Understatement of the year: We love Chinese food. And now that we have had the awesome authentic, cheap stuff nearly every day for 15 weeks, make no mistake, it will be one thing we truly miss when we leave.
Over the next couple weeks, I am working to try and cook more Chinese food simply to practice some of the techniques I have seen in a vain effort to be able to try and recreate some of the dishes that we have had with our friends and family back home. I do not underestimate how hard of a task this will be. Foremost, because there are some ingredients which might be hard to find. Flavors here are very specific.
While I can take really beautiful images of ingredients up close, like this:
You should probably know that when I am buying ingredients, it looks more like this:
Not exactly what you expected, right? Each market and vendor presents their options in different ways. Above you have walnuts on the left, then mushrooms (dried, of course), and then dried red peppers. Those peppers are in just about every dish that I like, so I am worried that they will be harder to find in Indiana.
Replicating cooking techniques could also present a problem. I can have a wok, but whether I have the right size one for the job and/or the ability to heat up that baby to the temperatures used here might be troublesome. Street vendors, like the one pictured below, continue to fascinate me. Just today, we drove up to Hankou (northern part of Wuhan) and on the way home stopped at my newest favorite food stall for a bowl of awesome noodles. Nine RMB for a bowl of tasty, spicy noodles cooked right in front of you in about 3 minutes.
This is one of my favorite breakfast foods from street markets. It is rice with egg and tofu, sold by the square. Hudson gobbles this one up too. I am sure you don't *have* to have a wok that big, but ...
I can not allow a food blog to pass and I not mention this fried bread once again. It is the bomb. It is sold by total weight, so you can get any quantity that you wish. I buy a bagful which is 10 RMB and the kids and I can eat until we are just stuffed. The husband/wife team that operate this foodstall start cutting it when they see me coming; check out that knife!
When we go out to eat, it is always an adventure. When we are part of a tour, or an organized dinner, or have a more seasoned China veteran with us, the ordering is done by them. Here is an example of some dishes from our trip with the Citadines to the orange picking island. These dishes represent very local and traditional food for the Yangtze River valley.
This first one is pork belly wrapped in a lotus leaf which was described perfectly in the book I just read, The Last Chinese Chef.
This is a tofu dish with mild spice. (Can we just note my biggest pet peeve about Chinese restaurants which is pictured here? Plastic wrapped covered tables. Ew. Ew. Ew.)
Garlic finds itself into most dishes. At our local grocery store, I get frustrated because I can only buy big bag when I really only need a couple heads. But that big bag is 6 RMB or $1 USD, so it is silly to complain; I just hate being wasteful! This dish has garlic, pork fat, soybean paste, and peppers.
Much to my husband's dismay, this is how fish is served in China. While it looks appetizing for all, we just can not serve this to the kids. Bones are present throughout. Chinese people are masters of eating this quickly and getting the bones out, but I always feel like I am a total mess when I try, so I have given up on dishes like this one.
As pictured previously, Tucker gobbled up these whole fish bones and all without flinching. To be fair, they tasted like fried oil and nothing more.
Going to restaurants we are usually picking blind the first time. Then when we return we get the dishes that we liked along with something new. We ordered this dish --or more correctly, our friends ordered it for us-- our very first Sunday lunch after church
three months ago. We get it every time we visit this place. Like most dishes, if I tell you the list of ingredients it does not sound appetizing, but together (with the sauce) it is fantastic.
I am not crazy about this dish, but Josh likes it and it can be found on most menus: I'd call it scrambled eggs and tomato.
The hours of preparation starts early in the morning. As early as 8 a.m. I will see the restaurants around our apartment beginning to prepare the cut vegetables for the dishes of the day. In back alleys and outside their front doors, owners are scrubbing and cleaning and sorting. At the market they are buying huge quantities and pushing their purchases away in huge bags on two wheel carts. While some food stalls cut to order, most have a good quantity of staples like carrot, cucumber, peppers (red, green, hot, mild), onion (white and green), cabbage, garlic and ginger already chopped and diced. Restaurants have their prepared vegetables separated in huge pastel colored plastic bins. When recreating dishes at home, it takes me far more time to prep than actually cook.
Desserts are a rarity. Most menus don't really list them separately, but dishes like this are sugary enough to qualify. Caramelized sweet potatoes, bananas, and other staples are a sweet end to a meal and FUN to play with as they are served ridiculously hot. However, order them at the beginning of your meal because often you will find the hostess/waitress/cook (which are often the same person) running out to the closest market mid-meal to pick up missing the produce ingredient!
This is more my style for dessert anyway! Lotus "fries" whipped up with (obviously) a ton of chopped dried red peppers. But the surprise here is that this dish is also sugared, so it is ridiculously sweet too. Sweet and spicy lotus fries: what is not to love?!?!
Previous food blog found
here.
