Krysztov In China!

Rachelle and I have been swamped lately, but I need to keep in the habit of blogging.  So I figure I’ll share my experience with another of the strange fruits of southeast Asia — the Durian.

The durian is known as “The King of Fruits.”  It is large, spiky, and stinky.  You could probably kill someone with one, but the reason they’re banned from some places is the smell.  When I first arrived in China I thought durians smelled a little off – it’s kind of difficult to describe the smell, but most people unfamiliar with it would describe it as a stink of some fashion.  The smell eventually grew on me, though, and I worked up the courage to try some durian candy I found in our local Park’n'shop.  The candy was both sweet and garlicky, and I had sulfurous burps which reminded me of garlic and vulcanized rubber for some time after.  Despite my description, it wasn’t bad per se, and the more I tried, the more it grew on me.  And so, when I got to speaking with one of my Chinese teacher friends on the subject of spiky deathfruit, and she invited me to have some real durian, I knew I could not decline, especially as the peak season for durian (in the summer months) was drawing to a close.

And so it was that I found myself standing in front of a rather large display of durian on a side street under a highway interchange (“They have the best durian”), trying to make sense of how my friend was choosing a good fruit.

Can you tell the difference? Neither can I.

After she had found one and had the shop owner break it open and package the flesh, we went to a nearby park to enjoy our stinky bounty.  The elderly Chinese walking around the park and slapping themselves stared in amazement at a foreigner in their park–especially one eating such a fruit!–but we paid them no mind and begun to dig in.

AAAH DURIAN

Durian flesh, ideally, is supposed to be soft and creamy, with a texture reminiscent of a firm custard.  Ours wasn’t perfect, so there were some bits of flesh that were firm and mostly flavorless (the white parts).  The taste is harder to describe than the smell–it’s slightly sweet, definitely sulfurous, with a hint of onion somewhere in there.  If you can get past the first few bites, it’s said, you’ll be hooked, and I found myself eating more and more, until my face was messy with durian pulp and all we had left were the pits.  The seeds are large and woody, and are supposed to be edible when cooked, but not really worth the trouble.

My friend brought out a bag of mangosteens.  Durians supposedly raise heat in the body (according to traditional Chinese medicine), so it is customary to follow durian with a cooling fruit, like mangosteen.

These are mangosteens.

You cannot eat the outer shell–it is woody and so bitterly astringent that you would immediately regret such an attempt.  Generally, you can use your nails to pull it apart, or crack it open with a firm twist, trying to get as little juice as possible on your clothes (it stains!) or on the flesh inside (detracts from the flavor).  Once it’s opened, you can eat the squishy white flesh, being careful of the seeds in the larger segments, and enjoy a flavor that kind of reminds me of pear and grape, only sweeter and lighter.

It was dark by then, so my friend and I went to the local artist and hipster neighborhood for one more tasty anomaly.

SHAZAM.

Chocolate and wasabi cheesecake.  Where is your god now.

I would like to share with you one of my favorite new discoveries since moving to China–fried dace with salted black beans.  It sometimes uses fish other than dace, like sardines, and there are other things it can be canned with other than black beans, but that will be noted on the can.  You can’t read Chinese?  Well I guess that’s your own fault.  It comes in a can like this:

(more…)

My wife, who is a writer who sometimes writes about China, said she wanted to write about our adventure yesterday.  And she did!  So here it is.

It was the day before Dragon Boat Festival and all through the largely populated town, not a person was stirring, except for the woman carrying a huge load of styrofoam.

Who needs gravity?

(more…)

So Rachelle and I had settled into our hotel room in Wuhan, tried to do some sightseeing before the conference began, were thwarted and frustrated and had the expected marital spat, and had returned home for a good night’s sleep on the hard hotel beds.  Pro Tip: Since Wuhan is at the center of China and most long-distance transportation passes right through it, it has been called, “The Chicago of China.”  This is a crap moniker, as a few moments trying to deal with traffic will reveal that it is, in fact, Pittsburgh, but with fewer bridges.  But I digress.

Rachelle was off to rub shoulders with her fellow academics, so I had the day to explore.  I took the Nexus, with some of the surrounding area pre-loaded on Google Maps, and a note from one of Rachelle’s students to assist me (best part ever: “P.S. If you think a Wuhanese is shouting at you, he is most likely not, because Wuhan dialect sounds short-tempered”), and took it upon myself to head, in an indirect manner, to 户部巷(Hu4 Bu4 Xiang4), a slightly touristy area full of food vendors, to explore some local cuisine, and maybe find some interesting sights along the way.

