Entangled in Vietnam

What would Vietnam be like if I were Vietnamese?

This is what I kept wondering last week.

Sitting in a taxi at a light in Saigon, I glanced out the window and saw a line of scooter riders burst into laughter. Someone at the back of the lineup must have said something funny, and because they were all out there riding together, uninsulated from each others' conversations by sound-proof windows and doors, all the riders cracked up together. I wanted to be out there with them, it seemed so fun!

With my fair skin, blondish hair, and height (nearly 5'10"), my chances of blending into a lineup of scooter riders in Saigon -- where 99.6+% of the population is either Vietnamese or Chinese -- was exactly nil. Alongside my 6'1", bright-blue-eyed sweetheart E--, I was even more conspicuous. Conspicuously not belonging in Saigon was not fun.

Fifteen minutes after we set foot in the city, we found ourselves pulled over to the side of the road in a dirty, limping taxi reeking of cigarette smoke, with the driver forcibly renegotiating the price of the fare to the hotel. Boy, did he not know who he was dealing with! E-- dug in his damn heels and told the driver he was happy to sit there all night. The man finally relented and drove us back to the airport (with the supposedly non-functioning meter now running). When he left us in the back seat with our luggage locked in the trunk, E pulled the keys out of the ignition, liberated our suitcases, and promptly found us another (over-priced) ride into the city, while the frustrated driver circled us, complaining and nipping at his heels.

The front desk staff of the supposedly five-star Legend Hotel expressed their regret at our unfortunate taxi experience and promptly tried to rip us off on our hotel room. The river view room with king-size bed, for which we paid a premium, was no longer available, but they *could* sell us an executive suite or somesuch. I went and sat down somewhere else. Five minutes later E-- came back with the keys to the room we'd reserved. I didn't ask. His approach isn't always elegant ;-)

My Lonely Planet guide, after enumerating all of the nasty things that can happen to you in Vietnam -- including being handed a chloralhydrate-laced Coke on a long distance bus and waking up without your luggage -- advises, "Don't be overly paranoid," and "Don't assume that everyone's a thief -- most Vietnamese are honest." (Lonely Planet's Vietnam, p.482)

Righto.

So, should we have handed over our passports to the smiling, friendly owner of the Condao Seatravel Resort, who apparently "needed" to keep them to register us with the police? E-- who was not heeding Lonely Planet's advice against paranoia, thought not.

And actually, after our ride into the town of Con Son in a crappy little minivan, past abandoned, dirty-looking buildings, to the dismal little swamp of a resort (imagine a trailer park in NH) -- and after watching a group of teenagers swarm behind E-- as he ran over the dirty sand studded with paint cans, alongside the grayish water floating filthy fishing boats, to urgently haul my butt back to the airport -- we wondered if we ought not be more paranoid about taking Lonely Planet's advice about where to spend our vacation. These are the Con Dao Islands we were expecting to find:

"Isolated from the mainland, the Con Dao Islands are one of the star attractions in Vietnam.""Con Son, the largest of this chain of 15 islands and islets, is ringed with lovely beaches, coral reefs and scenic bays, and remains partially covered in thick forests."
"Con Dao is one of those rare places in Vietnam where there are virtually no structures over two storeys, and where the traveler's experience is almost hassle-free."
(Lonely Planet's Vietnam, pp. 407-408)

But actually, it wasn't just Lonely Planet that was full of s***. The NYTimes was completely misleading too. From their article "Finding a More Serene Vietnam":

"As the sun's last rays streaked the sky bubble-gum pink and tangerine, the residents of Con Dao Island were calling it a day..."
"Teenage boys pulled up on Honda scooters, kicking off their shoes and rolling up their jeans to play soccer on the white sand;"
"Con Dao is one of Southeast Asia's most untouched and breathtaking getaways."

"The azure waters are brimming with Vietnam's best coral reefs."

Where did this BS come from?

On the flight back from Con Dao, two hours after we landed, we met an expat dude in the travel business who also lives in Vietnam. Not a happy camper! As I was stewing in guilt over having chosen this dismal destination instead of the purportedly idyllic Phu Quoc Islands ("fringed with exquisite white-sand beaches lined with swaying palms and gently lapping turquoise waters," p. 464, Lonely Planet's Vietnam) -- he instantly laid my mind to rest. "It's pretty much like this, only bigger (the size of Singapore), and with fewer roads." This man travels to Hong Kong for his vacations. No joke!

Another visitor to Con Dao told us he'd tried to snorkel, but that the men who ran the boat felt the weather was too rough to go out. The weather seemed fine to him, but no go. He and his partner had taken their own snorkel gear out at low tide. "Did you see anything?" No.

