Old Year, New Year

Dear everyone, we hope you have a great 2012, that it brings contentment, joy, depth and beauty!

Devin, Merlin and I stayed up on the 31st (Dan's in China continuing research, writing, and helping his parents who have both been ill).  It was a beautiful surprise to have the weather clear enough to experience a firework-filled celebration.  From our house, which I sometimes call our Mountain Retreat (I try to remember that when I feel like complaining about the uphill walk), we can see above rooftops to the city center below.  Folks here really get into the fireworks displays and from just before midnight until after 1:00 am, it seemed the valley was just filled with showers and sparks and bright flowering bursts.  I'm sorry, I didn't take any pictures (and they'd be a paltry representation, anyway, without a zoom lens), but after all my years in towns where personal fireworks are mostly off limits, I have to say that this was a treat worth seeing.  Both girls enthusiastically endorsed being here for it again next year.

Up until the 29th of December, downtown Göttingen hosted a Christmas Market with booths filled with crafts and ornaments, winter specialties and eye candy (and real candy).  It was a relatively small market, just filling two small plazas, but we found ourselves continually entertained by just walking through the jostle and seeing what there was to see.

 

We didn't have a white Christmas (just rain and more rain), but it did snow once, sometime in December, and then promptly melted and we're still wondering if we're going to get to use our sled.  We did go ice skating, at the downtown indoor rink - it was pretty crowded and with the dim lighting, hard to take photos, but here are a few I got.  We look faster than we really are, but for a bunch of Californians, we weren't really too bad at it.  I think we can thank Sacramento's December rink for that.

Yes, that's Merlin in the maroon sweater.

And Devin, zipping by.

At least it snowed on our gingerbread houses...

and bonus points to anyone who can identify these (super extra bonus points if you know the Danish name, just because that's how I happen to call them):

Beijing Nights

A while back I meant to write a post about the night life on our street. It's a bustling place as soon as the lights go on and people come out of doors in search of a cheap and easy meal. All up and down the street vendors wheel their carts and three-wheeled bikes along the curb and open up shop, patching in to the electrical system to light their incandescent bulbs. Even as the weather gets chillier, they're still out there. There are big barrel ovens with baking sweet potatoes and small coal stoves heat big woks full of something that looks like black stones in which chestnuts are roasted. Other vendors have glass-faced shelf-boxes in which "kabobs" of fruit are laid, having been drizzled or dipped in a sugar syrup so they're gleaming and colorful.

The big draw are the carts that open up into trays of bubbling soup. Vegetables and meats are strung on kabob sticks and then customers come and choose what they want to set into the boiling, spicy soup. When they're cooked, you just pull it out and eat it.

We tried it but it was spicier than the girls liked, so it's not something we've done since, though we have gone out just to walk through the crowd and get a festive feeling.

some things we've learned

The trees do eventually lose their leaves, but not until late November. The only time you can find a good pile to go crunching through is in the early morning before they've been swept up and stuffed into plastic trash bags. Poplar leaves are good and crunchy.



In the winter the bushes wear coats. This is true not only on campus, but along the big boulevards, too.




Pizza can be successfully made in a toaster oven with regular bread dough and imported spaghetti sauce and Land O'Lakes cheese (they're in the international foods section of the big grocery store).


Oh, and a picture I'd saved from last summer, so you can compare a burning California with every day Asia (see the earlier post for the satellite pic of Beijing, and see here for an article on the Brown Cloud that Hangs Over Asia, as we've started calling it, in capital letters because that must be its proper name).

cookies, toaster-oven style

That day we were into baking cookies and such. Julie our friend, Devin, and I baked really yummy peanut butter cooties erm cookies. Guess what?! We were actually able to find Amazing Skippy Peanut butter!!! Just kidding about the Amazing, but we did find the peanut butter.

It was Julie's LUCKY DAY. Ye know why? Because she was able to bake (in a toaster oven) her first batch of cookies EVER!!!!! Isn't she cute? She's wearing our teddy bear apron while Devin and I wore our aprons from our Aunt Jessie.


Here we are smiling and happy, ready to eats tons of sugar while sneaking pieces of dough during the time that my mom was in the kitchen. Heehee ;0) smiley face winking yay!
Here are the good looking crunchy with a slightly golden touch to the cookies. It took aprox. 5-10 min to bake. My specialty, the slightly black ones (really I actually DO like the slightly over cooked ones).

Delicious, perfectly sweet, beautiful golden-brown, warm, great when dipped in refrigerated milk, and has the perfect touch of flavor. Yummmmmmm!!!!!! ^-^ :-) @.@ &.& *-* :P :D (these are all my creative invention of smiley faces)

last of the October updates

Devin and Merlin have a few things they've been meaning to post, delayed for no good reason other than that it takes some coordination to get kids, computer, and digital photos in the same place at the same time with a corresponding interest on the said kids' parts to actually sit down and write something. So, I'm not sure if we'll get any other posts up today, but hopefully we can wrap up posts of October's activities in the next few days.

