in china you cook your squid and eat it too

A couple Tuesdays ago I went on another home cooking experience, this time at Du Laoshi's home with his wife Wang Laoshi. They really upped the stakes on this round of cooking. And, amazingly, they trusted me enough to cut most of the prep and to fry and saute some of the other dishes. For this dinner we made 5 dishes and had some ravishing conversations before, during and after the meal. These were those epic dishes...

• Xia pi chao xi hu lou (asian squash and shrimp rice dish)
• a few slices of cong
• a handful of shrimp rice (in my opinion, use salt and leave these salty shrimp dudes out)
• one xi hu lou thinly sliced (a lot like squash)
• Jiang you (soy sauce)
  
• salt
• sunflower oil

-put a liberal amount of sunflower in pan and heat. Add a few slices of cong. Fry the thinly sliced xi hu lou until tender, add in a handful of shrimp rice and a pinch of salt. serve.

• Jidan geng (egg and carrot jello)
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups of water
• small diced carrots
• sesame oil

-beat the eggs in with the water, add in the carrots, put the bowl over water, cover, boiol for 10-15 minutes until it has a jelly/jello like texture.

• Dofu gan (dry sliced tofu, with pork and celery)
• one slab of dry, hard, tofu
• ground pork
• a few slices of cong
• oil
• Chinese cousin of celery
• jiang you
• salt

-slice the tofu into thin crayon sized pieces, slice the celery at a bias into 1 cm pieces, heat oil, add cong slices, add in the ground pork, add in the celery, add in the tofu slices, add some jiang you and salt, saute together. Serve with a grand smile. I really enjoyed this dish, even with the pork. It was delicious and it was nice to have firm tofu after so many months of squishy tofu.

• You mai cai (sauteed spinach/lettuce)
• sunflower oil
• you mai cai, a bunch of bushels of it
• salt
• jiang you

-A very simple dish, just saute this leafy deep green lettuce with soy sauce and salt. serve. a little bit bitter, but a solid taste overall. Hard to eat on its own, but good with a mixture of the other dishes.

• You yu (squid)
• you yu (squid)
  
• yang cong (red onion)
• hu luo bo (carrots)
• yang (ginger)
• liao jiu (cooking alcohol)
• you (oil)
  
• salt
  

-Cut the carrots, red onion and squid into slices a little bigger than a matchstick. Boil the squid for a minute and then remove from water. Add oil to pan and begin by precooking the carrots. Then add in the ginger, red onion, and finally the precooked squid. stir fry and add in salt and liao jiu (cooking oil) to remove the squidy scent. Remove from heat and force feed your guests.

• Red bean and rice
• 1 cup of rice
• 1.5 cup of water
• 1/2 a cup of red bean

-Put it in the rice cooker and cook away, after the rice is cooked add the red bean. Eating your rice with red bean is more tasty and nutritious according to Du Laoshi. The cafeterias at Beida supposedly used to serve rice like this but now the price of red bean is too high to serve in the cafeterias. They would have to charge a high price for rice with beans and no one would buy it... supposedly.

During dinner Chen Tao and I asked Du and Wang Laoshi questions about eating in China. Du Laoshi told us that after the key meeting in 1978 about the open policy, within 2 years there was a major change in the way they were able to eat. Before the open policy they could only eat foods that were in season at the time. (no tomatoes in the winter) It was too expensive to grow vegetables in green houses during their improper seasons. Now, with everyone's income growing, they can afford to eat foods out of season. Before the open policy the supply of meat, eggs, oil, and rice were given to each person in an average of 250 grams per month. Now you can buy and eat as much as you can afford. These two teachers have lived in the area for 11 years and have seen the burst of restaurants lining the streets. The restaurants also started with high prices, but now that more people have enough money to eat at restaurants they have become more reasonable.

Du Laoshi and Wang Laoshi then told us about the way they choose to cook in their household. They're foods are not classic dishes, but mixtures of ingredients that they like. They use a tasting method to make sure the food is good, not family recipes or making what is popular. Supposedly with the coming of the open policy Du Laoshi has become rather picky with his food. They don't seem to have favorite foods here, which is strange because in American I feel like I focus a lot on my favorite foods.