Some people in Saigon were straight with us. One woman pointed us in the right direction after a taxi drove us around in circles for 20 minutes not finding the address he said he knew. We were amazed -- she actually helped us? And, there was Mr. Binh, who gave us a pedicab tour of the outlying districts of Saigon (Q. 5, 8, and 10), all for the very reasonable price he originally quoted us! E-- was grumpy and sunburnt after two hours sucking exhaust in Saigon traffic, but I saw some interesting things...
Two mattresses on a pedicab.

Fresh squash blossoms for sale.


A motorbike market.


People drying food leftovers to feed to their pig.

Young men peeling sugarcane for $3/day.

Ouch. Mr. Binh said that these young men probably lived in apartments with five other people, paying around $200/month in rent. So, let's see, that means roughly 4x6 days a week x $3 = $72/mo income, $33.33 of which (46%) going to rent. Some pretty mean economics.

Given this equation, it's easy to understand why so many Vietnamese we interacted with pushed for the very last 10,000 vnd (roughly $0.50) they could get out of us. On the advice of NYTimes again (while I never learn?), we went to Minh Duc Restaurant to try the carmelized pork belly which " was so tender it came apart in chunks when my chopsticks hit it." Yeah, right. The pork belly I tried was hard and dry. Anyway, when they tallied the bill for my little snack, three young men watched and laughed as we paid up 55,000 vnd ($2.82). When someone laughs at me for being a fool, I feel mean. "Oh yeah, buddy," I thought, "the joke's on you. If you only knew what we paid for dinner at Pierre in HK -- ha!"

Good lord, am I a jerk or what? I thought about it afterward...shouldn't I just chill out when someone rips me off for $1.25? When the ride from the airport costs $10 instead of $5? Even $25 instead of $5? I mean, I paid 30 Euros for a plug adapter in Spain, for God's sake! In Spain the streets are smooth, the air is clean, the buildings are well-preserved, and the price is on the package. That's worth a whole lot more to me than I realized.

When we first arrived in Saigon, I had an amazing meal at a food stall in Ben Thanh market: goi cuon with bright, fresh basil, savory pork and shrimp, accompanied by sweet and salty peanut sauce; roasty-wokky rice vermicelli with crab meat; a perfectly blended icy drink of coconut and lime. After those first bites, I looked up at E-- blissfully and said, "This is my cuisine!" (You'll notice there are no photos. Why? We endured so much heckling from the vendors and so much price-changing that E-- was on the edge of his tiny stool ready to bolt the second I let go of my chopsticks.)

Later, we had an excellent meal at Com Nieu Sai Gon restaurant, where the atmosphere was tranquil, the waiters were friendly and helpful, and we experienced one of the edible highlights of the trip: Deep-fried squash blossoms stuffed with pork, dipped in hot sauce.

This picture doesn't do it justice. The deep-frying left the blossoms delicately crispy with almost no trace of grease. The filling was juicy with mellow, well-integrated flavors. The hot sauce was tangy and biting. Yum, yum, and yum. Thank you, Anthony Bourdain, for this recommendation.

Another fabulous food experience: fresh watermelon and guava juice with homemade strawberry ice cream at Ngoc Suong. This is my kind of ice cream float -- fabulously refreshing! This one left a permanent imprint on my grastronomic memory. Yum, yum, yum, yum.

I keep wanting this story to roll up into some neat narrative: Vietnam's a hassle, but there are some very cool people there. Vietnam's a hassle, but that's understandable since the economic disparity between travelers and residents is so extreme. Vietnam's a hassle, but the food is phenomenal. Well, guess what, not all of the food is phenomenal! We had some outrageously bad food. I feel obligated to publicly shame these restaurants because they charged higher prices than any other places we patronized. We had offensively-flavorless food and ridiculous service at Nam Phan, named by the noodlepie food blog as "best high end Vietnamese." We paid one million dong for a shopping mall food court quality meal in the lounge area of Temple Club, where the staff allowed a pack of children to go wild, jumping on the couches near us. Again, thanks Lonely Planet and NYTimes for this fabulous tip!

We also had some decent, but unimpressive, food at The Refinery and Hoa Tuc.

Fleeing early from our so-called vacation, I was left with the impression that people in Vietnam are friendly, flexible, tough, and not-to-be-messed with. I am also certain that there is breathtaking food to be eaten there. I am also certain that I'd never attempt to travel in Vietnam again without a guide because every interaction I had left me feeling like Brer Fox with his paws stuck to the tar baby.

I don't know whether Guanxi exists in Vietnam, but my sense that one simply gets eaten alive there without connections, all of a sudden gave me a really clear understanding of why it is considered so essential in Asia.

Long legs in Spain

This is spooky, right?

