I meant for this to be my dinner appetizer, but I spooned so much into my bowl that it became a meal.
Hot and sour soup didn't appear in my childhood of Cantonese home dinners. It did, however, appear in my Chinese-American childhood, as a Sichuan/Northern Chinese dish that became bastardized for the greasy take-out joints of suburban America. I have had one too many versions that were so thick and rubbery I could stretch them with my hands like Silly Putty. Here is some advice to the aforementioned Chinese restaurants in the US: Cornstarch is never a main ingredient; just use sparingly.
(From upper left: Wood ear, lily buds, fresh bamboo, shiitake mushrooms. Bowl: fresh firm tofu.)
In the US, hot and sour soup also tends to lack the lily buds, shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots that make it a nutrient-rich, even somewhat refined, dish. (This is the Chinese version, not to be confused with Vietnamese, Filipino, or Thai hot and sour soups.) I also like to add wood ear and tofu for texture variation. Today I also used fresh instead of canned bamboo shoots, which I couldn't find when I went food shopping this morning.
The easiest way to make a thick stewy dish into a summery répas is by adding tropical fruit. Or so I told myself yesterday, when I was craving curry but wasn't too keen on the standing in front of a hot stove for the better part of an hour. The mangoes on the fridge were radiating their very ripened, last-day-for-eating aroma. Into the curry they went.
Yes, I did gluttonously attacked the pits after the flesh was chopped up. And yet much of the juice still found its way to the floor and all over the counter. Mango-soaked kitchen rags may be a side effect of this curry, if you choose to make it with the ripest fruit possible.
I have seen and eaten mango curries that contained chicken, pork, and lamb, but not vegetables. And why not, when this curry can accomodate whatever assortment you bring back from the market, as long as you cook starches and carrots first, and leave the green stuff until the end. The vegetable selection below was based on whim and color and texture variety.
I did need a glass of ice water to cool off after cooking, but the curry was worth the extra rise in body temperature.
This is what I drank after a long hot sweaty bike ride in Beijing.
I have a $25 one-speed from the local Carrefour which I am supposed to leisurely pedal. Cheap one-speeds are not meant to go fast. Sometimes I forget this, especially when I go to my favorite grocery stores that happen to be half an hour away by bike. My tendencies to zip by old men on their Flying Pigeons and come home glowing with perspiration I blame on having commuted to work by road bike on New York's Greenway, alongside the multitude of spandex-clad cyclists. Here, there is no spandex in sight to make you feel the need to ride fast. Everyone just glides gently along with grocery-filled baskets.
So until I learn to slow down, I am keeping a pitcher of something cold and a tray of ice cubes ready in the fridge. Today I cooked down a pound of black cherries, added some lemon juice and sugar, infused the liquid with a bit of star anise, and mixed in some strong black tea. The star anise adds just a touch of unexpected spice to the fruity tea. This batch should hopefully last a few days.
The hardest part is not snacking on the cherries before you start making the tea.
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Other summer coolers:
Since my trip to Hangzhou's Dragon Well tea fields, I have made use of the famous leaves less often than I should have. See, I went on a tea-buying binge after coming back to Beijing. In my cabinet right now there is an ample supply of not only Dragon Well (longjing), but also sheng and shou Pu'er, rose buds, chrysanthemum, barley, hibiscus, a fruit tea mix, and regular green and black tea. I'm sure some native Chinese would scoff at my puny tea collection (just like I would scoff at their wine collections of Great Wall and Dynasty bottles from Carrefour), but for me that is quite a lot of tea for the months ahead.
My right-brain demeanor also leaves me unfulfilled when I just drink the tea. (Purists, you may not want to read ahead.) I also must do something with it. Things like making rice pudding with rose tea and alcoholic granita with hibiscus. But before getting too experimental with my longjing, I thought I should whip up the classic Hangzhou shrimp dish that uses the tea.
It's the mid-June, meaning asparagus season is coming to a close. I have been seeing less and less of my favorite stalky vegetable at the markets, and what's left tends to be expensive. So I thought I would celebrate the end of the season with a recipe for Shandong-style asparagus. Make this while you still can!
It's true that asparagus isn't used much in Chinese food. I don't recall ever having it at the dinner table growing up, nor at restaurants in Boston's Chinatown. Here in Beijing, whenever asparagus appears on menus it is qingchao-ed (请炒-ed), or lightly stir-fried, with other vegetables.
Shandong province is China's center for asparagus production, so it's no surprise Shandongers showcase the asparagus practically au naturel. And since the dish eaten at room temperature, it makes a perfect appetizer for picnics, grilling dinners, or any other situation when you're wiping the sweat from your brows and spritzing water on your face every 2 minutes to keep cool.
