Activate your alliteration addiction
See this?
It’s bok choy with butter and basil.
Delicious AND intellectually satisfying.
One last adventure
On our final full day in Beijing, CJ and I sought out a restaurant we’d liked on our first visit to Beijing back in 2010. We took the subway, and cunningly got off one station early due to a subconscious desire to make the day more epic.
For future reference, this is what the restaurant actually looks like (plus a sign taken after turning 90 degrees left in the street facing the restaurant):
CJ and I call the restaurant either “The DongBei restaurant” (about as specific as saying, “The Chinese restaurant”) or “The pumpkin chips restaurant”, neither of which is especially useful.
Nonetheless, we found it and we ordered (along with pumpkin chips, naturally – easy to recognise by their picture despite the lack of any English in the menu) something that looked like either duck or chicken. It arrived startlingly quickly.
“Well,” said CJ, “it’s chicken.”
“Oh?” I said.
“I can tell by the head. And the foot.”
It was served cold, and with all the bones intact – much as if it had been left on a table for a while, then passed through a paper shredder. It was a boy chicken, and it looked at me funny.
I couldn’t handle it, and decided to order another dish.
“One with a mix of meat and vegetables,” said CJ.
I flipped through the pages frantically, as Louisette’s cries of hunger grew increasingly strident. When I spotted something that looked like it might be pork but was definitely beans, I ordered it.
It wasn’t pork. It was beef (well, probably. It’s hard to tell with Chinese beef, which is horrid even when it’s actually made from a cow). And the beans were not beans. Oh no, dear reader. They were chillis.
The pumpkin chips were a little undercooked.
The rice we ordered never came.
In Winter 2010 we always enjoyed the free tea served on every table. When I asked for tea, the waitress said they “didn’t have any”.
So that was our last proper Chinese meal. Oh, China. You always come through when we need surprises.
The following day we left on an even more epic three-part journey home – pausing only to say goodbye to Bonnie’s family and to pee on Louisette’s grandma (Louisette did the peeing; we said the goodbyes). I could write about the journey, but the only important thing now is that we arrived home in the end.
Brillig Beijing: The Food
Beijing has an enormous variety of delicious international food. The only sad part is that unusual food tends to require a certain amount of careful questioning (“It’s a pickled WHAT?!?”) and attention, and a little bit of extra labour (rice with chopsticks, for example) which really makes things difficult while also attempting to feed an infant (and not flash my breasts as passers-by), who often has eating difficulties of her own. Generally CJ tries to keep up with the food, and to feed me and himself simultaneously. I get the general gist, at least.
Korean Barbeque (involving cooking on your own hot plate):
At/near a Yunan/Vietnamese restaurant in Hohan.
Naturally, since we were in Beijing, we made sure to have some Beijing-style duck pancakes. The sweet heaviness of the duck and the thick sauce contrasts perfectly with the wafer-thin pancakes and cucumber sticks or bean sprouts that go inside. We had Beijing Duck last time we were here, and we’ve been craving it ever since. And so the cycle of joy and pain begins again.
Brillig Beijing: Buffet Style
Even without those odd little multilingual/cultural moments (eg asking a concierge to call a taxi then waiting in consternation for twenty minutes as he vanished out the front door) hotel life would be a fascinating and exotic experience for me. The best part, inevitably, is the breakfast buffet (fairly necessary when one carts an infant to a foreign country). It’s exorbitantly priced, as one would expect, and has about a hundred different dishes. We park Louisette at a table (prepped for the inevitable midmeal nappy change) and take it in turns to get food.
If I was still young, and still had faith in my digestive system, I would perhaps challenge myself to try every single dish at least once. Here’s one good reason why not – that’s salted duck eggs on the left (fine), and fermented bean curd on the right (for breakfast).
One of the juices featured is tomato, and there is a suspicious stand near the juices that appears to contain most of the other fixings for a bloody mary (but who am I to judge?)
At the time of writing, I felt I’d had enough experimentation and should just give up. Apart from anything else, the pancake griddle is increasingly temperamental and my interactions with the staff there are getting more and more awkward. Also, there were no dim sum pork buns OR red bean paste buns today, which was very disappointing. So all I ate was some fresh bread and butter, a hash brown, scrambled eggs, a fried chicken-and-indeterminate-vegetable dumpling, orange juice, grape juice, and five pancakes with butter and maple syrup (and I sneakily added cheese to one of them, since they were cooked on the omelette stand after a mild altercation between the pancake and egg staff), some fresh berries (one of which I didn’t recognise). And all I stole was a bit more butter, and a knife slipped into Louisette’s bag.
What a poor effort. I’m sure I’ll do better tomorrow.
Reunite with a food friend
PS: Oops, I posted tomorrow’s entry today. Welcome to the future.
Regular readers will know I’m a fan of home-made lemonade – and that I have a stolen mint plant. I wasn’t able to eat either during pregnancy, but I certainly can now! Plus it’s totally a serve of fruit. Hey, I don’t wanna get scurvy.
Coming next week: Awesomenesses that aren’t to do with food or baby!
Well, maybe. Tune in and find out.
Turkish Feast
Welcome back to your regular programming: Daily Awesomenesses on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I happen to have several saved up, but I’m sure Louisette will feature once or twice too (and of course she’ll be the focus on Wednesdays until she’s old enough to ask me to stop).
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Food is awesome.
Here is (from roughly left to right) Turkish bread, beetroot dip, hummus, sis kebab (lamb skewers), tavuk gogsu (char-grilled chicken breast), kabak mucver (zuccini puffs with yogurt and dill dip), tavuklu pide (pizza filled with chicken, parsley and cheese), salad, and baklava (filo pastry layered with walnuts, cashews, and syrup).
Nom nom.
Salad plants
We went to lunch at a friend’s place and came home with two tomato plants and this lettuce plant. You gotta love a plant where, if you want some greens, you just pick off a leaf and eat it.
Experimentation
In over two and a half years of marriage, CJ and I have never once eaten tofu. Every so often I make a dodgy fried rice with whatever is in the fridge – usually ham and eggs, with sugar and soy sauce for flavouring. This week I tried something new. I cooked coconut-flavoured rice by adding a cup of coconut milk to the uncooked rice instead of water (then stirring it a few times as it cooked, rather than just letting it go). It tastes brilliant. I fried the results with Chinese-style honey soy tofu (a pack of it from a supermarket shelf – in the same aisle as cold meats and cheese), and topped it with boiled eggs. We then added soy sauce to taste.
This is a great vegetarian meal, and without the eggs it’s even vegan.
Snickers Sandwich
This is what I call a snickers sandwich – it’s crunchy peanut butter and nutella, combined:
You’re welcome, people of the world.
What are your strangely delicious sandwich combinations?
Quintuple Chocolate
Some people reckon triple chocolate desserts are impressive – to which I say HAH!
Triple chocolate is merely the canvas.
I began with triple chocolate Cadbury ice cream – chocolate ice cream with real chocolate chips and ribbons of chocolate sauce throughout.
I added choc mint ice magic (a brilliant invention that turns hard when drizzled on ice cream).
I garnished the dish with one-qurter of a dark chocolate cherry ripe.
This, my friends, is what quintuple chocolate looks like:
I considered also sprinkling this concoction with Milo (which, for you Americans out there, is like Ovaltine but a million times better – mainly because of a distinct crunchy texture), but I decided hey, I’d hate to overdo it.
Felicity Banks 