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listening to: Cecil Taylor, The Beatles
While not the focus of the trip, this country’s diet is pretty wild and worth a good story or two. I’ve found some delicious and disgusting and sometimes just confusing things here in China, and I’ll share a few right now.
I love Baozi’s and Zhunzi’s…a Baozi is a steamed Chinese dumpling, pretty staple, but they’re better here. A zhunzi is filled and sized similarly, but is made of sticky glutinous rice on the outside and wrapped up in bamboo leaf after (I may have explained these before during the festival). There’s another dish called 鸡蛋西红盖饭 (“Eggs & Tomato Cover Rice”). It is exactly what the name suggests—whisked scrambled eggs mixed with roasted tomato and laid on top of steamed white rice. So simple, so delicious, and another one of China’s most popular meals. In the morning the cafeteria serves录豆揪,which is basically a rice version of oatmeal with green beans mixed in. Sounds weird, I know, but actually pretty tasty when hot.
A new method of food prep I’ve run across that’s popular at on-campus cafeterias etc. is like a mini, not quite as good, but much more accessible and cheap Hot Pot. Dunno what it’s called, but essentially you point to what ingredients you want (mostly veggies, with a few noodle choices, couple kinds of tofu, maybe a fish or meat option too), which are laid out in a display, assembly-line sort of style. You’re charged by ingredient, and they’re usually 1 kuai per. They take the skewers you choose and put them in a strainer which is dunked into some boiling broth liquid, like you’d find in a noodle or dumpling soup. It flash cooks and they can add either spicy or peanut sauce at your discretion. It’s like a hot noodle bowl where you get to pick out your own ingredients and don’t have to deal with the salty soup broth. Had it for lunch today in fact—roasted tofu + fish (in preserved, balled up form, but oh well) + clear noodles + cauliflower + Chinese spinach, 5 kaui ($0.75 U.S.) Bon apetite.
Tried a bunch of new fruits/produce over here. There’s waxberries (the “strazzies” I think I mentioned earlier), things that are shaped and colored like Golden Delicious apples but have the taste and texture of pears, best plums in the world, sour cherries, and little mini-bite size pumpkins that have the taste and texture of a peach. Also the OJ here is made from mandarin oranges; more of a bite to it, and I think a little better. It’s so expensive here though that I hardly buy it for myself, unfortunately.
There seems to be a country-wide love for ice cream, and popsicles/portable ice cream in particular. Weird flavors, too. There’s ice cream cake on a stick. There’s weird segmented popsicles and chunky chocolate-coated bars called Magnums. There’s corn-flavored. Yes. With a smiling corn on the label. Dave was brave enough to try it—a cone on the outside with ice cream on a stick inside. In his own words: “Well, you first bite into it, and it’s cold like ice cream and there’s the cone and it’s kinda good, but then it’s…corn. It’s like vanilla at first and then…corn. I dunno, I’m filled with bafflement right now.” I’ve promised to return his bravery by trying a green bean-flavored popsicle (which we have previously seen) as soon as one is spotted again.
I’ve already tried the Red Bean popsicle, which was absolutely delicious. Red Beans are actually sweet and used in many desserts here, and they may well become my one vice. So sweet.
Besides popsicles, the Chinese seem to love all things portable. You see people carrying lunches around in bags everywhere. That’s popular to some extent in America too, but more in the form of Jamba Juice and Power Bars. Here, it’s more like just grab random pieces of food and eat as you go. A lot of people, especially older generations, seem to like to eat their food items separately instead of together. Let me explain. At Summer Palace, a lot of all-day visitors brought lunches and sat down together for midday meal, nothing shocking there, I did the same. But whereas I made a sandwich, most Chinese would just bring a loaf of bread, some pieces of fruit and vegetables, and some meat sticks, and eat. Grab a slice of bread on its own, then maybe chomp on a beef loaf, etc. I’ve seen several old men sitting down straight-up eating a cucumber, and a couple of people biting into whole tomatoes with no chaser. Most little markets and stores will also have whole ears of roasted corn on a stick for sale (which is delicious by the way—it’s that wild maize sort of corn with multi-colored kernels).
A little odd subsection of this is something at the supermarkets which I like to call “bags o’ liquid shit.” If you like milky sort of beverages but don’t want to pay the price of packaging, what to do? China has the answer—portable single-size plastic bags of milk. And not just milk. There’s several flavors milk, various yogurts, and many more options for the drinker on the go. These have become a little experiment of mine while here, to try them all (hey, milk’s good for you, and these are so damn cheap). So far I’ve tried chive-flavored milk and green bean milk (gross), sugar-free yogurt, whole milk and black bean milk (great), and hazelnut-flavored milk (also good but hella sweet, like drinking coffee creamer almost haha). And I’ve barely scratched the surface.
As far as other oddities go, often the best place to look is convenience stores, corner marts and the like. At rest stop gas stations, you can buy jerkified chicken. And by this, I mean an entire game hen. A small dehydrated chicken. In an airtight plastic bag. On a store shelf. For sale, head and all. There’s stands where you can buy what we call “stinky tofu” on a stick, which is exactly what it sounds like: tofu that’s been fermented, like an old artisan stinky cheese sort of. It’s supposed to be delicious but none of us can get over the smell.
Snack foods and drinks are also hilarious, including “Rice Dew,” (some milky-looking drink I’ve been too wuss to try as of yet) candy-apple-flavored soda, bizarre flavors of potato chips (from tomato to fried chicken to, aptly enough, potato), dried pumpkin slices (like the preservable papaya or manjo you’d find in trail mixes back in the States), salty squid jerky. The list is simply too long haha. Dan and & are organizing a 4th of July “Man Contest,” where we first round up the most ridiculous of these minor foodstuffs and drinks then hit the Night Market again, to see who among us truly has an iron stomach, who is truly brave, who is truly, a Man.
Overall, the thing I’ve noticed most is that authentic Chinese cuisine is nothing like I expected. Pei-wei sort of dishes, like Sweet & Sour pork or Teriyaki Chicken, potstickers, spring rolls, crab cakes, fortune cookies, are all virtually non-existent here. A lot more noodles here than expected, in more varieties than I knew existed. Also no brown rice, oddly—asked Pang Laoshi about this, and she said Chinese mostly don’t think it tastes good, so it’s not popular enough to be served out in restaurants. You can of course buy it at a grocery store or something, but as she put it: “if you like it, you gotta make it yourself at home!”
Any other culinary queries, feel free to ask, folks. I’m out.
PS link to this past week’s pictures is below (two new albums):
http://s294.photobucket.com/albums/mm93/sterlingsin/
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Saili
Sally Lockhart
Hey, you know fortune cookies were invented in America. Do your best in the Man Contest, dear.