Goodbye Beijing

To sum it up, here is what we mainly ate:

For breakfast I ate oatmeal and very occasionally Chinese-style (i.e. a sesame shaobing).

For lunch, we usually ordered fast, home-style dishes from downstairs, such as eggplant, stir fried eggs and tomatoes, Ma Po tofu without the meat, etc. etc.

If we were feeling slightly less lazy, we would eat at the restaurant in our building: again, simple, but more Cantonese-style food: fish head tofu soup, stir fried greens, and clay pots with mushrooms and five spice powder.

Other wonderful restaurants nearby:

A Xin Jiang noodle place. Xin Jiang food is basically Chinese-Middle Eastern fusion, so they eat flatbread (Nang, obviously the same root as the Indian naan) and hand-pulled noodles like extremely chewy, thick, spaghetti, which you can eat with tomato and egg, or eggplant, peppers, and garlic shoots for the vegetarian options. As a carnivore, they have a ton of meat options: lamb, sliced beef, you name it. Everything comes in huge portions and is just great to carb-load after a swimming workout. My dad once ordered something called shou zhua fan (rice to eat with your hands), that was basically a biryani/pilaf/fried rice hybrid. The rice was short grained, but stir fried with lamb, cumin, and dried apricots. It looked great. Recently, we also had the lightest dish of cabbage in broth with nothing but a little bit of dried shrimp and goji berries—the perfect restorative tonic. We also ordered a huge pot of soup (made vegetarian) with a base of spices and hot pepper, swimming with cubes of tofu, noodle scraps (that’s the only way I can think of to describe their shape), and vegetables. Last but not least, I sampled two sweet pumpkin dishes: one served with glutinous black rice in a sticky orange syrup, the second much less sweet, but filled with raisins, figs, and Chinese dates (jujubes)—that one was much better. I saved it the next day to eat for breakfast.

This restaurant I mentioned earlier—the one hidden away in the village part of our neighborhood that has yet to be modernized. Every time we went there, we would order ge da tang, soup thickened with lumps of dough, egg, wild vegetables and tomatoes. In addition to this, we would get the fabulous sesame pancakes, filled with a sandy, sticky and sweet sesame paste within a crispy flatbread. Even the simplest stir fried vegetables they did amazingly well, especially the mung bean sprouts, which were cooked with nothing besides Sichuan peppers, peppercorns, and a little vinegar. Two more great dishes that we tried: a variety of vegetables topped with an omelette (“vegetables covered with a quilt”) and smoked tofu with garlic shoots: usually smoked tofu is too hard, but this was soft and tasted more like bacon than anything I’ve had in years.

The dumpling place—I only came here once this year, but it’s great if you’re looking for something easy and quick. Pick a filling, any filling, and the weight you want (usually 2-3 ounces), in addition to some simple cold salads and you’re good to go. Some of the fillings they might have would be any combination of beef, lamb, chicken, or pork with any kind of vegetable, vegetable fillings with egg, and of course seafood dumplings. When I went, we got pork and cabbage, green bean, lotus root and egg, and lamb with scallion. Sometimes the simplest things are best, especially drenched with lots of vinegar.

Another dish I love is zhou: there's a specific place we went to for it: known for health benefits, rice porridge is a way to get a lot of volume for very few carbs. You can get it either salty or sweet. Some zhou I've ordered in the past is mushroom and broccoli zhou and boneless fish zhou. Of course, Korea and Japan have their own versions, where the rice is already cooked and added to a broth, whereas in China the rice is cooked slowly like oatmeal into a thick porridge.

Of course, we had the occasional Korean

or Japanese meal.

And I always found time to grab one of the yogurts on the street—Chinese yogurt, although you can get it in the store, is always better served in the ceramic jugs that you drink on the spot with a straw. More of a drink than Western yogurt, it’s only slightly sweetened and is a wonderful thirst-quencher.

So that’s it! I’ll miss you, Beijing… I’m also in for a shock when I find out how expensive everything is when I get back.

