The Cost of a Meal in China

Turner and I went out to eat tonight at a local, family-style restaurant. For a little more than six dollars we ordered the following:

• One-liter bottle of Tsingtao beer
• Two bowls of rice
• Stir-fried eggs with tomatoes
• Shredded potato fried with garlic
• Sweet and sour pork

Not too shabby and utterly satisfying.

When my students ask me if I cook Chinese food at home, I usually say no, because we can get it for cheaper and tastier just a few hundred yards from our door.

(This picture is from Shanghai, not a few hundred yards from our door.)

Street Snacks

China probably has more street vendors than anywhere else in the world. India might be a close second, but, as I have never been there, I can not compare.

Fruit, fish, rice crackers, bunnies, fireworks, dumplings, kebabs, watches. You can buy just about everything you need for daily life and special occasions without setting foot inside a building.

At every gate of our campus, food vendors set up shop. They arrive in the mid-morning to prepare for the lunch rush. Should we decide to grab some food around lunchtime, noon or so, we have to wait in line for quite awhile. Their popularity stems from the food's cheap cost, speed of preparation, and overall deliciousness. More on these purveyors of meals some other time.

Today, after lunch at our local noodle joint, we came upon a vendor of dried snack food. He was selling various seeds, nuts, and fruits out of large plastic bags. Our go-to snacks from these "establishments" are banana chips, unshelled roasted peanuts, and sweet potato chips. This last item has me in a state of enthrallment whenever we buy a bag. Sweet, thick, crispy, just the right amount of oil, these are sweet potatoes like you could never have imagined. I can't ... stop ... eating ... them!


I used to not like sweet potatoes, but since being in China and seeing the multitude of ways they are cooked, I am a convert. And these chips are quite possibly the best snack food ever.

Until I break into the bag of peanuts.

Garlic Lovin'

I think I had a run-in with destiny today.

As I was eating my scrambled eggs on toast for dinner last night, I thought about the good food that I could be eating. Now, don't get me wrong, I love eggs loaded with cheese and topped with Cholula hot sauce, but one night a week is enough. For some reason, meat loaf sprang to mind.

Being a home cook in China presents wonderful challenges and many impossibilities. For one, I've learned to carefully select my proteins and their cooking method. It's hard to screw up ground meat and a loaf pan. It's hard to screw up the flavors of onion, garlic, tomato, and cheese. Meatloaf offers a few bonuses: easy preparation and cooking, compatibility with many side dishes, and tasty leftovers.

Back to my date with destiny though. I went grocery shopping this morning, picking up some staples (butter) and the fixings for dinner (ground beef and pork). The ground lamb winked at me, but I thought its flavor would overpower the other meats. I came home, put the food away, and then sat at the computer for my daily food blog perusal. How did I ever pass my time before the world of food blogging opened up for me? It's wonderfully addictive.

One of my favorites, Smitten Kitchen, blogged today about Meatball Sliders. Meatloaf, meatballs, basically the same thing--except hers are cooked in tomato sauce, while mine will be slathered with ketchup. The epiphany came when I saw her recipe for Roasted Garlic Buns at the bottom of the post. They would be perfect as a dinner roll accompaniment to my meatloaf! I had all the ingredients in my pantry and few glorious heads of Chinese garlic.


If you ever want to impress someone, foodie or not, have some garlic roasting in the oven when they come over for dinner.


Mine turned out well, despite a few alterations due to lack of fresh Pecorino in China, and I did not find it too difficult to work the roasted garlic in for the second rise. I ate one already, fresh out of the oven, and am having problems saving the rest for the meatloaf.


I also made healthy oatmeal cookies since I did not have to teach any classes today. I found a recipe from Martha Stewart that uses vegetable oil instead of butter (hence the "healthy"), which works perfectly in China because butter is a luxury item. Two things did me in, using Chinese peanut oil instead of soybean oil and using Chinese brown sugar. The oil had an odd smell, not rancid, just not as odorless as I would have preferred. Sometimes, Chinese brown sugar contains "rocks," as I call them, which are really just hard clumps of sugar that do not mix in well. I ended up with brown sugar pockets in the cookies.

Martha's dozen or so cookies turned into my six. (I can never make cookies tiny to meet the recommended quantity! It just feels like a waste of space in my toaster oven where space is at a premium.) I also added walnuts that have been wasting away in my freezer.


