life in China

Our China: Exercise

March 11, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Exercise is part of the culture here–from school children who line up every morning to march and do junior calisthenics, to the elderly who take a morning walk and/or one after dinner. In addition, until quite recently, the primary mode of transportation for everyone in China was by foot or bicycle (although in our city, bicycles are scarcer because it is quite hilly), so walking was a part of daily life in China. Elevators used to be reserved for buildings over five floors, and small “exercise parks” like the one pictured below are common–every park and apartment complex has at least one.

exercise_park — Seniors exercising at one of the many exercise parks

Exercise in China park ladies dance — Seniors do aerobics in our apartment complex

Groups of ladies like the ones pictured above meet every day to do aerobics together. Someone brings a radio or CD player and with a leader–usually an older lady who used to teach some kind of dance classes–they all dance together. When we lived in the south, a group of ladies met in our complex every night to dance holding beautiful red fans. From time to time, I’ve been tempted to join them, but have been held back by the certainty that my participation would not go unnoticed and a large crowd would gather.

kindergarten exercise — Our kids do morning exercises at their kindergarten, 2008

There is a proverb in Chinese that says, 饭后百步走活到九十九. “Walk 100 steps after dinner and you’ll live to be 99,” so it’s a way of thinking deeply engrained in the culture.

The car, however, is changing all this. Certainly, there are still people who exercise regularly, but the most visible group exercising are the elderly. Perhaps it is simply that they have more leisure time to do so, but I do believe this is a part of Chinese culture that is slowly disappearing.

This article shows just how much car ownership is pervading the new China as a status symbol, and changing this aspect of Chinese culture. We are sad to see it go.

So what are you doing after dinner this evening?

{Tomorrow I’ll be participating in 5 Days of Teaching Creatively along with other members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway
for almost $1000 worth of homeschool and family-friendly products.}

Our China: The Local Market

February 6, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

People ask us all the time what it is like to live in China. I often respond that it’s hard to describe, but I’m going to give it a try.
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to guest post about what homeschooling in China is like. You can read that post at the Schoolhouse Review Crew site.

Come along with me in this series of posts to sample a little taste of what our everyday lives are like. For the first post, I’m going to take you with me to the market. The word for “market” in Chinese is 市场 (shì chǎng). You buy everything here in a shì chǎng. If you want to buy flowers, you go to the flower shì chǎng. Need a new cell phone, laptop or iPad? Go to the electronics shì chǎng. Clothing, of course, is purchased at the clothing shì chǎng. Want to buy a dog? Man’s best friend is–you guessed it–found at the animal shì chǎng.

To buy fruits and vegetables, some wealthy Chinese now believe the supermarket to be the best place to buy quality goods, but it seems to us outsiders like going to the good old-fashioned shì chǎng is the best place to buy fresher produce more directly from the farmer–like going to the farmer’s market back home in Canada. And like many of our neighbors, we shop at the shì chǎng almost every day.

Some markets are just for meat, fruit and vegetables. At our local market, the main offerings are foods, but you can also buy hardware, fabric, get your cell phone charged with money or buy a lightbulb.

Goods are divided into departments of sorts. One family sells just condiments: vinegars, oils, sauces, canned goods and spices. Another sells sesame seeds, sesame oils and sauces. Another sells nuts and dried fruits. Several vendors sell fruits and vegetables (although not together). Since fruit is the customary hostess gift when one visits another’s home, fruit markets are often open late into the night, but don’t try buying vegetables anywhere but the supermarkets after about 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., depending on when the local market closes.

We tend to pick a vendor and return to the same stall over and over again. Once we’ve built a relationship, people tend to give us better prices or throw in a freebie or two from time to time. When we lived in the south, we were surprised to discover that you could bargain for anything–even fruits and vegetables, but while it’s okay to ask for a discount if you’re buying in quantity, generally speaking here in the north, prices in the food markets are marked, and you pay the standard price without bargaining. In other markets (the electronics market, the fabric market, the clothing market…prices can be bargained).

This is our favorite vegetable stand–the one I typically go to unless they’re sold out of something. They sell the best lettuce in the city–a variety hard to find elsewhere. When I asked once about why I couldn’t find this kind of lettuce at other markets, I was told this lady’s brother grows it himself.

Business was humming at “my” fruit stand, and things were a bit congested, so I took a picture here instead. Sugar cane, anyone? Strawberries are in season at the market right now ($1.60 for half a kilogram for the smaller ones, about twice as much for the big ones). I can buy blueberries, but they’re not in season and quite pricey. Sadly, I’ve never seen raspberries anywhere here, but I can buy mangosteen, pineapple, mango, pomello, starfruit, dragonfruit or kumquats. There’s a lot more variety and availability now than there was even when we first came to China almost five years ago.

There’s much more to tell about market-shopping, so I’ll reserve some of it for next week’s post. Until then, chūn jié kuai le! Happy Chinese New Year!

{For more Chinese New Year fun, visit my Mandarin 4 Kids video blog at Hold the MSG.com.}

Making Mooncakes

October 9, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

Last week here in China was Mid-Autumn Festival, also called Moon Festival or “Golden Week.” We spent the whole week visiting with friends. The weather was absolutely beautiful.

Moon Festival lands on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, so it moves around a bit in terms of where it lands in September/October.

A big part of the celebration of the festival is eating mooncakes. They are a traditional food, which we actually enjoy quite a bit, but we are told that they are kind of like the Chinese version of fruitcake. Not many people actually like to eat it, but everyone takes a bit to celebrate the season.