(more…)

Rachelle wanted to make chicken salad, but we didn’t have pickles.

I used to make fun of her for saving every olive jar we ever had.

I don’t do that anymore.

Fuck yeah pickles.

A lot of things we take for granted back in the states are either super-expensive or nonexistent in China.  For a while we could afford to get cheese and olives and tortillas and cans of beans and tomato sauce whenever we needed them.  But as money gets tighter and our stateside bills become more and more burdensome, we first learned to do without, and when that sucked too much we figured out how to make our own.  Tomato sauce, usually 39 cents a can back home, can go for over three dollars here in China.  One day I brought back a large-ish sack of cherry tomatoes from the market and Rachelle decided she was going to make her own tomato sauce, as it is an imperative for making our favorite foods.  This ended up being almost as cheap as an American can, and a little bit tastier to boot.

The pickles cost us perhaps about a dollar to make two jars (and we could have made more had we more available jars).  A single jar at the imported foods market would cost us about 39 kuai, or over six dollars.

We still can’t make good cheese or nixtamalize our own corn for tortillas, so for the time being we have to reserve enchiladas as a special meal to treat our friends.

** Rachelle Says:  “Alternate Titles of Post: A Pickle A Day Keeps the Ums at Bay; What A Pickle!; Pickle Me Tickle Me Too.”

I know that whenever I need some material for a post, I can always turn to something I’ve recently eaten.  As any regular reader should know by now, there are all sorts of culinary adventures available for a foreigner in China.  Recently, a friend of Rachelle’s and mine invited us out for an authentic Cantonese dinner at 炳胜(bing3 sheng4) restaurant across the street from the TaiKoo Hui shopping center.

We were going to take the B9 bus there, which uses Guangzhou’s BRT system–basically a highway for buses that cuts through the city and carries up to a million passengers a day.  But apparently they had changed their plans and the one bus that stopped by was only going as far as Zhujiang New Town, so we gave up before the rain started falling too hard and took the metro, because hey, why not get packed in a rolling tin can like sardines.

We found the place rather easily, and our friend arrived shortly after.  We let him make most of the choices, since we’re still not exactly experts on Cantonese cuisine, and in fact we can’t even speak Cantonese.  Oh well.

In true Cantonese fashion, the dishes arrived as they were ready.  We started out with some Pu’er tea, and marinated lotus root slices.

This tea comes from a particular part of Yunnan province and is fermented extensively, sometimes for decades.  I don’t think our tea was quite that old, though.  It is supposed to help digestion, especially of fatty or oily foods, and it had a delightful earthy taste.  The lotus root marinade complemented it nicely, actually.  For those who haven’t had lotus root before, it’s crispy and a little slippery and reminds me at least of a mix between water chestnut and raw potato.  It’s also full of little holes, as you can see.  Water plants love being hollow.

Next, the soup course.

So this soup had starfruit and papaya and pork.  It was sweet and savory and quite good, although I didn’t end up finishing it before the next dish came out…

THE GOOSE.  Rachelle and I love Cantonese goose.  It took me a little while to be able to bite through the crispy skin, the layer of fat, and the meat all at once while still working around the bones (of course there’s bone, silly) and I still can’t not use my fingers a little to maneuver it around in my mouth, but still.  Yum.  You know, after that I could go for something lighter, maybe a vegetable or someth–

TA-DAA, MOTHERFUCKER!

This veggie is called 通菜(tong1cai4), and in English has a few names, most commonly called water spinach. Here is is sauteed with garlic.  I will keep an eye out for this one in the market.

This is three flavors of tofu, in sauce, and topped with beef and shrimp and whatnot.  I didn’t notice a very strong difference in the flavors, although they all were good.  Rachelle noted some differences, and said the dark one in the middle was kind of earthy and tea-like.  This tofu was a lot creamier than the kind I usually get in the market, almost custard-like.

In Cantonese cuisine, chicken is done a little differently from how you might know it.  First off, the head is often staring at you.  It’s also very lightly seasoned, if at all.  Cantonese cuisine is all about the natural flavors of components, and so on.  Sometimes this leads to terribly bland foods, but the natural taste of a chicken that isn’t stuck in a battery cage and fattened with corn and chemicals is actually quite delicious.  This actually came with a little bowl of garlic dipping sauce, which was also great, but I mostly ate it plain.  By this point, I was pretty sure that was all there was to the meal.