The cookies taste, well, "okay" would be a good adjective. They'll do in a pinch, but I won't be making that recipe again. "Healthy" and "cookie" should rarely be uttered in the same sentence as far as I'm concerned. One of my obstacles in China is that I have to bake cookies on a rimmed baking sheet all of 12 inches by 6 inches, approximately. This tends to lead to too many cookies baked at once, hence the flat edges.

Simple Pleasures

Sometimes it's something so simple that so sensationally satisfies. Okay, I got alliterated-away. The other day I craved chocolate, surprise surprise, who doesn't get a chocolate craving every now and then? I really don't get them that often, but when one hits, I have a fail-safe remedy.

The best brownies ever!

It's a fairly simple recipe that even the most hard core box-mix bakers can follow. I think it's from Martha Stewart, like many other pleasurable recipes, but I have been making this one recipe for so long that I can't quite remember its origins.


Double Chocolate Brownies
Probably adapted from Martha Stewart

• 6 T unsalted butter
• 6 oz. coarsely chopped semi-sweet chocolate (I prefer Ghiradelli for its price point and quality.)
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (Don't know what the unsweetened bit means but I use Hershey's.)
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/4 t baking powder
• 1/4 t salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 t vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and butter bottom and sides of 8x8 or 9x9 pan.
2. Put butter, chocolate, and cocoa in double boiler over simmering water. Stir until melted and then set aside to cool.
3. In medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
4. In large bowl, whisk sugar, eggs, and vanilla until pale, about 4 minutes. Add the melted chocolate mixture. Beat until combined. Add flour mixture and beat until well-incorporated.
5. Pour in prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes. (I prefer to underbake instead of overbake for fudgier brownies. Your choice.) Let cool 15 minutes before removing from pan.
   

You'll think you'd died and gone to heaven after eating these. I don't think I've made any other brownie recipe for almost 5 years, and I never add anything to these--no nuts, no frosting.

They're not the most photogenic, but sometimes all you need is a warm brownie and then all is right with the world.

Day 05 Shanghai

This is the day I got sick. I felt exhausted, had sinus pressure, and dealt with a nose that would not stop running. I'm not sure if the change in climate and pollution levels did it or if I was just run down from traveling. Still, we spent most of the day walking around the city, finally making it to the French Concession in the daylight. First though, we walked along the building-side of the Bund so Turner could stick his head in the extravagant banks, most of which had surly guards and "No Pictures" signs, if they let you in at all. Turner likes to break the rules though.

During our perambulations, I started to get a chill, so we ducked into the nearest warm, quiet place we saw. Turns out it was a Dunkin' Donuts! I exaggerate. Turner saw the sign from the street and said he hadn't had a doughnut in ages, so we had to stop. Everything tasted like we were sitting in a doughnut shop in the US. Warm coffee can do wonders.


Not long after our late breakfast stop, it was lunch time. We had yet to eat dim sum, the Cantonese version of tapas, or small plates. Because we were in a retail/business district, most of the restaurants were fairly fancy, linen tablecloths and tuxedoed servers. But because it was lunch, prices weren't too high. We ordered a few dishes to give this cuisine a try: cucumbers in garlic sauce, chicken spring rolls, egg and onion pancakes, Shanghai pork dumplings, and sweet Shanghai dumplings (what you see in the foreground below).

These sweet treats look harmless until you try to pick one up with your chopsticks and realize that it is squishy. The outside is made from glutinous rice flour and coated in peanuts. The inside oozes a black substance that I think is made from either black sesame seeds or beans. As harmless as the ingredients are, it was the texture that I couldn't get past, only managing to eat half of one. Nothing we had for lunch was exceptional, somewhat of a let down.

All was salvaged with dinner though. Since I was sick and we were both tired from a day walking around, we decided to order pizza and have it delivered. We chose a place called New York Style Pizza, for obvious reasons, and ordering was surprisingly easy. They delivered it right to our hotel room for about the same price you would pay in the US. And let me tell you, this pizza would pass muster in Buffalo any day. I couldn't believe how authentic it tasted, right down to the pepperoni. What a great way to end our culinary adventures in Shanghai!

After some coffee and leftover pizza the next morning, we made our way by taxi and subway to the Maglev station in the outskirts of the city to take us to the airport. Turner was thrilled.

