Our China – Page 4

Our China: Food

March 4, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

As most people know, Chinese cuisine offers a wide range of foods to enjoy, but mostly one style of cooking: stir-fried. And most people know that what you buy in a “Chinese food” restaurant in the West isn’t much like what really graces the table in a genuine Chinese home.

What many people don’t know, is the Chinese food mostly available at real Chinese restaurants in the West mostly comes from Hong Kong, since historically, that is the part of China most people were acquainted with. Occasionally, people are familiar with Sichuan cuisine, but that too is from further south.

So many people have never enjoyed real northern Chinese food. Generally speaking, Chinese food follows the universal rule that those in warmer climates eat spicier foods, so real northern cuisine isn’t always spicy, but it’s always delicious–and of course, as people have become more mobile, Chinese food isn’t just localized anymore. It’s possible to go to a restaurant anywhere in China and enjoy the foods from all over the country.

One of our favorite dishes from the north is hot pot.

The dining party gathers around a table fitted with a burner, and a pot is brought out containing broth (spicy or non-spicy or a divided bowl containing some of each) and some seasonings. Then you begin to order what you want to put in. There are the thin slices of lamb that I mentioned in another post, as well as similar slices of beef, a variety of different kinds of mushrooms–our favorites are the “needle mushrooms,” some seafood, and plenty of vegetables: sweet potatoes, potatoes, cilantro, spinach, and plenty of other greens. And noodles. Our favorite restaurant has fresh noodles, but since these contain white flour and gluten, we usually opt for glass noodles and/or buckwheat (soba) noodles.

Once the order is placed, diners go to the sauce bar to pick out their favorite dipping sauces. I usually fill my little bowl with the traditional sesame sauce, plus minced garlic, cilantro, garlic chives, and some red pepper oil.

When the ingredients have been added to the pot, and everything is boiling nicely again, it’s time to dig in your chopsticks, pull out your food, dip it in the sauce and eat! Yum!

Our China: Serendipity

February 25, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Weird things happen to us here. And I don’t mean just the normal weirdness of negotiating life as a family with three expat homeschooled children in a country of one-child families, compulsory government schooling and people who speak very little English, by and large.

I mean serendipitous weirdness.

One thing we’ve had to get used to here is that many things (dare I say most things) happen without much advance planning. Advance appointments are made only by those who know Western culture well and understand that we Westerners like our plans. Often, we’ll receive a call inviting us to some special event.

“When?” we’ll ask.

The reply? “In an hour.”

Friends still “drop by” here without calling ahead. And things can be called off just as easily as the arrangements were made in the first place. This year, the city’s Chinese New Year fireworks were cancelled (not that you couldn’t see enough right in your own neighborhood).

Last week we had one of those last-minute kind of days. JavaMan received a last-minute call to join his friend on a trip to the countryside, after which they’d have a chance for his friend to introduce him to a man who worked for the government and could advise JavaMan on some business matters.

He came home with this:

So at least one night last week, we didn’t eat vegetarian! (It’s a pheasant, for the uninitiated. Note the unplucked, ungutted state of this bird. We’re getting more adventurous all the time!)

According to instructions we located on the internet, pheasants should be hung for three days, after which they can be skinned, and prepared for consumption. JavaMan used the following recipe and cooked dinner, after he skinned and prepared the bird for cooking:

Cream-Roast Pheasant

1 young pheasant
Salt
Butter
2 thin slices bacon
1 c. sweet cream or sour cream
1 c. water
2 tbsp. flour

Draw the pheasant carefully; wash and dry. Rub inside and out with salt. Put the liver and a piece of butter in the pheasant. Fasten bacon across breast. Bake at 350 degrees, basting frequently with 4 teaspoons butter. After it has cooked about 30 minutes, baste with cream and water, a spoonful at a time. Pheasant should cook about 1 1/2 hours. Remove bacon before serving. Stir flour into drippings, brown and add water as needed. Cook 5 minutes. Serve gravy with bird.

Has serendipity found you lately?

Our China: The Local Market, Part 3

February 18, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

This week, I’m continuing to give you a taste of the China we know by taking a last look at the Chinese market. And I have a treat for you–a special recipe our family loves made from ingredients we buy at our local Chinese market.

While pork is much more commonly eaten here than beef, (beef is considered expensive), we don’t eat pork, so we frequent the lamb and beef lady. There is only one stall selling beef at our market to the three or four that offer pork, and during Chinese New Year, that stall was closed for eight full days (so was the chicken stall–fortunately the supermarket was open).