In the meantime, I'll just throw on a few random pictures, just for fun and general audience edification.

Here's Merlin, working on some Chinese calligraphy, with Dan in the background. This was taken during Dan's students' cultural activity. In the future we may join them for papercutting, stone stamp carving and other language/art activities.We're welcoming Julie (obviously her English name, as most of you wouldn't be able to pronounce her Chinese name) as our new Chinese language instructor. She's a grad student at CUN, is also a tutor for Dan's students, and has become the best thing about living in Beijing. She's tons of fun and really good at getting us all to speak Chinese (her English is good too, so she can provide translation when we're stuck on a word). You'll be seeing her picture more often because we like to go on field trips with her. This semester's students have instituted a new tradition every time we eat out together: ku gua, or bitter melon, is the one dish that HAS to show up on the table, regardless of what kind of ethnic cuisine we're focusing on. Ku gua lives up to its name - it's phenomenally bitter, but oddly satisfying. A little bit goes a long way.
Sometimes there are fantastic things here, like a clop clopping coming up behind you, through the traffic,
and a new-found gustatory treasure: Jian bing - roughly a Chinese crepe, though it's a very wild cousin to the familiar French style. Here's one version, but just watch the video and you'll get a good idea of what's involved: batter, egg, cilantro, green onion, a jiang (a sauce, probably made of fermented soybeans and salt and other things, like a chunky miso), za cai (a salted/pickled vegetable), lettuce, a crispy fried sheet of something (tofu maybe, as per the website linked to above, though it looks like some vendors make it with youtiao, a type of fried dough/cruller thing), and then it's all wrapped up and delivered hot. I think this is the first time I've eaten a food created with a putty knife.



(hmm, maybe the video doesn't work? I'll keep trying...)

good company... and the food was pretty good too

Dan's oldest sister came to visit for a week this month. Dan was travelling and so we had her all to ourselves. We just mostly hung out, did our studies and projects and enjoyed her phenomenal cooking. That week also went a long way toward lessening the 'American Bubble' problem as Da GuMa (as the kids refer to her) doesn't speak English. I saw a big improvement in everyone's ease of conversation, the general fluency, even if our vocabularies are still lacking.

We got to enjoy great dishes like bai jiao and doufu gan - I haven't any idea what bai jiao is in English, the dictionary says it's "wild rice shoots" but that doesn't make sense, plus it's a large piece of plant compared to what I'd expect a rice shoot to look like. Doufu gan is tofu, pressed and seasoned.

More tofu, this time little tofu-puffs with bok choy (bai cai or qing cai in Mandarin).
Yummy soups, with dong gua (winter melon) or daikon radish, tomatoes, sometimes meatballs...
...and just a generally fabulous spread. I tend to cook extremely simply - the most you'll ever get out of me is probably 4 dishes since I don't multitask well in the kitchen (I can only oversee one cooking thing at a time unless things are supposed to be burnt).
We were all reluctant to let her return to Hangzhou. Perhaps we'll be able to visit all the family over the Chinese New Year holiday next year.

one really long noodle

(trying out Blogger's video function - let me know what you think, compared to the YouTube versions I've posted before)

forager mode

One of my very, very most favorite things to do is forage. Usually that means happening upon someone else's post-northwind fallen lemons as I walk the kids to school (no not here in Beijing, I'm talking about Davis), but if I could, I'd spend lots of time also out looking for wild foods. This last year my big food and medicine harvests were chickweed, wild mustard and radish greens, pie cherries, elderberries, rosehips, apples, jujubes, oranges, comfrey, calendula, pomegranates, and mullein. If I had my way, I'd be living somewhere where I could forage a good amount of our food and have that as an excuse to spend my time outside, walking around, talking to plants.

I did notice a pomegranate "bush" a few weeks ago (still blooming, as the seasons seem later here than in Davis), and that reminded me of how little I've actually seen here. There's something that looks suspiciously like lambsquarters, and though I know it's a chenopodium, I'm not sure which one. Anyway, I don't feel like eating anything growing here - there's too much dirt.

We also received a box of hongzao (Chinese red dates, that aren't really dates, but rather jujubes) from a friend of Dan's and I remembered last year's harvest from the nooks and crannies of Village Homes (people there don't know what to do with them and so they fall to the sidewalk and rot) which produced such incredibly good dried hongzao.

I looked back and found that the jujube's were ready in October, but I began harvesting the elderberries, apples, and rosehips right around the first of September. I'll write later about the jujubes.