This was my first time on any high-speed train, let alone one that levitates on magnets. As we left the station, the train continued to pick up speed for about 3.5 minutes, topping out at 431 kilometers per hour and taking the rest of the trip to slow down. I am not kidding. It was like riding a 7-minute-long roller-coaster without the hills, though the train did make some steeply banked turns. Even I found the train ride exciting. Thus ended our vacation in Shanghai. It was a great experience, but I was happy to see our little city of Qingdao from the plane windows.

Bye-bye Shanghai; Ni hao Qingdao!

Day 04 Shanghai

Our intention was to have brunch at a restaurant in the French Concession, which was a good 1/2 hour journey from our hotel (because we did not want to take a taxi). Turns out, this is too far for me to travel in a strange city without any sustenance, so we made it as far as McDonald's and succumbed to their breakfast menu. We got some egg sandwiches, hash browns, and coffee--a welcome change from the mornings of instant.

From there we meandered to the People's Square. As it was Sunday, the park was full of men and women, father and mothers, trying to marry off their children. Picture eHarmony without the internet and a feisty old woman as the matchmaker! Parents (or grandparents) wrote all the pertinent information--birth date, height, salary--on a piece of paper and attached it to a bush with a binder clip or secured it to the ground with some stones. Some even had pictures. Over a hundred people were taking part in this weekly activity, as marrying a Shanghaiese is very desirable in order for the hukou, or residency, of the bride and future children to be in Shanghai instead of a rural village. I think the parents or matchmakers exchange numbers and hopefully leave the rest to the couple, but I'm not sure.


After standing on the sidelines for awhile, we went to the Shanghai Museum, which I had heard was the best museum in China (or at least cost the most money to build). Entry was free, but you had to wait in a security line. They made me drink my water to prove it wasn't acid or something that could destroy the "relics." The museum had four floors organized by type: coins, jade, furniture, calligraphy, ceramics, painting, sculpture. Each exhibition contained the most exemplary objets d'art from across the country. I thought the most impressive were the ceramics (china from China) and the sculptures.


Around lunchtime we were hungry but had only seen half the museum. If we wanted real food we would have to leave the museum and then wait in line again, which had gotten much longer as the day wore on. This left the tea shop. Tea and cookies--not very filling and very pricey as "museum food." Then, by the time we left the museum, it was past lunch and we did not want to ruin our appetites for dinner, so we had a bit of street food and made our way back to the hotel.

Deciding on where to go for dinner took some time. We started looking through the city guides with the intention of going for Cantonese (or dim sum), but most of the restaurants were large, expensive hotel venues, which we were not in the mood for. Then the pendulum swung to pizza, which sounded okay, but not quite perfect. After frustratingly looking through literally hundreds of restaurants, I was getting very hungry and cranky (they usually go together). When this happens, one of the cuisines that can quickly cure my foul mood is Indian. Turner and I consider it comfort food--warm, satisfying, spicy, sweet--everything you want a good meal to be.

We chose Vedas, recommended as having very authentic food that could have come straight from Delhi. I was doubtful when we pulled up in the taxi to a large house in the French Concession with daunting wooden doors and a club next door. It seemed pretentious from the outside, but inside was inviting, with subdued decor (nothing overly exotic) and very friendly fuwuyuan (waitresses). Ours was downright giggly! The restaurant also has an open kitchen, glassed in to save the restaurant from being smoked out from the tandoors (Indian-style ovens, of which the restaurant had two, a good sign), but giving diners a view of the Indian chefs (another good sign).


We ordered drinks, a martini and an apple martini (guess who got which), and started salivating over the menu. This almost literally happens when I read descriptions of Indian food. I went straight for the naan section, happy to find more than one version--plain, butter, garlic--and knew we would need more than one order. We ended up getting butter naan and garlic naan, plus chicken tikka masala, palek paneer (spinach with housemade cheese), dhaba tadka dal (yellow lentils with ginger and other spices), and lamb botti kebabs (tandoori lamb with a crazy spice rub that tickles all your taste buds).