Mountain climbing, rustic eating

I really need to speed post, since I'm leaving for Indonesia tomorrow for three days (not very long, I know, but it was one of those meeting deals where they pay for everything)! Sadly, we're going to the most touristy place in Bali, so I'm guessing the food won't be especially good. :(
Yesterday we decided to check out a new mountain, called Jiu Feng (Vulture's Peak). It was different from other mountains we had climbed before because it was rocky and steep all the way up-- plagued with mosquitos and wasps and the like, but that's not exactly unusual.
We found out there was no restaurant at the top, so we decided to stop for a very early lunch at a completely empty "nong jia can guan," which basically means country/peasant cooking. It wasn't as rustic or cheap as we would have liked, but they did have some interesting specialties. The problem was that my dad ordered enough for an army and we didn't want to be so full that we couldn't climb!
We ordered:
A salad of Chinese almonds (Which are actually apricot kernels) and wild vegetables picked on the mountain. This had a LOT of garlic, as well as vinegar. It was good, but too garlicky for my taste.
They also brought us a ridiculously bitter wild vegetable with a sesame dipping sauce, but it was so bitter none of us could eat it. A million times more bitter than bitter melon, if you've ever had that!
Grilled trout-- Usually I'm not into Chinese whole fish because it's soaked in chili oil and is much too greasy. This was totally like a western-style fish! It was perfectly crispy on the outside but not oily at all, with a little cumin sprinkled on top.
A kind of bing called shou zhua bing, which just means you're supposed to scoop it up with your hands.
My favorite-- simple, peasant style corncakes with absolutely no flavor. We couldn't finish them, so we took them up the mountain with us.
More ge da tang (the rustic soup I mentioned before), only this one was truly like a starch... no flavor whatsoever, except for some black pepper. It was wonderful, believe it or not, and had mountain vegetables floating in it.
We had to leave so much food :( what a shame.
The hike was beautiful! Some photos of the top:

On the way down, my dad and I stopped for a popsicle. We were both totally nostalgic, because we bought a "snow cake" (xue gao), which is basically milk, water, and sugar. The really old-school kind should just be a square without a popsicle stick, but this was still pretty good.
We also saw some people selling wild vegetables, apricot kernels, and dried cherries on the mountain.

More oatmeal and dinner at another old Beijing restaurant

I slept horribly last night. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was watching Buffy before bed (ANGEL. IS. SO. HOT.) or maybe because I was attempting to go to sleep before 10. I can feel my swimming suffering, and I really want to get more sleep. But instead it took me ages to settle down, and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed about hiding from monster trucks that were trying to drill out my teeth under sand dunes.
But I did have a great breakfast this morning! We had an overripe banana, and I decided, after reading about this method on a few other blogs, to mash it into the oats before cooking them. Banana raspberry hazelnut oatmeal

• 1/2 cup oats
• up to 1 cup milk (or water, or a mix)
• 1 banana
• a handful of rasberries
• 5 or 6 hazelnuts, chopped
  
• a spoonful of the most divine hazelnut honey i bought in Paris! This is not honey from hazelnut flowers (do those exist?), but rather a combination of honey and blended hazelnuts. So basically, a very sweet hazelnut butter.

Mash the banana into the oats and milk, then microwave or cook on stovetop until done. Add the rasberries and hazelnuts and dip your spoon in the honey so you can get a little bit with each bite.


Last night we wandered for ages through the park by our house (see very cheesy but nice picture of our building through the lotuses) to find somewhere to eat. We finally ended up going to this gigantic (it takes up an entire block, that's how long it is) Beijing noodle place. They almost try being deliberately un-fancy, like shouting how many people you are as loudly as possible as soon as you enter the door. We had been taken here by a friend last year, and I remember that my parents ordered zha jiang mian, noodles with a soysauce and pork sauce, and I ordered ma jiang mian, noodles with sesame paste. When you order noodles, they bring you a tray with your noodles, sauce, and chopped vegetables, then all of a sudden they flip each condiment dish into the noodles so quickly everything is literally a blur.
My mom ordered zha jiang mian and my dad ordered some noodles with an egg, pork, lily stem and tree ear sauce. I decided that I was really sick of noodles, so I ordered a kind of corn pancake topped with chinese chives, and just a little bit of egg and dried shrimp.
We also ordered stirfried spicy green pepper in a vinegar sauce that was delicious but a bit too cornstarchy, as well as a stirfry of a kind of chinese sauerkraut with glass noodles. This was GREAT, but unfortunately its picture makes it look disgusting.
My pancake was great! Very thin and almost like a corn tortilla. I got a bit scared by the shrimp, since they're tiny little shrimp with black eyes, but if I didn't look, all they did was add some extra saltiness to the pancake, which you were supposed to fold and eat like a taco. I suppose that's what it was-- a soft taco.
The only thing about this food was that it was SO EXPENSIVE for what it was! The food we had at our rustic place was so much better-- and do you know how much it was for 15 people? 180 yuan! that's less than 30 dollars. Last night's meal was 120, but I think that's also because we ordered chrysanthemum tea.
PS. check out what I saw on the way to the restaurant in a bakery window: FRENCH moon cakes! I don't know exactly what they would be like, but according to the poster, some of the flavors were hazelnut coffee, "seductive strawberry," and some kind of chocolate.