Here's what I wrote about it last year:

I've been reveling in unemployment. I can do whatever I want so long as we're fed, rested, and the appropriate study has taken place. After that it's free-for-all. Woohoo!

This week, since we got home from all our travels I've been in major forager, stock up for winter, mode.

I've come across elderberries which I've dehydrated, frozen or made into jam.

There were lots of windfall apples to be sliced and dehydrated or made into applesauce.

I also just finished a batch of beef jerky and now I've got more elderberries going.

Another bucket of rosehips are next.

I love the dehydrator I brought back from MD. It was my aunt's old one which she never used and I'm using it all the time.

I also happened upon a tomato plant somebody pulled out of their garden (in this same "green" development mentioned below) and set by the curb - with lots of little cherry tomatoes on it - so I helped myself to a huge bowlful. And we've enjoyed them for the past few days.

I'll just go out every morning before it gets too hot to see what I can find. It's great!

Observations during my foraging journeys: I'm nervous about being caught though in actuality most people are only curious. For the wild edibles most people don't even know what I'm picking and a few have asked. My nervousness comes simply from my desire to go about unwatched. The apples, being windfall over in the nearby housing development are somewhat trickier - they ARE on people's property (even though I'm pretty much only picking up what I can reach from the sidewalk), but I'm still self-conscious about being there. I feel like I could identify with Gypsy people who always get sidelong glances and silent judgments for such behaviour. But I've benefitted from these plants' bounty and I'm not self-conscious enough to give it up so I'll be back at it tomorrow, looking for more apples or maybe hong zao (aka jujube) which is a traditional Chinese food/herb. Unfortunately I missed the sour cherries (those are fabulous but ripen in July). There are some figs but they're way up in the trees.

Maybe there'll be a few pomegranates.

I love, absolutely love foraging for edibles and herbs.

The Kingdom of Really Good Popsicles

I do believe we've found the popsicle holy-land, here in China. We never knew what was possible, being from the land of something as weird as Otter Pops. Having given up on popsicles in the U.S., other than the ones we made ourselves (coconut/pineapple juice with banana - yum!), we've been converted!

Here's what we've found so far:

Hawthorn - tart and sweet
Cantaloupe/Honeydew (two flavors, two colors, swirled)
Sweet Red Bean (Dan's favorite)
Sweet Mung Bean (surrounded by vanilla ice)
Yogurt (tangy sweet)
Green Apple 'Jello' - as it melts it's actually jello-y
Yogurt with dried pineapple and raisins
Pineapple with icy crunches in the middle
Orange - with orange flavored ice on the outside and 50/50 style orange & cream on the inside
Orange and honey with chunks of orange-y ice and orange zest throughout
Purple taro root - admittedly, not that tasty
Strawberry
Coffee ice cream
Coconut
Bubblegum flavor
Iced Honey Peach
Kiwi
Milk - kind of like sweet milk (ice milk maybe)
Cake (like a white cake)

The smart things: the icy coating on some keeps the softer 'ice-cream' in the middle from melting too quickly and contains it when it does start to melt; the icy chunks in the middle are tasty and fun to crunch without being too hard.

posted by all of us.

Hong Dou Baozi

I used to make these back in the U.S., but figured I wouldn't be making them much, once we got to China. It turns out, though, that they're not very common in our neighborhood. We used to get really great ones in Hangzhou - very fluffy and packed with sweet red-bean paste. The little shop that sold them also sold really good vegetable buns as well as pork buns. I assumed we'd find pretty much the same thing in Beijing, but though northerners are known for their diet that includes more wheat, there's a serious lack of good steamed buns in our immediate vicinity.

The supermarket carries one version of hong dou baozi, but we all agreed that they were mediocre: too much dry bread and not enough smooth, tasty bean paste.

I foundpackages of dousha (the sweet red bean filling) on the supermarket shelf so knew success was close behind (that was half the battle, just finding that there actually was adzuki bean paste available). I have a recipe for dousha though I've never made it - it's available at the Korean store (Kim's Mart, which is owned by our friends/former neighbors) and it is cheap and easy to just buy it.

Anyway, I never really learned an official version of hong dou baozi, I just modified a bread recipe I used to use - you could use any recipe you're more familiar with if you wish.

This time, since I don't have my baking utensils, I just measured by eye - it turned out just fine, but I'll give you the measurements so you have an idea of what you're working with.

Bread recipe:

1/4 cup warm water (not too hot)
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp yeast

Mix these three ingredients together in a small bowl - let sit for about 10 minutes, so the yeast can proof.

In a large bowl add:

2 cups water
2 Tbsp oil
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar

Mix these. After the yeast has proofed, add it to the liquids in the large bowl.

6 cups of flour can be gradually added to the liquids. Eventually it'll become dough and be very sticky. Keep adding flour until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl. Keep stirring, trying to incorporate as much of the flour as possible early on.

