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?
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.
The very first thing I have in the morning, almost every day, is a cup of green tea with a spoonful of honey. Sometimes I add a bit of soy milk, other times I don't. But it's that combo of caffeine and tiny bit of sweetness that wakes me up, now that I've weened myself off coffee. (Although I still indulge recreationally, a cappucino here and there at a wifi café.)
So it seemed quite natural to bake something with a green tea and honey flavor combo. I had already made green tea cookies a few weeks ago, to much success, and still had a lot of matcha powder left. I was also inspired by La Tartine Gourmand's Chocolate and Matcha Cake, and which I'll probably make once I stock up on some good quality chocolate and cocoa powder.
But for now I'll be satisfied with my morning tea in cake* form.
*I guess these could be called muffins too, but I tend to associate muffins with big crumbly breakfast items to be downed with coffee, usually Dunkin' Donuts, that fall apart all over your clothes because you're scarfing them down with your hands. These are a bit denser, smaller, clothing-friendlier, and meant to be savored any time of the day, with or without tea.
When I was about 4 or 5, growing up in Guangzhou, I went crazy with excitement whenever my parents brought home a sack of lychees or rambutans from the fruit market. Abandoning whatever toys I was playing with at a time, I would instead grab a plastic bowl and sit for at least an hour or two, carefully carefully removing the skin and pits, not eating any of the flesh until the bowl was filled.
For a kid, this was an excercise in restraint. But I loved the smooth, sweet, and jelly-like texture of both fruits so much that I wanted to eat it all at once, without work getting in the way. And the extra wait made eating doubly enjoyable.
The name rambutan comes from the Malay word for "hairy", a fitting name for a fruit with a bright red prickly rind protecting pearly white or yellowish flesh. With yellow soft spikes that strike me as kind of punkish, rambutans seem to stand out in the market. Can I really eat these, you wonder. Will they prick me like cacti?
Like lychees and longan, rambutans only grow in Southeast Asia, news that came as disappointing when my family moved to Boston. We found lychees pretty easily in Boston's Chinatown. But rambutans, those were harder, and more expensive when available. So I resigned myself to eating it maybe once every year or two. And forgot about how rewarding it was to peel and pit for an afternoon, to have a bowl of sweet rambutans to enjoy at the end.
The electricity in my apartment went out last night, and I was worried that everything in the fridge would spoil. Great, I thought. There goes all the meat, the dairy, and even the green tea cookie dough I had just prepared when the lights went out.
When I checked this morning, sure enough all the leftovers in the fridge compartment had to be tossed out. But miraculously, everything in the freezer was well preserved, including the ice cubes which didn't seem to have melted at all. And the green tea cookie dough, with a little thawing, was ready to go into the oven.
I based this recipe off Apartment Therapy's Earl Grey Tea Cookies. I forgoed the bigger bits of tea leaves. The great thing about these cookies is that you can shape them easily. I chilled my dough as a square block instead of a roll, and added some criss-cross designs on half the batch. You can also roll out the dough after chilling and use cookie cutters.
I have been obsessed with almond milk ever since I discovered Lulu in Beijing. Sold at every market here for 7 yuan a liter, this boxed almond milk has been my new alternative to chamomile for a soothing right-before-bed drink. I also have it at breakfast mixed with green tea, or at dinner whenever my fridge has out of soju or vodka or anything to mix a drink with. Lulu is fine cold, but so delicious when warm that I can unconciously go through a whole box in one sitting.
So naturally I had to make my own. Store-bought Lulu may be addictive, but the homemade version is so transcendent that it makes me forget the 3 or 4 times I had to strain every batch because the mesh in my colander isn't fine enough. But c'est la vie. If you have a very fine-mesh colander to strain out the minute particles of puréed almond, making this will be a breeze.
The results of this first homemade trial were either sipped straight, or heated to go with warm honey and bananas (recipe below). Some other ways to use homemade almond milk:
In Beijing, it's easy to find fruits like carambola, rambutans, and dragonfruit in almost every major supermarket. However, I couldn't for the life of me find a single lime in this city. I've bought them in Guangdong, but up north it's a whole different story. Even Carrefour and the foreign import stores didn't have them, nor did any of J's Chinese-English picture dictionaries show "lime" alongside "apple", "banana", and
"durian". What I took for granted as a common grocery item in the US is, apparently, as exotic to Beijingers as a waxberry is to Americans.
I finally found limes at Jenny Lou's near Dongzhimen station. I was so excited I bought in bulk (5 kilos maybe?). The cashier looked at me as though no other person had ever bought so many limes at once in this city.
What I wanted limes for was to make, in addition to Southeast Asian curries, this Coconut Lime Rice Pudding. A medley of sweet and tart flavors of the tropics out of a single pan. Lemons would not have added the same zing.
In the past few years, goji berries, or 枸杞 (gouqi) in Mandarin, have become one of those new "it" foods highly touted in the media. Everyone from health gurus to fashion magazine editors raved about how gojis were rich in antioxidents, good for your eyesight, and so on. As a kid I had eaten them in herbal soups my mother made, but as a 20-something New Yorker my disinterest was purely economical: they cost upwards of $10 or $12 a bag, even on sale.
Of course, here in China you can get the exact same goji berries for 6 or 7 renminbi a bag, if you don't mind the less fancy packaging. (Which makes me wonder why I'm not stocking up to sell for a killer profit back home.) Also called wolfberries, gojis are said to have Tibetan and Himilayan origin, but most sold nowadays come from other parts of China.
Gojis taste like a cross between a raisin and a date. I don't like to eat them on their own, since they are a bit dry. But I do like a spoonful in green or black tea with honey. (Note: Whenever you consume goji berries you should first rinse them in water to rid them of any chemicals they may have.) They're also great to bake with; the berries' natural sweetness makes them great for muffins, scones, and especially cookies.
Last night Jacob and I invited a Chinese friend, Amber, over for dinner. Upon seeing me in the kitchen getting ready to bake with a huge chunk of butter, she said, "I don't think I've ever tasted butter before."
Stunned, I asked her to clarify. She thought for a while, and said, "Unless you count the butter that's baked into bread," she said. "But not in anything else, I don't think."
It's true that not much savory Chinese food uses butter, as even a minor ingredient. And while bakeries abound here, selling a plethora of breads and cakes, not many Chinese are accustomed to spreading butter on rolls or toast. But last night Jacob and I had planned a Western-ish meal, and made liberal use of butter in our side of haricot verts. Thankfully, Amber didn't mind, and seemed to love the change of butter as the cooking agent, as opposed to peanut or vegetable oil.
She got another chance to taste something very buttery when I brought out my dessert, orange-almond lace cookies. (It was another way for me to use up orange peels, like in my orange sesame brittle.)
Oranges are so abundant and inexpensive this time of year that I've been making fresh squeezed orange juice every morning. It takes about 3 to 4 medium oranges and a lot of arm muscle just to get a cup of juice, but the fresh pulpy taste is well worth it.
But what to do with the peels? It seems like a waste to throw them out, and we don't have a yard to compost organic matter. So I thought of a way to put part of the peel to good use, and satisfy my sweet tooth at the same time. A twist on old-fashion peanut brittle, this sweet snack requires a minimal number of ingredients and minimal time in the kitchen.
Orange Sesame Brittle
Serves 8
1 1/2 cup (300 g) white sugar
1/4 cup (60 ml) water
2 teaspoons butter
1/4 cup (60 ml) white sesame seeds, toasted
1 1/2 tablespoons freshly grated orange zest