From this point on we discussed some stark differences in the foods of China vs. that of America. One of the main dissociation in our foods is the use of Tofu. Tofu is becoming very popular in the US but will never be used the same way it is in China. As of now I feel like tofu is reserved for vegetarians, and dishes with tofu are usually vegetarian. This concept is non-existent in China. Tofu is not seen as a supplement to meat, but something to add to meat. This makes it increasingly difficult to avoid meat in China. Another very interesting difference is the style of eating. In china, you have a bunch of dishes and everyone shares. In America, a lot of times the food is individual, like hamburgers, sandwiches, steaks, slices of pizza, etc. In china the dishes consist of many ingredients that supplement each other. In America, dishes can be single food items, like mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, bread, etc. These are all used to supplement a main dish. In china, there is no main dish, all dishes are important to the whole of the meal.

More to come later!
-Abi

I'm never eating pork again.

Yet another few weeks ago the program took us on a weekend rural homestay. We posted up in Cibei Yu Cun, a rural village an hour and half away from Beijing. Every pair of students (in my case triplet) were placed in a household. Our household consisted of our Ai yi (literally translated to Aunt, but used mostly in situations where the elder is not your relative, but a close friend) Shu Shu ('uncle'), their grownup son and his girlfriend who returned home for the weekend from their home in Beijing, BeiBei the fattest cat... ever, NaNa our fun loving watch dog, and Dobia the son's new golden retriever puppy. My friends Yasi, Lingli and I shared a room, and a kang. Don't knock the kang till you try it. A kang is basically a large (the size of multiple beds) stone and tiled box. The hollow inside of the kang connects, in our case, to the kitchen fireplace so the kang stone is constantly heated by the wood burned to cook meals. Thin blankets and 'mattresses' are laid out on the kang during the night to sleep, but during the day the kang is used as a central location for hanging out. We ate meals on the kang, sat on the kang to play mazhong, and constantly had to keep the dirty outdoor pets off the kang.

During the rural homestay we ate a lot of food. Ok, well I would have eaten a lot of food if I could have stomached it all. The first meal we had was very good. There were quite a few dishes and about 85% of those dishes had pork in them. We watched our Ai Yi cook the first couple meals and her method was basically to waste nothing and to continuously add as much oil and pork as possible. There were these mini egg roll things which I loved. Unfortunately, once you tell the rural host families that you love something, they continuously force feed you this food. I can't really handle all of the bones and the fat that they leave in dishes in China, but have no fear, in our house if you didn't like something you would spit it out onto the table and feed it to NaNa, the vacuum. A lot of the dishes we ate in the rural village were very similar to dishes found throughout Beijing. Just way more pork, and no escaping it. We drank a lot of green tea in our household, which was REALLY good.

Cibei Yu Cun is known mostly for it's agricultural benefits. Commonly grown in this area are chestnuts, walnuts, persimmons, and this kind of Chinese dates. I was forcefully fed chestnuts every night we were there. Atleast they were super sweet and fun to open.

Over the weekend Yasi and our other friend Sean did a research project on food, so I had the privilege of watching them and helping to make some of the foods. Our Ai yi showed (them/us) how to make jiaozi (dumplings) and baozi(filled dough balls). The jiaozi was very good, and since Sean is a vegetarian, I got a break from eating pork. The baozi was the best I have had thus far in China. One kind of Baozi that I had never had before was this sweet kind. It looked liked clumps of sugar with molasses or just some kind of brown sugar, and when the baozi was steamed, the brown sugar melted inside the baozi. DELICIOUS. It got a little messy, especially with chopsticks, but completely worth the mess.

After the rural homestay I believe I have gained an appreciation for the work that goes into a Chinese meal, especially one consisting of Baozi and Jiaozi. I have also become kind of a vegetarian. I really have no desire to eat pork again after eating multiple dishes of recooked pork at every meal (including breakfast) for 4 days straight. I now plan on building a Kang in my future home as well. knock on kang!

-Abigail Rebecca

Jiu xiang bu pa xiang zi shen

"If the wine is fragrant then it doesn't matter how deep you must go into the alley to find the restaurant"

YUEBIN RESTAURANT:
A few weeks ago Chen Tao and I took the trusty subway system to Cuihua Hutong in Dongcheng district pangbian Tian'an Men square. Amongst the winding streets of this unassuming hutong one can find the frangrent scents leaking out of Yuebin restaurant. Though its apparence isn't particularly breathtaking this restaurant bares quite the historic significance in Beijing and all over China.