When it becomes too stiff to stir, flour your table surface well and put the dough on that. Flour your hands and start kneading, adding more flour as the dough reveals its true stickiness.

You may need to add an additional 1/2 cup of flour or so. No worries. Just keep kneading, until the dough is supple and smooth which will indicate that the gluten is well developed.

At this point I wash the large bowl and then coat it lightly with vegetable oil. When I'm sure I've kneaded the dough long enough, I set the dough ball in, upside down, flip it over (so it's gotten lightly oiled all over) and then cover it and leave it to sit. Your rising time will vary depending on how warm your house is. Let it rise until it's doubled in size (more or less) but not so long that when you stick your finger in it it gives a big sigh and collapses completely.

Deflate the dough gently, then let it sit for about ten or fifteen minutes - it would be fine to take it out of the bowl and let it sit on the table.

Divide the dough into four equal pieces - set three of the pieces aside and cover them with plastic wrap so they don't dry out. Make a "snake" of the one other piece (a very very thick snake with about a 1 1/2 to 2 inch diameter) and cut it into rounds so that when you roll them in your hand they'll end up about ping-pong ball sized (or maybe like a golf ball would be ok). Roll them all into balls and let them sit, covered, while you work with each one.

Now you're ready to make the baozi.

Take a ball and roll it out with a rolling pin so that it maintains its circular shape (not elongating into an oval). The Chinese way to do this is to hold the dough in one hand and the rolling pin in the other (Chinese rolling pins are like dowels with curved edges, so you can use it one-handedly) and the hand holding the dough rotates it after each stroke of the rolling pin so that all parts of the edge get flattened. The middle usually ends up a little thicker. The point here is that you should just do what works best for you.

When you have a nicely flattened round that's about 1/4 inch thick, take a spoonful of the dousha and put it right in the center.

At this next point I can't pretend I'm any good at making baozi - Real Chinese Baozi-Makers are impressively nimble-fingered and they turn out beautiful creations. Amateurs like me - well, I'm a little slow and I always end up saying, "Yep, they're ugly but they still taste good."

I use a method for wrapping them up that is more akin to dumpling wrappers, but it works - it holds the dousha in for the amount of time it takes to steam and eat the bun. I don't know if it'll translate well as a written description, but here goes:

Holding the dough round (with it's dousha in the middle) in my left hand, I use my right thumb, index and middle fingers to pinch the edge of the dough like I might to make a pie crust edge. Pinching it tightly, I walk my fingers forward to make another pinch - effectively making small waves in the edge of the dough as I go around the circle, pinching each one to the one previously made. Around, around, and at the end I just pinch it some more.

You migh wish to follow Merlin's instructions - " close it up into any shape, just make sure it's closed." That's what we normally do when I have help - we end up a with a hodge-podge of shapes that we then try to identify after steaming ("oh, that's the cranky bull-dog!" "look, there's your purse!").

When you have enough to fill your steamer basket... oh yeah, you need some steaming apparatus, generally a large pot, a tray to set all the baozi out of the water, and some sort of perforated dish or something like that on which they can be lowered and lifted out of the pot. I've used bamboo steamers, vegetable steamers, and the like - a colander might even work.

Ok, when you have enough to fill your steamer basket, go ahead and set them with a little space around each bun. Then put them into the pot and turn the heat on. Steam them for 10 minutes - start timing once you see actual steam coming out of the pot.

At the end of ten minutes, turn off the heat and remove the buns to a rack to cool. They're edible as soon as they're handle-able.

This recipe makes a bunch (it's enough dough to make four loaves of bread) but we end up eating them fast - and I usually take a good portion of them, after they've cooled, and stick them in the freezer. They make for a fast, easy breakfast because they just need to be re-steamed for a few minutes (maybe 5?) to defrost and be ready to serve.

I think the packages of dousha I usually buy only end up containing enough for 3/4 of the dough. This time I experimented with the remaining dough and found that indeed you can bake bread in a toaster oven. I baked it as though I was making pull-apart rolls simply because I knew the toaster oven would have the tendency to overcook the outside and leave the inside gooey. This way, with spaces in the middle and fewer thick areas, the dough ended up baking evenly.

Yummy!

Sunday "baking"

We made hong dou baozi, which are steamed red-bean buns. To make them you first make a dough ball.






You knead it for about 20 minutes. Be sure to put flour on the table so it doesn't stick.













Let it rise. When it is done rising divide the dough into small balls then put flour on your spot on the table and flatten out each ball one at a time with a rolling pin.












Then, using the red bean paste that you have, put a spoonful into the flattened out dough and close it up into any shape, just make sure it's closed.

















Then, steam it.






I like making hong dou baozi. I like to eat them too.











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posted by Merlin
recipe to follow...