But then the pork arrived.  And wow.  It had a lot of fat, which is a feature it took me a while to get used to in food around here, but once you get used to it, you can enjoy food like this.  The glaze on it was sticky, and slightly sweet, and just…well it made me happy to eat it.  Okay.  That was the meal.

Wait, dessert.

This is a pumpkin soup.  There’s some stuff we think is tapioca on top.  It was a perfect end to the meal.

Fuck yeah.  Also, that’s another person we’re gonna make enchiladas for.

So of course Rachelle and I went to the Shaxian Snacks place outside Xiaogang Park the other day (it’s our favorite one) and this time we had some kick-ass 云吞汤, or wonton soup if you aren’t trying to be a douche like me.  Add to that a heaping plate of fried noodles’n'eggs (I forgot what the actual name for it was, but asking for 鸡蛋炒面 – ji1 dan4 chao3 mian4 – got the point across) and, at the older lady manning the counter’s insistence, a surprisingly tasty black chicken and ginseng soup, whose menu entry claims it has medicinal properties, and we had filled our bellies for around 20 kuai.

But I already talked about those cheap eats.  Another way to get food without spending much money is to have many Chinese friends, and to talk to them often.  Before long, you will be invited to lunch or dinner, and they will almost always insist on paying the tab, and you will usually get to discover some new place to eat which you otherwise would never have known about.  And thus begins my first taste of the dining phenomenon known as “Hot Pot.”

Of course I had heard about hot pot, I had seen people eating it, I had heard it was a wonderful experience, but until that day I had never tried it.  It just seemed too daunting to try something so new, in a language I was still quite unfamiliar with, without any kind of guide.  One of Rachelle’s colleagues, who was also her workout buddy and good friend, invited us to hot pot with her and her husband.  Fuck yeah hot pot.  So we met near the gym (a short bus ride from campus) and all piled into a cab headed for the outlet mall which housed our dining destination.

I offered to be a good guest and pay the cab fare (only ten kuai) but our friends wouldn’t hear of it, and besides, cabbies and other service personnel will try their damnedest not to acknowledge a foreigner if there is a Chinese person in the group.  I have been told this is the case even if the “Chinese” person is American, or Japanese, and actually speaks no Chinese, and the foreigner is near-fluent, and this leads to all manner of frustration for all involved.  But I digress.

The restaurant had an English name under the Chinese, “Cool and Hot Cooking Pot.”  The gimmick here was that there were actually two cooking areas to a table.  Most hot pot restaurants have a well for the eponymous pot to sit in and boil, but this one also had a flat barbecue well, which was kept well-supplied with a steady stream of marinated fish, meats, squid bits, and other marvelous things.  One tasty, oily fish was explained to us as being called “Korean Fish.”  Nobody had a very good reason as to why, so I ventured that it looked a little like Kim Jong-un, and everyone had a good laugh.  Except for Kim Jong-un.

Hot pot itself is pretty simple.  They give you thin little pieces of meat (sometimes with lots of cartilage, which while not particularly desirable in the States is a nom-a-minute here in China) and you drop it into the broth, which in our case was divided into a clear, light broth and a spicy Sichuan one.  There are many other things you can put into the pot – it’s kind of like Chinese fondue, really – and this restaurant had a whole buffet of various things and meats and fish slices and mushrooms and veggies and unidentifiable other things that I was told are certainly delicacies in China…

By the time we were finished, I’m pretty sure I had gained a few pounds and my stride had been reduced to a waddle.

Oh, and for the friend food to be viable and for you to not seem like an asshole it goes without saying that you must genuinely be a good friend and from time to time treat them in return when finances allow.  In this case, since these particular friends have spent time in America and enjoy Mexican food, we plan to have them over for Rachelle’s home-cooked enchiladas, which are pretty much one of the best things you can give someone you like.

BUNNY UPDATE:  He really loves the fan.  We moved it and he found a chair nearby to jump onto so he could feel the wind in his face.  Maybe it feels like he’s running really fast.

OTHER UPDATE: Hey, just about everyone in China uses the QQ messenger, and now I do too.  But I don’t have any QQ friends yet.  If you want to try it, add 1354161861, because that’s me.