Yuebin Restaurant (悦宾) was conceived by Guo Peiji and his wife Liu Guixian and was the first privately run restaurant to open in China after the end of the cultural revolution in 1978. The owners initially had to jump through hoops to get the liscensing rights to run a privately owned restaurant. From the start of the restaurant on September 30, 1980 they have yet to significantly change the menu at all. The dishes are delicious and remain quite resasonably priced until this day. The restaurant dining hall itself has also had minimal renovations since the opening. It started off the first day with a line down the street and to this day sustains a bustling crowd at all times.

According to Liu Guixian, the reasoning beyond opening the restaurant was not to stir up controvesy, just to make enough money to support their family of 7. At the beginning many publicly attacked the restaurant saying there was no place for a privately owned restauant in a socialist state. With time, government officials and foreign diplomats began visiting the restauarant, supporting the validity of its exsistence and spreading the word about its delectable foods. The support of these officials gave the owners the boost necessary to continue the proper functioning of their business. It has been said that after the opening of Yuebin in 1980, 10,000 more restaurants were opened in China in the early 1980's.
Liu Guixian continues to visit the restaunt every few days, but has turned over the secrets and the prestige to a staff of 14. The current chef was trained by Liu Guixian to continue making the food up to par. While we were there we had a conversation with Liu Guixian's daughter. in the past couple of years her daughter had retired from the job she has held since the 1980's in a hotel restauant. Now, in her retirement she spends her time at the restaurant sorting bills and continusouly calculating with an abacas and observing the dining area.


Upon arrival we basically had no time to observe the menu before the waitress had decided the dishes we were going to be eating. It has been a real cultural experience ordering food at restaurants in China. Typically in the United States when you are seated and given a menu the wait staff will give you a bit of time to choose your meal. In China they use a completely opposite system. The wait staff hoovers over you from the second you sit down until you can come up with a set of dishes to make up a meal. Sometimes, they even add in their ideas on the meal. Rarely will they tell us the specialties of the restaurant or their favorite dish, they usually just tell us that we have ordered too much or too little. It is also different from home because they rarely ask if you want something to drink here, or if they do ask I have never understood their questions.

So Chen Tao took the advice of the waitress and ordered us the following famous dishes from this historic restaurant...

• Suanni Zhouzi - elbow pork in garlic and vinegar

-I'm not really a fan of fatty meat and being able to actually see the bone of the pigs elbow... But the meet itself was really flavorful and tender. A lot of vinegar, but all in all a really tasty dish that Chen Tao put in a lot of effort to devour. I think pork is his favorite food. I think that a lot of Chinese pick the broad category of pork as their favorite food.

• Qingchao Xiaren - stir fried shrimp and cucumber
• Guota Doufu He - wok tofu boxes

- These little deep fried tofu boxes were ofcourse filled with meet. probably pork. Actually, pretty tasty, and I never really ate tofu before china. Correction, other than the Grove House tofu, I never enjoyed tofu before I cam to China.

• Wu Si Ton - egg rolls served with pancakes, leeks and hoisin sauce

-heavanly taste. I loves my egg rolls. Especially with hoisin sauce and cong. It reminds me of the food my daddy makes at home. This method of eating (with pancake, hoisin, cong and cucumber) I later found is how the Beijingers eat their famous Peking Duck dish.

• Ruanzha Huiguo Niurou - twice fried beef

HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS RESTAURANT if you are in the greater Beijing area. You will not be disappointed. It is quite the cultural adventure as well. Just follow your nose. or your stomach.

Xi'an, it's all about the terracotta

Sorry it has been awhile, but we have been really busy in China and blogposting time is sparse. Quite a few weekends ago we went on a trip to a city just south of Beijing, Xi'an. This city is most well known for housing the Terracotta Warriors. Truly a wonder of the world, this recently excavated site houses over 6,000 life size clay warriors guarding the tomb of the emperor Qin Shihuang.

After doing some site seeing in Xi'an, we did not have a hard time finding nourishment in the large variety of local cuisine ranging from sweet to sour, savory, meat filled, to drinks of different flavors and consistencies. One of the first things I had to try here was the cotton candy. These larger than life swabs of white stringy goodness were prepared from actual sugar cane. To add to the eating experience, when you pulled off a string, a significant amount of stray sparkles lined your clothing. While enjoying my cotton candy, we passed a storefront bakery that was attracting quite the crowd. My friends and I indulged in the scrumptious almond cookies and these little pumpkin flavored balls with sweet bean paste in the middle. The best desert at the bakery was the delicate peanut brittle.

