Foodstuffs

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.

Wordless Wednesday: Food shopping at Market

This is how most shopping is. You don't know if you are in someone's house, a store, or an alley.

Prepared food stalls really enhance the aromas of the fresh market.

Boiled duck eggs.

Eventually I had to tell this woman to go away, but for awhile she was pretty entertaining.

I wanted to take picture of his melons. (LOOK AT THOSE!)
He wanted to take pictures of my kids.

I so desperately want to photograph people here, but I am still shy about it.
She is getting the lotus pods out; those are lotus roots  (in foreground) and stems (in water)

Making magical music for his meat.

If you go to a market after lunch, it is very quiet and many vendors are asleep.

A picture is worth 1000 words. I will let you come up with your own.

Just like America, right?!?

This old woman had such a heavy load. I just wanted to cuddle her.

Chicken. It is what's for dinner.

Nothing goes to waste.

These stalls line the market because shopping is not pain in the butt enough.

Little man, I will assume about the age of Tucker, putting cherry tomatoes on the pinchers
of a crawfish. He was a pro! So amazing.

This little curly went to the market

**We continue to have incredibly unreliable internet and wifi service, even with the VPN. Random power outages and scheduled ones (no power this Saturday 8a-18p!) so this blog represents what we did on Wednesday. It is now 5:54 a.m. on Thursday. The kids are asleep still! This is a record!!!**

Today we were invited to tour the Wuhan Yangtze International school with Rebecca from foreign fellowship. The building where the school will be this year is brand new. As a teacher I participated in the moving/opening/first year in two new high schools and it was interesting to see how this school was prepared for school which starts in just a few weeks.

The building is five stories tall surrounded by a tall fence and guard shack. Previously the school was two floors and shared a physical building with a Chinese school so the facility is a tremendous "step up." It seems to me there are many aspects of the culture here that build exercise into your daily life. Working at a building where you might be climbing five sets of stairs (multiple times) a day would definitely be an example of that. The kindergarten class was so cute. Everything was just as you would expect it to be back home for a school that was age 3 through grade 12 in one building. I have already emailed the school librarian before we arrived, so I am hoping to go back once school is open and once a week as the 10 softcover books I brought with us are already losing their charm.

Gorgeous, right? But watch out for that scooter! (We are INSIDE a building, people!)

Rebecca needed to go to the outdoor market and asked if I wanted to go with her. I am not turning down any opportunities to practice speaking or doing daily life activities with the locals when I have help, so we went. The driver was able to understand her directions (it was just 5 minutes from the school) and her request for him to stay and wait.

Greeeeeeeeeeeen beeeeeeeeeeeeans.

The market is everything you would expect of a traditional Chinese market: under a metal roof in something that might remind you of an airport hangar there is vendor after vendor displaying their produce. Around the perimeter of the vendors on the inside were small vendors selling baskets/watches/ perfumes/plungers/wooden things/bags/you name it out of little stall like stores. It was loud, dirty, and wonderful. Seriously it was the coolest thing I have seen yet. If I had been their sans kids and with my good camera, it literally would have been a slice of heaven. As a foodie, I desperately wanted to taste everything. Only about 75% of what I saw was identifiable. Rebecca took me to her favorite carrot lady and she gave us "good price" on some things. I probably purchased from 6 vendors. Again, they were quick to give the kids samples. Hudson ate some type of root thing then gave it to me and said it tasted like dirt. Yep, it did.

See those purple-ish things above the chilis? That is what the man peeled for Hudson.

I am so excited to share that I know what strange fruit they are selling everywhere (that we bought Monday outside our supermarket). It is lotus. The lotus flower is very special to this area. In addition to the flower part that we bought to eat, they eat the root too. I snapped this picture as we were walking out.

Lotus! Okay, so you crack these open in your hands (like a mushroom) then there are these green balls.
With your fingernails you tear them open and there are white balls inside.
What do they taste like? Um, nothing? Air and dirt? 

Our purchases: watermelon (10RMB), unshelled edamame (8RMB), 5 ears corn (15RMB), 2 pounds carrots (3 RMB), 1 celery stalk (1 RMB), 1 pound huge purple grapes (10 RMB). In total we spent about $8. My backpack was heavier than Tucker (I was carrying both). There were vendors who had prepared food too. One day I will try something. I think I will veto anything that still resembles the body part of which it is though.

Spices. Everywhere.

In the back of the building there are live chickens and such for sale. I am trying to be really careful what germs we expose ourselves to our first week, so I vetoed going back there. But I am dying to see it. Anyway, it was already near 97 degrees (at 10:30 a.m.) so we decided to go back to the van.

For the first time I overheard something and understood it. A group of men stopped near us and said "Meiguo ren. Meiguo ren." That means "American." I asked Rebecca if I would ever get used to the people staring at the kids, and she just laughed. "It's not just the kids. You too, " she said. "That curly blonde hair and blue eyes of yours stands out in this crowd."

He was singing "Do you want to build a snowman?" Ha!!! Love him!