So as you may know, our budget has been a little tight lately.  Fortunately, food can be obtained for cheap all over Guangzhou, if you know what to look for.  One of the best cheap/yummy combinations is the Shaxian Snacks branded restaurants.

As the story goes, Sha county (xian) in Fujian province is a very poor area with really tasty variations of common Chinese munchies– dumplings, noodles, won tons, etc. etc.  And when a man from that area opened a couple snack bars in a major city, they were an instant hit and since trademarks aren’t really a big thing in China, everyone started opening them.  There’s a county government “Snacks Bureau” which apparently tries to maintain a standard of quality for all the restaurants bearing its name.  I can’t imagine it’s easy, because there are freaking hundreds of these places in Guangzhou alone.  Someone even came up with a story to explain the real reason there are so many, if you can read Chinese or don’t mind Google’s machine translation.

Anyway, all you have to do is look for the red Pac-man looking logo with the words “Shaxian Delicacies” around it, and be able to recognize a few characters, and you too can get some cheap noms!

One side of the menu at the closest 沙县小吃。

As you can see from the menu, just about everything is very cheap, averaging maybe $1 per dish.  They’re filling, and delicious, and this one, being close to the student dorms at SYSU, is very popular with students.  And me.

I’m much happier about this food than my expression seems to convey, I promise.

And yes, that green stuff is, in fact, cooked lettuce.  And strange as it may seem to most Westerners, it’s fucking delicious.  Anyway, thanks to this place, I can fill my stomach for around 12 kuai (about 2 dollars perhaps?) and if I somehow have room for more food, there’s usually a Muslim guy selling barbecued meat skewers right across the street for 3-5 kuai, depending on what kind of meat you get.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to go to a restaurant.  You want the comforts of home.  But you also want delicious Sichuan food.  I thought this was a problem, until I found a packet of Mapo Doufu sauce (enough for two dinners) at a nearby grocery store.  If I recall correctly, it cost about 5 kuai.  All you need is some water, minced/ground pork/beef (the pork was about 7 kuai for enough for two dinners), and then when I was ready to make it, I headed down to the neighborhood wet market and picked up some fresh bean-curdy goodness.

This will do!

So one of those squares is enough to make one dinner for two people, although it might be slightly less than the packet calls for. Either way, it’s 2 kuai a pop.  Follow the packet instructions, fill up the rice maker, saute up some cai xin on the side, and voila!

And that’s what I call…(cue music)…Good Eats!

I’ve decided to write more about the various food items one might encounter in China.  So, when the fancy strikes me, I shall cast my spotlight upon whatever I find worthy of such attention.

This evening, I am inspired by the loquat.  In Chinese, that would be 枇杷 (pi2 pa).  They seem to be in season around this time of year, so you will see street vendors and market stalls stocked with twigs bearing a multitude of these smallish, oblong orange fruit.  The texture reminds me somewhat of a very ripe nectarine or apricot, maybe, and the ones I am eating are very mild and sweet, with just a touch of acidity.  Inside you will find a cluster of large seeds (I think 4-6 of them), which are very bitter and contain a bit of hydrogen cyanide.  This is important to remember because some people use the seeds for various purposes, and consuming too much of that will kill you.  But hey, what’s life without a few risks?

Anyway, there were some loquats in the fridge, and now there aren’t so many.  They’re said by some to have a mild sedative effect when eaten in quantity, so we’ll see if I sleep any better tonight.

I remembered to take a picture of one of the last ones as an afterthought. They’re just so tasty!

Yum.

Shortly after we arrived in Guangzhou, we met a doctor friend of Rachelle’s friend we replaced.  He introduced us to the wonders of vegetarian Buddhist Chinese food at a restaurant called Yixin, near the rail station.  It was a refreshing change from our previous experiences with Chinese and especially Cantonese cuisine up to that point, which usually involved our food staring back at us, or playing a rousing game of “Guess Which Organ This Is.”  In addition to various veggies and bean curd, as would be expected, there were also quite a few textured vegetable protein fake-meat dishes, most of which were surprisingly convincing, and all of them super-delicious.

Fast forward.  One of Rachelle’s colleagues’ friends owns another Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, right next to Rachelle’s gym and the campus.  And, we got a cookbook, each with two weeks’ worth of recipes for each season.  It’s in Chinese.  I think I can figure it out.

This is going to be great.

Or terrible, I’m not sure yet.

Rachelle assures me it will be great. She’s the best.

Cookbook cover!

Sample page! It appears to indicate which colors you get from which dishes.