When we went to the Forest of the Stone Steles, we tried a small cup of regional noodles from a street vendor. At first the pungent pickled taste was shocking, but after time the thin strings of noodles mixed with the spicy pickled sauce became quite addictive. Next to the noodle vendor was a woman making jian bing. This is the Chinese version of an egg crepe.

The perfect mixture of crepe, egg, pickled spices, and onion only improves with the somewhat inconspicuous addition of a flattened, ultra thin, deep-fried noodle. When this delicacy comes off the griddle it is undeniably my favorite snack in China. The jian bing that my friends and I shared in Xi’an was the best version of this dish I had ever had. The noodle stayed crispy until the very end, and the flavors were phenomenal.

Back on the snack street we managed to muster up a few more meat filled dishes. In relation to western food, these were equivalent to quesadillas and hamburgers. What the Chinese quesadilla lacked in cheese it made up for with leeks, beef, and spices. Deep fried to the point of perfection, though I would generally be disgusted by oil dripping down my hand, I finished the snack within a few meters walking distance. The Chinese hamburger was not one of my favorite street foods, but it was an interesting mixture of rice, beans, spicy spread, mutton and beef inside a steamed dough bun.


To wash the street food down, there were intermittent stops of drink stands. The common drinks consisted mainly of highly concentrated sugars and teas. The most interesting of the drinks were the dark plum juice, the local teas, and most unique, the juice of the sugar cane. I didn’t get to try any of the sugar cane juice, but the plum juice was very flavorful. Another great drink here was the milk bubble tea shop that was next door to our hotel.


The most favored local cuisine of Xi'an seemed to be this mutton soup that the customer helped prepare by ripping bread dough and adding it to the soup. Since mutton is not one of my favorite meats the soup didn't really tickle my fancy, but I recommend trying it for the experience. All in all, XI'an was great and the food made the experience that much better.

ani ochevet et hayihudim

Shalom Chaverim!

So today Ben and I decided to take a long overdue break from local Chinese cuisine and venture to the Northeast part of Beijing. There, one can find many foreign embassies along with international dining options. In the early afternoon we made our way to the Israeli embassy and it's kosher deli pang bian. With the intent to purchase hundreds of dollars of blessed deli meats, imagine our shock when the kitchen was out of pastrami. Ben eventually settled for the Matzo Ball Soup and foot long Kosher Beef Hot Dog, while I stuck with the Chicken Shnitzel. Free of charge, the Chinese waiter brought us warm mini challah rolls with honey mustard sauce. That's when we lost it. When Ben's hot dog arrived I think I caught a glimpse of him rubbing it against his cheek as tears of joy poured from his eyes. The shnitzel was fantastic as well as was everything we ate at this Kosher Deli. Seeing other Jews reminded me of my youth when they told us wherever you go, there's always someone Jewish. I guess they were right. While we savored every last bite, we had an interesting discussion about what food means to different cultures and groups of people.

Weird things happen to your taste buds and your food oriented decisions when you are in a foreign place. It is almost as if your food brain splits in half. One half of your food brain is so excited about trying different foods in your new environment. There is new flavors, new ingredients, new concerns about food, new places to try, new street foods to experiment with, there's commercial foods, there's street markets, supermarkets, there is family style meals, and there are individual breakfasty snacks. Though not always good choices are made in a different environment, it is impossible not to expand your palate while abroad. The other part of your food oriented brain seeks the familiar. I mean anything familiar. You clearly crave the foods that you liked the most in your own culture, but also start to crave ANYTHING that reminds you of home.

Since we have been in China, we have all witnessed this split brain phenomenon. Some people came abroad with the intent to never break social norms and eat at American chains that are never more than a block away from you. Others planned on eating fried chicken at KFC for at least one meal everyday. Embarrassingly, we commonly find ourselves making the short walk to the 24 hour McDonalds that is just outside the closest gate to our dormitory. While we sit and devour our 16.50 yuan value meals, it is impossible to leave McDonalds without someone mentioning that they haven't been to McDonald's in YEARS back in the US. But somehow it is such a treat when we go to Micky D's here. So does this happen when foreigners come to the United States? Do the Chinese go to Panda Express and think, "I would never eat this crap back home, but while I'm here in the US, it's better than those organic vegetarian restaurants that line the streets."