Here I can order my meat chopped, ground, or in 片儿 piǎn er (thin strips that resemble bacon). These thin strips of beef or lamb are used for special recipes. I can have it ground or chopped, at my request. price of beef has gone up recently, and now both lamb and beef cost almost $6.00 per jin.

As promised, here’s a special recipe that uses lamb 片儿 (lamb in thin strips). But if you don’t happen to have a Chinese grocery handy that sells the 片儿, then thin stir-fry-type slices will do. This is a very northern dish. We never ate it in the south–in fact the 片儿 were hard to come by there, and much more expensive. This is the recipe, as it comes from my bilingual cookbook, Chinese Cuisine Beijing Style (out of print but worth getting your hands on if you’re serious about Chinese cuisine), but I always double it. The method of cooking, with separately mixed sauces, is very typical of Chinese cuisine.

This recipe disappears pretty quickly at our house. Serve over rice, of course, with a side of bok choy, cooked this way (you’ll thank me).

And here is the photo of this recipe, straight from my cookbook, and complete with authentic food stains created while cooking this fabulous recipe :)

Coriander Lamb

1/2 lb. thinly sliced lamb
1/2 lb fresh cilantro
1/4 cup shredded ginger
2 teaspoons garlic cloves

Sauce 1

1 Tablespoon cooking wine
1 Tablespoon salad oil
1/2 Tablespoon cornstarch (I use arrowroot flour instead)
1/4 teaspoon salt

Sauce 2

1 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon cooking wine (try to get the kind sold at Asian groceries)
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Directions

Marinate lamb in Sauce 1 for 20 minutes. Wash coriander and cut into 1″ sections
Heat a wok, add 4 T oil. Stir-fry minced garlic and ginger root until fragrant. Add lamb and stir-fry over high heat ntil lamb color changes slightly (I fry it a little longer).
Stir in coriander and Sauce 2, stir-fry quickly and serve.

Enjoy!

Our China: The Local Market, Part 2

February 11, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Welcome to the second week of “Taste of China” posts. In these posts, I’m attempting to give an idea of what it’s like to live in China–a taste of this country for those who’ve never lived here. In last week’s post, I introduced the concept of the market in China. Whereas some markets are dedicated only to foods, our local market has a little more to offer. Last week, I wrote about the fruit and vegetable stands. Here are a few more of the offerings in our local market.

The simple egg is still a bit of a mystery to me here in China. Eggs are not sold by the dozen, but by the half kilo (a measurement called the 斤 jīn, used for buying everything from fruit and vegetables to yarn for knitting). I can buy eggs with inspection stickers for up to $3.20 a half kilo, but I always buy the cheapest kind (no stickers) for around $0.80 per 斤 (jīn). These humble, stickerless eggs have lovely bright-colored yolks, and resemble what I might purchase at an organic farm in Canada. Sizes are irregular, but mostly large, and almost all the eggs one sees in the market or the supermarket are brown. Other than the fact that they are inspected (and perhaps come from a different variety of chicken?), I don’t really understand why the expensive eggs are more expensive. At the same place I buy chicken eggs, it’s also possible to buy pigeon or duck eggs as well.

Generally speaking, here in this city, it seems harder to find whole chickens here than pieces. (This was not true where we lived in the south of China.) When you do find a whole chicken, it is truly whole. It will have its head, feet and probably its entrails intact. At most markets in the north, things are a bit more “civilized” than the south. When we bought a chicken in the south, we picked it out live, it kicked its last inside a bucket and it was plucked and cleaned out right before our eyes. Our kids have no illusions about where their food comes from!

Next week I plan to share a little about other kinds of meat sold in the market, and as a little bonus, I’ll share a special recipe that’s a family favorite. But to complete our tour of the market, we must stop and buy grains.

Here I can buy several kinds of rice (including red and brown), millet, buckwheat–groats or flour, oatmeal–groats or rolled oats, dried beans, flour for dumplings or for baking and various kinds of oil. I buy things by the 斤 jīn here too.

Oh wait a minute. Need a set of clothespins, a bucket, a mop, a flyswatter, some garbage bags? Well fortunately, our market has a little hardware store too (as well as a small toy store, a stationery store, a fabric store, and a small electronics place that sells extension cords, lightbulbs, and at Chinese New Year, plastic red lanterns).

It’s always fun to shop for something new. We often look up vocabulary before we go to the market if we’re buying something unusual we don’t already know the name for. My favorite trick is to print out a picture of the item I need from the internet. Neither strategy guarantees success, but we usually come back with what we went looking for, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Either way it’s always an adventure!

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