sometimes you come away with a richer, more interesting story that you had anticipated, and once in a while you find a story that you didn't foresee at all.

That was certainly the situation last year when I traveled to Beijing with my husband, Josh Wand (a freelance food photographer), hoping to take a long-awaited vacation while doing some reporting for the magazine. I lived in Beijing for a few months while I was in college, but I hadn't been back in nearly eight years. When we arrived I found that the city had changed so much that it was almost unrecognizable. In the rush to prepare for this summer's Olympics, major highways had been added, thousands of steel and glass skyscrapers had sprung up all over the city, and entire neighborhoods had been razed to the ground and rebuilt. What's more, I hadn't spoken Mandarin with any frequency in nearly a decade, and Josh doesn't speak Chinese at all, so our first couple of days were spent mute, afloat in a sea of food possibilities but without a rudder to direct us toward the subjects we had come to work on.

After two difficult days, I decided to call in some backup. I contacted a few American expats living in the city, including Sandra Huang, one of the creators and authors of Savour Asia, a wonderful website that offers restaurant recommendations in cities all over Asia. Sandra happily agreed to act as informal interpreter on our outings. One morning, as the three of us were trying to coax the secret to some especially juicy and delicious steamed buns out of the proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, Sandra announced that we were only a couple of blocks from a great cooking school where she had taken lessons. Would we like to see it?

Ten minutes later we were in a sunny courtyard, where Chunyi Zhou was teaching a handful of students how to make kung pao chicken. She greeted us warmly and invited us to stay and watch. Thinking of SAVEUR's Kitchenwise column, I asked whether she would mind if I wrote about her home. By the end of lunch, I had a story and Josh had dozens of photographs, and a completely unplanned but wonderful article was on its way to the pages of SAVEUR.