McDonald's is obviously not representative of the majority of food we eat in the US because clearly most of us haven't been there in years. And now that I am in China I can guarantee that Panda Express and greasy take out joints are not very representative of common Chinese foods. (ok, the grease is a good representation, but it tastes better here). So why is it that we have such poor representations of our foods in foreign places? and why is it that we so easily sink to the level of eating these terrible foods when abroad?

my guess is that it is just so hard to be so uncomfortable in a culture that is not your own that we reach out for anything that can make us feel at home when we are miles away.

As for the Jews and their love of food, I think the Jews as a very small religion could take on the extremely large population of Chinese that think that food is most important to them. As I sit on my bed and eat this extremely greasy and frankly delicious representation of a bagel from the kosher deli, I feel the need smack myself in the face. If I don't enjoy real Chinese food while I am in China, I will return to the US and someday view Panda Express as a decent representation of food from China because I was too busy eating bagels at the kosher deli in Beijing instead of Jianbing (Chinese Egg Crepe with spices and onions (i leave out the cilantro))and Baozi (Steamed dough balls filled with vegetables, meat, rice, and/or soup) on the streets in the mornings with the masses to see the difference.

and that is all for now.

b'ahava-
avigal

it's nice to use a knife once in awhile

Cello everyone!

Tuesday evening Chen Tao and I went out the South East gate of Beida to embark upon our next epic adventure. The setting was the apartment of a faculty member of Beida. Her name is Zhu Laoshi, but one of her colleagues, Du Laoshi, was the one who did all of the cooking. We started the evening at 16:00 with a few cups of red tea. New to the red tea experience, I was pleasantly surprised by the earthy flavor and lovely scents of this tea commonly drunk in Zhu Laoshi’s home province. It is meant to be enjoyed in small cups and quickly before it cools down.

With a couple of tea cups under our belts, we began preparing the fresh ingredients for the 6 dishes to come. Du Laoshi informed me that most of the food was purchased in local street markets because the food is fresher there than in the large super markets popular in Beijing. The dishes were chosen based on the foods currently in season and based heavily on what Du Laoshi felt like buying at the time.



These are the 6 dishes we created.





1. Tai Yong Rou (Sun Pork)
Ingredients:
2 eggs
small bag of ground pork
dian fen
xiang fen
salt, I presume
Vague Instructions:
Using chopsticks, skillfully mix the ground pork in a circle and add in dian fen, xiang fen, salt, and one egg. After mixing the egg and spices completely in with the meat, flatten the meat mixture onto a plate. Crack an egg onto the center of the dish. Place the plate over boiling water and cover the plate. Let simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the pork is an apprapote color and the egg is cooked. Serve with a smile!

2. Kou Gua (bitter cucumber/celery)
Ingredients:
2 deseeded kou gua
oil
dian fen
Vague Instructions:
Take the seeds out of the vegetable. Cut on a bias in thin slices. Sautee in peanut oil or vegetable oil with a few shavings of dian fen. Serve with a bitter smile!

3. Egg and tomato soup dish
Tomato in Chinese is called xi hong shi meaning western red food. They used to be imported, but now these western red fruits are grown in China
Ingredients:
3 eggs
2 tomatoes
slices of cong (onionlike spicy herb, in some places they eat it straight, here it is used to add flavor to dishes)
3 heaping tsp of sugar
1 tsp of salt
Vague Instructions:
Boil tomatoes so that you can remove skin easily. Supposedly the skin can get stuck in your throat. Then slice the tomatoes into sizable chunks with no matching shapes. Meanwhile, beat 3 eggs with chopsticks until they are thoroughly mixed together. Add a liberal amount of oil to the pan and heat. When the oil is hot, add eggs and scramble. Take eggs off heat. Add more oil to the pan along with the tomatoes and a few thin slices of cong. Add in the 3 heaping tsp of sugar and 1 heaping tsp of salt. Allow the tomatoes to cook until it creates a sort of soup. Add scrambled eggs to the soupy tomato mixture, heat for a bit and remove from heat. Serve and enjoy!

TIP: when beating eggs with chop sticks, you must move in quick circular motions with your wrist. Keeping the fingers slightly separated will allow for a quicker beating process.

4. Cabbage and mushroom dish (really tasty)
Ingredients:
Handful of large musrooms
Full bag of Chinese cabbage
Cornstarch
Salt
Soy sauce
Vague Instructions:
Boil water. Cut Chinese cabbage leaves in half. Slice musrooms into strips. Add the cabbage leaves to the boiling water for between 15 to 60 seconds depending on how you are feeling that day. (this is really what Du Laoshi said). Position steamed cabbage leaves on a plate all facing the same direction. Sautee mushrooms in oil, add in soy sauce, a large pinch of salt, and a cornstarch-water slurry mixture to thicken the sauce. Add the mushrooms to the top of the cabbage on the plate and enjoy!

