I am going to miss my grape tomatoes if the Tangjia vendors stop selling them as frequently as they do now. I don't know to what extent seasons affect the town's produce selection, I have seen some produce come and go already, but I never want my beloved little tomatoes to go away. I am trying to cut back on them since I manage to consume anywhere from one to three pounds a day when I have them. Raw, steamed, boiled, charred, sautéed, whole, sliced, pureed, plain, seasoned, sweet, salty, spicy, sour – I sound like Benjamin Buford Blue (aka, Bubba from Forrest Gump) talking about shrimp when I get excited about tomatoes (or oatmeal or pressure cookers). If people can turn blue from consuming silver and orange from eating carrots, perhaps we can now explain why my cheeks are such a healthy hue of red...
I mention this precisely because I am trying to make the ten pounds of tomatoes I bought on two days ago last at least three days... and, as of the writing of the original draft of this update, with 15 hours left, I have less than a sixth of the original supply in my fridge.
Those who know me and my diet well have already begun to say, “Yeah, and next week she will have forgotten her beloved tomatoes and have moved on to peanuts or tofu or, God forbid, onions.” If you are one of those, then you are so wrong. I am not moving on to peanuts or tofu or onions... but I may consider moving on to the strange cubes of deliciousness that my friendly local Cantonese vendor calls mianjin (面筋) in perfectly comprehensible Mandarin. I have surprised myself with how easily I have found the characters and dictionary translations for the Chinese words I learn on the street (which is why I can provide the characters above). Hence, I can point you to the English Wikipedia entry that refers to this as seitan. The type I typically buy is the one referred to in the Wikipedia entry as “baked spongy gluten,” but I am also trying forms that appear to be pulled chicken wannabes.
Writing about this makes me consciously realize that I have a predilection for foods of odd textures. I wonder sometimes if I have a less sensitive palate than most, and require the strange textures of my food to give me the kick and gastronomic experience that most get simply from seasonings. Or, maybe I get a high from those things that still have something of an unexpected or hard-to-find feel.
If you are curious about the Chase Diet in China, it consists of soybeans, oatmeal, and several varieties of rice in addition to a variety of produce: tomatoes (obviously), bok choy, winter melon, yard long beans, a winter squash called 南瓜 (nan2 gua1) that tastes like a candied pumpkin and is probably just the best variety of butternut squash I have ever had, mung bean and soybean sprouts, all these types of mushrooms except the black ones, and lots of grains (shown below).
Before I show you what I eat, I want you to see the exciting dishes I eat from!
As always, my tastes tend toward all things big and bright.
I love this dish set. It was cheap, but it is still coming with me back to the States when I go home.
These match a set of chopsticks and chopstick stands I bought in San Francisco back when I visited Lei the summer between high school and college. A set of cups and saucers I bought with Mom similarly utilize bright, bold colors, and I have long known that both these sets would provide a foundation to my future dinnerware collection. I love that each of these subsets will have a memorable experience associated with them, rather than all be from one box picked up out of necessity from a local Walmart or something.
Veggies are an obvious component of my diet, but the diverse set that I have to choose from here will constitute an entry of its own some other time.
Today, beans and rice will get most of the attention. Below are (I believe) black soybeans. When not dried, they are often sold fermented. I have not tried the fermented variety on my own here, nor noticed whether they have been served to me, but I would really like to try them. Last time I cooked with these, they dyed everything purplish gray, so I have minimized their use when I think anyone else may espy the dish I am making. I am a strange enough eater in the States; I do not need to amplify the effect of my idiosyncratic cooking habits by making it seem as though I included a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater in the recipe...
This black sticky rice similarly transforms food that it is soaked or cooked with into a purple mess of deliciousness, but I consider it more forgivable since I am likely to cook rice alone (but not beans alone), and it actually looks very cool when a pile of rice is a brilliant violet with a sweet shine to it.