My Mandarin Minivan Man

Go ahead and say out loud all the Mandarin words that you know.

Go ahead.

No judgement. I started practicing 3 months ago and can say only 30 or so words. And of those, I would only understand 20 of them if you were pointing or using sign language to confirm my guess of what you were saying.

How many words did you say? One? Two? Three? Yeah, that is about as much English as everyone I have met so far knows. Aside from the young girl who scans our IDs at breakfast, everyone is just as clueless as to how to talk to me as I am on how to talk to them. (The girl at breakfast is smitten kitten with little Tucker. She cuddles him up every time we see her whether we are in the lobby or eating.)

This language barrier is so overwhelming that every little minute that I spend outside our apartment finds itself with compounded exhaustion.

So with all this going on, you become crazy gracious when people who know the language offer to take you off the ranch to eat. Up to this point, we have survived on "pizza" from downstairs, peanut butter and jelly, popcorn galore, random fruits, that amazing meal (but very American) we had after foreign fellowship on Sunday, and the various easy snack foods I picked up at the supermarket (chaoshi). Last night we went out to eat with Josh's boss, Jeff, and a friend who we had met previously in Indiana, Cristos.

Wowza. It was so interesting! Let us start with the chef's specials.

Mommy...intestine again?

Jeff was happy to order our entire meal. In China, everything is served family style, so we had seven main course dishes on our table. And you just go for it. Eating a little of this, a lot of that. Everything has spicy heat to it and it is fantastic.

We did get the pan fried dumplings (pictured at very top) and a beef and broccoli dish which were made not spicy (bu xinla) for the kids. Tucker actually ate!!! Hudson was game to try several dishes, but he really went crazy on those dumplings. They were fantastic.

My favorite dish was this cabbage thing. It had red chills in it and was just so tasty.

Today I used our driver (Mr. Song) for the first time. He took us to Cummins so we could attempt, with  the help of those who speak English at the company, to talk to him about logistics of how this driver thing works. Mr. Song speaks no English as far as I can tell. This is a pretty freaky thing if you think about it. We have this guy driving us around and I just have to hope that he understands where to take me. And if he starts to go someplace wrong I have no ability to tell him that, but how would I know because I have no idea where I am.

For example, we are getting low on diapers so I thought I would have him take me back to WanDa shopping area so I could buy some at the WalMart, which is in the huge three level mall about a mile and a half from our apartment. The taxi driver had just dropped Rebecca and I off on Sunday on the road right outside the door. Granted we kind of had to jump out and dodge all the cars but it was at least at the front door. Well, Mr. Snow goes into the parking garage under the mammoth mall and I immediately had no clue where anything was. I did not have even a clue where the elevator was. Every sign is in Chinese. I do see the word English word EXIT which is no help because that is for leaving the whole compound and the word EMERGENCY and that is some type of safehouse shelter room. He parks the van and just sits and waits for me to get out.

Um, okay. So I look at him and point up (thinking where is the elevator) and he points towards one direction and I, with my two blond babes in tow, go for it. 

Turns out the elevator he pointed to was for a particular store, but whatever I can figure this out, right? I pick a button and walk out into a very nice Macy's type place. But you know how crazy lost they can make those department stores? I bet it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to get out of the very nice Macy's type place and get into the actual mall. Immediately we see a playplace. It  is awesome and there are kids everywhere! I let the kids play for a minute but feel the pressure to get back to the van. So we start to wander through this mall with no clue which direction we are to be going. And, of course, (you know where this is going) people are STOPPING and TAKING PICTURES of the kids. Good gracious.

Finally I see a sign that says IMAX which I knew was right by WalMart so we go that way. I bought the diapers and let the kids each pick out one thing (Tucker got a tub of plastic dinosaurs 19 RMB ($3) and Hudson got an Angry Birds mug 21 RMB ($3.50)) We did a slow detour around the huge display of fish scales, skins, eyes, and other assorted dried fish parts. (I have a picture of that on my phone. I will try and share it later.)

Walmart is multiple stories tall (just like the mall) so I am slowly but surely getting myself towards the checkout. Thank goodness I have a really great sense of direction because if you were one of those people who could not retrace your steps, you would be there for days. Somewhere near frozen foods I feel myself being followed. I look directly at the man and it is Mr. Song. It took me a minute to figure that out since I just met the man and frankly I am still the stupid American who thinks most Chinese men look extremely similar. About the time I started to wonder how the heck he found us, someone else stops mid-aisle to take a picture of Tucker. Oh yeah...we are the aliens here. I am sure we are emitting some type of yellow glow and are easy to locate.

Thank goodness we do stand out because Mr. Song had taken the liberty of moving our van to right outside the WalMart doors on the parking garage level. What if he had been moving it when we retraced our steps and went back through the department store elevator to the parking garage? What if I lost him? I can not even let my brain go there. Are you wondering why didn't he park outside the store in the first place?(!??!)  Yeah, me too. However, I can not ask him because we don't. speak. the. same. language.

Ahhhhh...best part? I get to do it all again tomorrow (mingzao).