-the mushrooms in this dish were amazing, and I don’t even like mushrooms normally.

5. leek/green onion and shrimp rice mixture dish
Ingredients:
A bushel of what was either leek or some sort of scallion/green onion
A bag of dried shrimp rice. Yikes.
Soy sauce
Salt
Oil
Vague Instructions:
Peal off the rotten parts of the bushel of leeks/scallions/green onions. Cut into inch long pieces. Sautee said ingredient in oil while adding salt, soy sauce and a bag of dried shrimp rice. (The shrimp rice is extremely salty due to the sea water contained in it, so less salt is needed in this dish than in others.) Serve at your own will.

-there is something with little shrimps that look like silk worms with eyes that really scares me. It smells a bit like the food you feed fishes. The Chinese seem to enjoy it and it is a very common dish due to the ease in the creation process.

6. Basi Shanyao (hot candied yam!!!)
Ingredients:
2 aged yams from the autumn harvest
oil
sugar
Vague Instructions:
Peel the yams. Cut into non-matching geometric shapes about the size of a silver dollar. Put a lot of oil in the bottom of a pan and turn heat to high. Add the pieces of yams. Fry until edges are browned, continusouly moving the bottom to top and top to bottom. Do not mix too much because yam pieces will begin to break up. When sufficiently browned, remove from heat. Dry out pan. Add 5 or more tsp of sugar to un-oiled pan. Melt the sugar until it is carmelized but very liquidy. Carefully add yams to hot sugar. Cover yams with carmelized sugar. EAT IMMEDIATELY but be careful because it can be extremely hot.

-This is the best dish I have had in China. Hands down. Make it at home if you can figure out my vague recipe.
-This can supposedly be done with bananas, apples or biqi (something I have never heard of but it is circular, black, grows in water, and has a deep brown horn in the center.) In order to use these other ingredients, they must be powdered first, like the chicken at KFC.

As we sat and enjoyed our large meal I was able to ask Zhu Laoshi some questions about food and culture in China. She talked a lot about the vast consumerist boom that started around 1998 and 1999 including mostly food and clothing availability. She presented us with some candy and spices from her home town, which were interesting and enjoyable.

The most eye opening part of this experience was the observation of the techniques used to make these common dishes. The techniques are remarkably similar to those used in the United States. The use of frying, slurrying with corn starch and water, the addition of spices and salt, as well as the mixtures between bitter, sweet, salt and spicy in all the dishes were the same. The main difference is that somehow everything still tastes different here. The produce is what is different, and the culture behind eating the food. Since the cooking experience happened on St. Patrick’s Day, I informed them of the traditions we carry out in the US and they seemed excited about drinking some pi jiu in celebration for the special learning-to-cook-experience and maybe even for this international holiday.

More eating to come!

abigail

restaurant outting numero uno

nimen hao!

Last Thursday during the late evening Chen Tao and I went out the south gate at Beida to seek out our first interviewee in a little restaurant across the street. After some hesitation, one of the owners of the restaurant allowed us to ask 3 questions under the agreement that if she was not interested after 3 questions we would end the interview. Luckily, the apple computer I used to take notes during the interview was intriguing enough to keep the questions a'coming. Here's some of the basic things I learned about this little restaurant just off campus. Now that I know about how long an interview will take I intend on changing questions accordingly to get to the depths of the food industry in China.

The restaurant was opened in 2007 by this couple who owned a couple of other successful restaurants in the past. From experience, they knew that the location just outside of Beida's gates was prime with a clientele consisting mainly of young adults between 20 and 35. The restaurant serves hot pot style with some supplemental dishes. The most popular dish is called ma la shong gua meaning something like spicy and scented hot pot. The recipes are all family recipes but they said that they did not feel comfortable advertising this because the lack of credibility being such a young restaurant. They seemed to have few fears for the future and actually discussed the possibility of expanding their restaurant in other areas of China.