These are my kidney beans (I think) and some smaller red beans that look like the seeds of the yard long beans mentioned above. The smaller beans give a great texture to rice dishes without the obtrusive feel and flavor of kidney beans, but they too contribute to the production of less-than-appetizing color schemes in my food when prepared in multi-ingredient dishes.
My red rice (which appears deceivingly brown in the pic below) is a staple to the grain portion of my diet. I mix it with all my oatmeal creations since I cannot easily get a hold of steel-cut oats here. They add texture and flavor that makes me a little grateful that I had to get original to heartify my oats in China.
My stash of short-grained brown rice, which used to be a favorite among rices, is not dwindling at the end of the week in the way my red rice is. I use it more as a bulking agent than a flavorful one since the red rice has brown rice beat on appearance, flavor, and texture.
However, one fabulous use for brown rice is toasted brown rice tea (genmaicha in Japanese, I think, and impossible to find in China). I toast the rice on a dry frying pan until the kernels start popping rapidly. I stuff about a tablespoon and maybe a half into the tea infusing cage that Lei got for me at Jungle Jim's, and steep it in water as it cools from a boil until it is cool enough to drink (yeah, sometimes I cheat and add cool water or melamine-fortified milk to speed up the process). Adding a couple grains of salt and some licorice root for sweetening really makes a fabulous caffeine-free tea-like hot drink. =)
Wheat berries would be more of a staple if they were not such a hassle to cook. These cause my pressure cooker to boil over unless they are pre-soaked and/or cooked in oil. I do not mind using sesame oil in savory dishes, but I like adding wheat berries to my sweet cinnamon oatmeal -- not a place for sesame oil.
Update: I was so curious to know whether sesame oil was really all that problematic in a sweet dish that I stopped writing the entry and went to cook a big pot of hua cha oats (a spectacular oat dish flavored using aromatic tea leaves and, in this case, licorice root for its sweetening power). I did not measure the amount of oil I used, but I believe it was only 2 or 3 teaspoons in a 6-cup pot. The sesame flavor was indistinguishable by my nose and tongue, but it did the trick of preventing boil-over fiascoes.
I have a new body pillow that is intended to be the harbinger of day bedness in my stark little room. I will slowly collect a pile of pillows that I think are cute enough and bright enough to adorn my bed, until I can sit on my bed and get as much back support as a proper couch would offer.
Job Satisfaction
Here is one of my classrooms before class. My diligent students arrive early whenever they can, and then study before class and during breaks. Even when they are talking to one another, they often seem to be helping each other with coursework of some sort. Truly, Chinese students are a world apart from Americans.
I love my students, and could sing their praises all day. Sometimes I do.
They work very hard to improve,
they show unreserved enthusiasm in class when they are not bogged down by midterms
(and even manage to smile and laugh a bit when they are),
and they have made me feel more welcome here than I ever could have imagined.
What more could a teacher possibly ask for?
(An apple, you say? We are going out for dim sum soon,
and I will celebrate one student's birthday at dinner tonight,
so I think they have my optimistic expectations beat on that account, too.)
I find myself to be a junkie for local diets. They are especially well suited to coping with the local weather, like a diet of meat and milk is good if you're living in Mongolia.
ReplyDeleteI just discovered an unlike-anything-else drink called "Horlick's", local to northern England.
It's available everywhere, but nobody talks about it because it's just that local. I think it tastes a lot like a glass yeasty cereal, combining the best parts of hot milk and cookie dough in one tall mug of hot milk mixed with the by-products of some brewing process (that's Horlick's).
Additional winners are: Fish & Potato pie, and Roast Vegetable Goat Cheese tart.
You've inspired me to consider buying a small pressure cooker while traveling, to make it easier for me to cook all this stuff.
I don't understand this "post as identity" thing, so, Hi Chase, this is STAR!
Rachel! It sounds like you're having a great time in China- don't give in to the temptation to stay for more than a year.
ReplyDeleteI've got some exciting news, too. I got pretty much all the funding I need to go to Brazil this January! Yay!