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Shandong-Style Asparagus
Adapted from Saveur
Serves 2 to 4 as an appetizer
1 pound asparagus, trimmed and sliced diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
A few drops chilli oil
1 teaspoon toasted white sesame seeds
(Tanqueray No. 10 Martini)
Beijing hardly ever sees rain, but the first part of the weekend we had an enormous showers followed by drizzling rain. The nice part is that the air (finally) gets cleaned. The bad part is outdoor activity becomes limited. On Saturday I was invited to the Ritz-Carlton Culinary Coin Festival, an indoor food and wine event I had no objections to attending.
(The "coin" part refers to the hotel's location on Beijing's Financial Street.)
The impression I got from some ads was that the event was all about Champagne and chocolate, but fortunately there was a lot of savory food to line the stomach pre-sugar and pre-alcohol. The food was a mix of French, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese, keeping in line with the Ritz's restaurants. I filled myself up on cheeses, prosciutto, soba noodles, roast duck in pancakes, an interesting quail egg shooter topped with aspic gelée, caviar, and chive oil. Chocolate made an appearance in the form of a fountain, where you can dip grapes and marshmallows, in bonbons, and in a mini soufflé topped with chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Although, for me, the dessert highlight was a chocolate-less basil ice cream.
Yesterday I cooked without water. Well, not completely without water, but with trickles from the faucet. When the trickles eventually stopped, I used purified stuff from the water cooler in our living room. To rinse food, boil noodles, wash dishes, everything. Trickles.
See, Jacob and I live in a brand new apartment, so new that construction hasn't even stopped. Anyone who has visited Beijing (or China) in the past 10 years will know that the entire city (and country) is over-dosing on construction. In order to clean up the air for the Olympics, the government had mandated that all construction projects stop by June 1. Well, that deadlines has now been pushed back to July 1. And I'm annoyed not only because the air is still dusty, but also because we get periodic electricity and water outages, both announced an unannounced.
According to a notice in the "lobby", the water outage was supposed to occur between 10pm and 6am. Fine, I thought. We go out to a bar at night, come back late, and try not to use the bathroom 'til morning. Then the water stops in the middle of the afternoon. Not very convenient when you're making curry laksa. Laksa paste, bird's eye chilli seeds, and raw shrimp juice are not things you want to leave unwashed from your hands.
Thank goodness for the purified water, though I did feel a small amount of guilt.
I guess I could have also called this Hibiscus Mojito Granita, but that sounds a little hokey.
My experimentations with tea desserts continue. Since my Rose Tea Rice Pudding was a success, I moved on to hibiscus tea, another tisane I bought at Maliandau, Beijing's tea street.
Hibiscus tea is also known as roselle in Southeast Asia, red sorrel in the Caribbean, and karkady in the Middle East. Among other benefits, it contains vitamin C and is believed to lower blood pressure. All that is wonderful, but my main concern on yesterday's 30 degrees Celsius afternoon, was how to incorporate hibiscus into a frozen dessert.
I don't own an ice cream maker. Heck, I don't even know where to find one in Beijing. But to make a granita, all you need is a fork and the ability to mash a bunch of ice with it. Quite simple, quite fit for a Luddite foodie.
Originally this granita was going to include just hibiscus and a splash of lemon juice. Then I recalled seeing a recipe for Hibiscus Mojitos a few months ago. Well, why not add some mint and rum in here as well?
As of June 1, China banned grocery stores from giving out free plastic bags to customers, joining Sweden, Ireland, and a few other places in raising awareness of how wasteful plastic bags are. (I never saw the necessity, in China as well as New York, for stores give you a bag just for Coke or to double-bag a carton of milk.) Now reusable grocery bags are being worn everywhere and sold in every other clothing shop. I found this one with Mao the Smoking Bicyclist at Grifted on Nanluoguxiang, Beijing's unofficial hipster hutong. (They also have a line of Socialist dolls.)
In other fun news, Serious Eats found Absinthe gummy bears in New York. And Syria currently has the world's largest restaurant, seating at max. of 6,014 people, with separate theme sections for Chinese and Indian food.
A few months ago I wrote about my obsession with rose tea, also called rosebud tea. Not to be confused with rose hip, or the those things your boyfriend is supposed to give you for Valentine's Day, rose tea uses the buds from a rose bush. 玫瑰茶 (meigui cha) is usually blended with black tea or other herbal teas, but I think it's great on its own.
Since I moved to Beijing, I would drink rose bud tea in cafés but never bought any to steep at home. Maybe it was a subconscious move to associate it with the pleasant dim cafés of Beijing's university district - the clatter of Mandarin-English exchanges, the walls of books and French New Wave posters - rather than my bleak florescent-lit apartment. Or maybe it was just pure laziness.
Earlier this week Jacob and I went to Maliandau, also known as Beijing's "Tea Street." This is where restaurants and shops come to source their tea wholesale, and where tea obsessives buy their leaves and gadgets in bulk. We went around and bought a bunch of gifts for his family and, of course, ourselves. I couldn't resist the rose tea, sitting in a big bin and whispering my name. Now that I have it at home, I can't stop thinking of desserts I can make with it.