During the interview I was surprised at how interested in me and my studies in China the restaurant owners were. They really wanted to know what I thought about China. I was really not expecting these sorts of questions, so I will be prepared for next time. Unfortunately, since the restaurant was so young they could not shed very much light on the comparison from present time to the past 30 years, but future restaurant interviews look more promising in this aspect of the project. Since Chen Tao and I went to interview them so late in the evening we were unable to sample their hot pot dishes, but since I am about 98% sure they put up a picture of me in their restaurant on the wall, I think I'll be returning to try some tasty hot pot. I'll tell you how it turns out.

-many boiling pots of meat, fish balls, tofu, vermicelli noodles, potatoes, Chinese broccoli, and spices that will burn your mouth for hours to come!-

lìn lìn

chopsticks = china

"That Chinese cuisine is the greatest in the world is highly debatable and is essentially irrelevant. But few can take exception to the statement that few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese" - Chang Kwang-chih 1977.

To jump start this DISP I would like to throw something out there. This evening, sitting in an extremely crowded shitang (cafeteria) with my friend Ben, we found ourselves discussing the ever-present difficulties posed to us foreigners with the eating utensils provided for us. Both Ben and I are new to the art of chopstick dining, and I think we have picked it up relatively quickly seeing as we have no other choice. I began to realize the strengthy comparison between the use of chopsticks and our experience in China.

• It is a bit awkward at first, but you get used to it with time.
  
• Food constantly slips from in between the sticks back into the soupy dish from which it came. This is a perfect representation of learning Chinese. After learning a vocabulary word or grammatical rule, it generally slips from your mind over and over again until finally it can be remembered, recalled, and processed in the brain.
  
• With chopsticks we can't seem to eat everything we want to. It is very difficult to cut big pieces of food with a smooth stick. With the academic restrictions of the study program we are unable to go on long journeys throughout China or explore as freely as we would sometimes like, but this is most likely part of the culture of China.
  
• After awhile your hand starts to hurt and get tired. After just a short month in China, I am already pretty mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. Still the prospects of adventures to come keep us going everyday.
  
• I find myself poking people around me with my chopsticks, or hitting them in the face with my elbow in the attempt to get a small piece of rice or peanut from the bottom of the dish. We are CLEARLY foreigners in China. Westerners stick out like a sore thumb in almost every situation. We don't know the language, we don't know the directions to walk in, we are loud, we have different color hair and appearanaces, maybe we even smell funny. I constantly feel like I am impeding the Chinese in their own home. And believe you me, the stares are out of control here. Sometimes it feels like we are from a different planet and we just landed in Beijing and no one has seen an alien before so they stare like there is no tomorrow.
  
• After awhile, you get use to it. Enough said.
  

All in all, China is a pretty cool place. Within a short period of time I realized how important food was to China. How could I not spend a substantial portion of my time in Beijing not researching (and eating) the vast array of foods?! With chopsticks in hand and Chen Tao, my trustee DISP tutor and translation expert at my side we set out to explore the endless possabilties of knowledge acquisition in the field of food.

Dai Haur Jian!
dèng lín lín

Welcome to the jungle!

Nimen hao! Hello world wide interweb!

Within the next few months to come I will be using this online blogposting website to compose and structure a directed independent study project (DISP) in China. The broad topic for my project is food, particularly Chinese food (I think it would be a bit more difficult to study western food in Beijing because providers are far and few). Through the use of historical review, personal recollections, the process of learning to purchase and cook traditional family style meals, interviews of the old and the young as well as of restaurateurs I hope to gain a better understanding for how the production, purchasing and consuming of food has shaped the culture in Beijing/China. Since the early 1980's the picture of food culture in China has changed drastically with a boom of options and restaurants around every corner. By understanding how food shapes the culture I believe I will gain a deeper appreciation for China and how it functions.

Using this online blogposting website I am confident I can retell some fascinating stories and provide readers (friends, teachers, family members, randos, and Internet stalkers) with some knowledge of real Chinese food and Chinese culture. Feel free to leave comments, stories, personal opinions, constructive critiques, crippling critiques, or anything of the liking to help me figure out how food can shape a culture. Relations to the way things are in your home culture are always interesting as well.

I promise this will be entertaining, so if you follow it until perhaps some good conclusions will be made and you can actually learn something. I sure hope to.

A bit of a disclaimer, my Chinese language skills are minimal at this point, but getting better, so I apologize in advance for butchering names, names of dishes, names of restaurants, recipes, directions, and most importantly my use of the English language (I blame my American status for the majority of this...).

Anywho, I hope you enjoy. zaijian for now!

-dèng lín lín (abigail rebecca darin)