Today im gonna talk about...food. are you surprised? no. what? you know you like it.Partly just to blog and partly to make myself a list, with some pizazz. The thing is, ive had some dietary slip ups gluten wise and im just now kind of jiving with being able to eat here. It has made me gain a little weight (which isnt unusual ive dealt with gluten pudge before) from all the starch and body chemistry and quite frankly depresses me slightly. And so, as im regaining control of my body and giving it a breather finally, i am also slowly rekindling my excitement about food. okay, so ive compiled the list of foods that ive discovered here that i absolutely cannot live without. Okay i can, but im really gonna try to make/find these things when i get home. Im really excited to see how this influences my cooking when i get back. One, the above picture is typ of Chinese cuisine, just about any vegetable wilted or shredded and then soaked in vinegar or something brothy, and always always always accompanied by rice. To eat something without rice is a sin.
Mu er. Or "wooden ears" a yummy little fungus that grows on trees, and tastes..ah how it tastes..perfect with rice of course. cook these little guys up with some salt or vinegar and presto! buon appetito! I suspect i will spend some time in the Chinese grocery store near my home lookin for these.
Oh my gosh, If there were one food item i could take home with me from china, it is this. Tang yuan. Im pretty sure the literal translation is like sweet soup or something. Basically just these balls of glutinous rice ( which despite the name are gluten free) and then filled with chocolate or sugar or yuminess on the inside. You can make them by hand and they are typically eaten for Chinese new year or lantern festival, but we buy them frozen and i eat them for breakfast. Sometime they are green or pink or blue, i like the green ones best, and you bet your chopsticks im making these by hand when i get back.
okay. something i never would have thought to try on my own but was pushed too. This is a lotus flower root. It is boiled and then stuffed with sticky rice with sugar. Wowee, so good. Sometimes its in soup or other things but its best with the rice, of course, rice, duh.
The chinese for this i dont know how to type in pin yin but its sounds like "qual-oon-qua" or as we know it, dragon fruit. mmmm. this is definitely available at home, i just took it for granted. A tad sweet, not mealy but more stringy like an orange but not quite, and filled with little black seeds, it almost doesnt look real. The best thing about moving anywhere is discovering the produce...i think. Dragon fruit, hit it up at your local whole foods.
Alright, i know what youre thinking. Okay i dont, but whatever it is it cant be right. This is a fermented egg. The first time i ate this i didnt even know what i was eating because it was chopped up and in soup. I actually thought it was a mushroom until i was corrected, confused, and then delighted. I can even begin to think how to make this but ima try. google to the rescue, too bad china doesn't agree :)
This isnt Chinese but get off my case, im on sensory overload. This is actually Korean, and i had heard about how much i would love Korean food because it is mostly naturally gluten free, but i didnt get a chance to try it until i was in Beijing. Nikki and i found the most random restaurant and i recognized a picture of Korean food and of Korean writing so i insisted. Then after posting a picture of it, the lovely liz went informed me that it is called Bi bim bop. Which only makes it better. Just a bunch of spicy rice and veggies! with egg on top! and you mix it all together! I swear to Buddha im going to korea one day for two weeks just to eat. Also to do: make more Korean friends with domestically inclined parents or grandparents, get invited over for dinner.
Ive really only tried/seen a few moderately weird things. Scorpion and starfish on a stick. I tried some pig ears (bland) and what can only be described as a spicy tendon on a stick. But really, i dont know if its that im not getting out enough or what, but i have yet to see/hear of these cat brains and dog and horse meat that everyone in the us seems to think the Chinese eat. Still i would not be surprised, there is saying, and its in Chinese of course, but the translation is "everything under the sun that crawls swims or flies with its back to heaven can be eaten" I think this was in response to the famine that happened a while back, but still, kind of a cool part of Chinese culture.
while perusing the facebook feed illegally today, i also ran across a note that my friend mike, who i met in beijing had written about our visit there. While describing our tour he entered the following statement, and i laughed out loud, partially because it was funny and partially because i feel happy about being able to laugh at my misfortune:
"After this we had lunch, where Mike and I learned that our Shanghai friend (who's name is Jessy) is allergic to basically everything. She can't eat anything with ANY kind of sauce on it - which is unfortunate, because it's China, and food NOT covered in sauce is about as easy to find as a driver who is actually aware that there are OTHER cars on the road. Anyway, post lunch we went to our final stop of the tour, the Lama Temple."
So what can we learn from chinese food? Vinegar vinegar vinegar, pork pork pork, broth broth broth, rice rice rice rice rice rice rice rice. the end. oh and the occasional scorpion. Wash it down with a glass of hot water and you may just think "Hao Chi" (tasty)
nom nom nom!
j.
No comments:
Post a Comment