The chicken tikka masala was by far the best dish of the night. The chicken was tender, the tomato-based sauce was sweet and spicy, the whole thing just worked. I could have eaten bowls of it. The paneer was good, but there was too little cheese in the dish. The lamb was on the verge of being overpowering, but it was tasty. Of the meal, the dal was the least inspiring, slightly one-note and lacking salt. For dessert we shared a mango kufti, housemade mango ice cream, which was like eating a frozen mango--divine! We had enough for leftovers that we ate with dinner the next day. Restraint is hard to come by when I eat Indian food. It's becoming one of my favorite cuisines.

Namaste.

Day 03 Shanghai

February 14th, Valentine's Day and our three-year anniversary. While out and about the past couple days I have been wearing just a t-shirt, but today was much colder and cloudier than previous days. Our itinerary today included a few tourist sites and then a fabulous dinner that we made reservations for a month ago.

First, we took the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel from the west side of the river (Puxi) to the east side (Pudong). This is no ordinary tunnel, mind you. You ride in enclosed modules (rather space-agey) on tracks through a tunnel covered in LEDs, lasers, and inflatable clowns. It's a good thing that neither one of us suffer from seizures because this was a mind trip. At the same time, it was a classic Chinese attraction because it was a lame attempt to be high-tech, well worth the 5 dollar ticket though.

Once we were on the other side, we went to visit the iconic Oriental Pearl TV Tower, a simultaneously perverse and communist building that is the symbol for Shanghai, like the Space Needle for Seattle.


You can buy tickets to the top, but since the air was not clear, we stuck to the Shanghai History Museum on the bottom floor. Rather than using artifacts or pictures, the museum relied on dioramas to recreate thousands of years of history. Some of them were very accurate; the hair on some of the Chinese mannequins was authentically balding--you could see individual hair follicles. Some of the exhibits though left us bewildered. Take the image below for example:


This is supposed to be a famous dance hall for the westerners in the French Concession during the occupation of Shanghai at the beginning of the twentieth century. The figures are about the size of Barbies and look like zombies. I'm not kidding! I call this the "Zombie Ball." It was really creepy because opposite this was a life-size reproduction of a hovel with poor Chinese covered in dirt. I'm not sure if this juxtaposition was intentional by the museum staff, but you can just imagine the message they're conveying: Look at the tiny, money-grubbing foreigners sucking the life out of the honorable, proud Chinese. Overall, the dioramas with Chinese figures were much more lifelike than any that contained a baigui (white devil). We left the museum in a state of befuddlement.

Then on to another museum, the Urban Planning Museum in People's Square, that was chock full of more dioramas about the future development of Shanghai and, more importantly, for the World Expo in 2010. (Shanghai has count-down clocks around the city that let you know there are 440 days left until the Expo.) By this time, we were tired, cranky, and overwhelmed by all the minute details. Turner took a lot of pictures though.

For dinner, we had reservations for the special Valentine's Day menu at Casanova, an Italian restaurant in the French Concession. At our table was a red rose and specially printed menus for the evening's four-courses, along with two flutes of Tattinger champagne. My menu consisted of Steamed Crab Meat with Cress Salad, White Beans, Sun Dried Tomatoes and Fig Vinaigrette Dressing; Fettuccine with Boston Lobster Sauce and Thyme; and Crispy Red Fish Fillet with Saffron Sauce, Mashed Chick Peas and Asparagus. Turner had Pan Fried Goose Liver with Port Sauce, Goose Liver Terrine with Orange and Marinated Goose Liver in Sweet Wine Sauce; "Candy" Dumpling Stuffed with Porcini Mushrooms Served with Butter Sauce, Truffle Pate and Crispy Parmesan Cheese; and Pan Fried Beef Tenderloin Wrapped with Smoked Ham, Rosemary and Mustard Sauce. The dessert course was shared, called the Cupid's Platter with Chocolate and Rum Mousse, Ricotta Cheesecake, Coconut Shooters, and Truffles. (You can tell that I saved the menu so I would not forget all the details!)

After our first glasses of champagne, we knew we would need more to go with dinner so we ordered a bottle of Prosecco. Everything was delicious! Yes, I ate a little crab and lobster, the first tasted like tuna and the second I gave mostly to Turner to eat but it flavored the pasta sauce nicely. Turner said that his beef was "something else," the best he'd ever had. This was a very memorable V-Day and anniversary, with better food and drink than we can usually afford in the US. Ah, the benefits of being an expatriate.

Salute!