I thought it would be fun for the kids and I to try to make mooncakes. I spotted mooncake molds at the baking supply store we frequent (an essential stop for buying things like butter, cheese and cocoa at good prices). The store also sold the filling and two essential ingredients that I shopped all over for before I realized they were right back at the store where I bought the molds. Everywhere else, people looked at me strangely when I asked for them. (Not that this is an uncommon experience for me here!)

It’s actually rather rare for people to make their own mooncakes. Even my quintessential kid resource on Chinese cultural festivals, Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats, which usually offers a recipe to go along with each festival, simply said that most people buy their mooncakes. And in buying mooncakes, presentation is a big part of things. A good quality box of 12 or so mooncakes can run you up to $100 or so. Much of it is about the bling on the box:

I still thought it would be fun to make our own.

Mooncakes vary depending on region, but here in the north, the most popular type of mooncake contains nuts (and that’s our favorite) so that’s the kind of filling I bought. I dug up a recipe for the pastry from an expat forum, and we were in business. [This recipe has now been removed, and I have posted it here.]

The dough is really unusual. The recipe said to mix it in a “large bowl” but when I was only using 100 grams of flour I wondered. Indeed our lump of dough was pretty puny, and instead of making 12 standard mooncakes, it made only 6 small ones (I bought small molds).

If traditional mooncake molds aren’t a collector’s item, I think they should be. They’re so beautiful:

Ours is new-fangled, and spring-loaded, which definitely makes mooncake production easier!

The basic steps began with rolling out the dough, which is sleek and oily-looking, but in reality the oil content is very low (the sugar content, however, is pretty high!). According to Sweetpea, who ate the last leftover bit, it was yummy all on its own. I tried a few first to get the hang of things and then Sweetpea took over:

The recipe says to roll it between “plastic film” but I cut two sides of a ziplock bag, and used it. It stayed put and peeled back much more easily than plastic wrap would have.

The unidentified lump in the foreground of the picture above is the lump of filling. After rolling out the disc of dough, you form a ball of the filling and wrap the dough around it, then fit it gently into the mold. We pressed down gently on the cookie sheet to make the beautiful pattern on the top, then popped the mooncake out, ready for baking.

After this, all that’s left to do is bake them for 10-12 minutes. Halfway through the baking time, the mooncakes need to be brushed with an egg wash. (This makes them shiny when they’re all done. I was pretty generous with the egg wash, which was a good call.)

Like fruitcake, the mooncakes get better if they’re left a couple of days to allow the filling to soften up the dough. But we sampled them right away anyway.

Chinese friends who visited for Canadian Thanksgiving were impressed with my efforts–they’d never seen them homemade before–but upon tasting them, declared they could tell the filling was commercially produced and challenged me to make my own filling next year. They also said I should come up with unique fillings that aren’t as sweet as the traditional ones, because less sweetness is appreciated by the Chinese palate.

We found the process a lot of fun. I think I may be up to the challenge!

- Carey Clark

My Chinese Kitchen: Weekend Breakfast

June 20, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

One of the interesting aspects to life here is sunrise. Since the entire country is on a single time zone, and we are on the eastern side, it makes for a rather early morning. Today, the longest day of the year, the sun rose at 4:29 a.m. That’s why our first purchase priority when we arrived was a good set of curtains for all the bedrooms!

The early sunrise makes for a culture of early risers. We know plenty of people who are up with the sun. Some of them live in our house :(

Which makes you feel really weird about sleeping in on a Saturday morning. I know I shouldn’t care about what others think, but when people have a four-hour edge on your day, it feels like you just might be missing something.

What’s more, we’re hoping to restart our Saturday morning English club soon. We can effectively say goodbye to leisurely Saturday mornings anyway.

Last Friday I had the urge to be organized for the weekend. JavaMan was away in Beijing meeting coffee people and arranging for the purchase of his first Chinese coffee roaster (yay!), so it was just me and the kids, and I experimented. I’ve gotten a lot more free in the kitchen since coming here. I still measure for important things like bread, or if the inspiration strikes me, but I cook for feel a whole lot more, and with all the gluten-free experimentation, I’ve gotten much braver about making things up all on my own without a recipe.

I wanted to make a breakfast casserole in the crockpot–something I could fix and forget the night before and wake up to something yummy and savory. But all the breakfast casserole recipes I found used hashbrowns, and even if I could bring myself to serve those on our table, I couldn’t buy them here.

Here’s what I ended up with. Because the potatoes aren’t hashbrowns, they turned out a little soggy for our liking (but yummy all the same). Everyone agreed that for that reason, the little bit left over was even better the next day.

Breakfast Casserole

Crockpot Breakfast Casserole

Ingredients:

2-3 large potatoes, cubed
1 medium onion, chopped
1 green or red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 lb. bacon (this is what I had, feel free to use more, but it was yummy as is)
1/2 c. to 3/4 shredded cheese (We had mozzarella on hand, and it’s a somewhat precious commodity here, plus our family tries to go easy on the diary, so I used 1/2 cup)
10 eggs (or up it to a dozen)
1 c. milk (I used whipping cream because I had it and it needed to be used)
1/4 tsp dry mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:

Combine onions, bacon, potatoes and green peppers in frying pan (I used my wok) and cook in butter until potatoes are just tender and bacon is cooked.
Pour into crockpot and layer with the cheese: one layer of potato mixture, then some cheese, another layer of potato mixture, more cheese.
Combine eggs, milk, dry mustard, salt and pepper and whisk together until combined. Pour over potato mixture.
Cook for 8-10 hours on low setting.
Wake up and enjoy!