It's ham. In Spain. And yet...it's so much more than ham, no?

I found myself in the doorway of this shop in Donostia-San Sebastián gawking at this strange food/aparatus...and thinking, "Whoa." Then J--'s friend M-- came up next to me and said, "Whoa!"

It's a strange brew of associations. I'm getting....



Marlene Dietrich's legs photographed by Milton Greene (the abstraction of the leg)



A leg brace (why does the leg of ham need to be braced in *that* particular position, I wonder...).



Pointe shoes (a leg with a hoof always looks like someone standing on tippy-toes)



And, of course, pigs. A happy, healthy, college-educated, organic, tax-paying, liberal, pata negra.

Then I think, this is just my dirty mind. Spanish people are not mixing swine and sensuality. This is just a practical solution for getting the perfect slice of cured meat and simultaneously showing patrons that this is a pata negra. No big deal, just food, right? Move along, move along.

But later that evening I found myself eating...



...a pig's ear.

It was so delicate, so tender, like biting into a little piece of pork chop fat. There's something disconcertingly intimate about having something that soft between your teeth. And then the very idea of nibbling on an ear makes one (not me, of course) think of nibbling on a lover's ear...

Well, anyway.

Then the NEXT day at my friends J-- and N--'s wedding, there was an enormous cart of fresh oysters...



So I was trying, nonchalantly, to gobble down as many of them as I possibly could while not being noticed standing nearly 6' tall in a hot pink dress. Just act cool and maybe nobody will notice that that's your sixth oyster. I'm not very good at hiding my feelings and my enjoyment must have been apparent because people began handing me oysters, which was kind of embarrassing, but also kind of convenient. And then...

A pretty woman in a bright red blouse reached over and popped a piece of...ham...in my mouth.

Oh yum. Oh wow. The flavor was so clear, like a bell ringing in my mouth. The meat was naturally sweet, not sweet like some honey-baked-ham nonsense, but sweet like the flesh of pigs who are blissed out because they have been eating acorns all day, *their* own bliss food. Sort of a bliss chain: the pigs were drunk on pleasure, so I was drunk on pleasure...

I think the Spanish are just more comfortable with pleasure. I mean, look at this...



This is not a silly postcard picture. This is just one exquisite hour of the day in Donostia-SS, where the light and sky and ocean are one continuous drama. I said to N--, "Do you realize how scandalous it is that you live around this kind of natural beauty every day?" People live in places like Ploiest, Romania:



Or, you know...Hong Kong:



Well, anyway, what I'm saying is, those Spanish (and Basque and Andalusian) folks are just way more comfortable with way more pleasure, and it shows in their food.

Me, a VIP?

You know you're a VIP when someone snaps their fingers and the world's most perfect hairy crab appears on the shimmering silver tablecloth in front of you. Then, after you open the shell like the hood of a VW Bug and savor the delicious egg yolk-like roe, a silent girl appears at your elbow and shells the rest of the crab for you, placing tender morsels of flesh in a saucer of black vinegar for you to nibble. When you're finished, you bathe your fingertips in a bowl of cool tea and sip a cup of potent ginger something. And it looks like a grenade went off on your plate...



What, you mean not everyone lives like this? (Shocking!)

Oh, and did I mention that our host sent us home with two containers filled to the brim with living, bubbling hairy crabs for my friend J-- to take to her family? J-- giggled while she lifted the lid of one container to show me ten bound creatures stacked one on top of the other. I got a mental jolt when I realized they reminded me of diagrams I've seen of 18th century slave ships.

But let's not get morbid here! They're just crabs and anyway we did go to a Buddhist temple earlier that day, where we were ushered behind the velvet VIP ropes to do VIP prayers, so that should cover us for any animal-related karma, right? This was after we had an exquisite multi-course vegetarian meal at the restaurant attached to Hanshan Temple.

It started out with refreshing glasses of gold and green young bamboo tea and little plates of fascinating appetizers (seaweed, wheat gluten, pumpkin mousse, etc.).



Then, out came a beautiful cuttlefish stir-fry on a plate adorned with a darling little bird sitting on a branch, all carved out of carrot.



Of course the cuttlefish was not cuttlefish, but its texture was just as delightfully chewy, and its sauce had a yummy peanutty-or-sesamy-y roasty flavor to it. And, as I mentioned, the bird was not a bird, it was a carrot ;-) Ah, the art of artifice.

What next?

A "fish" with a butternut Buddha! Everyone gasped in amazement. The Buddha was really a gourd, of course, and the "fish" was something marvelously crispy on the outside and dense and mellow on the inside (taro?), in a perfectly balanced sweet-sour sauce. Neither J-- nor I could stop eating this dish.



And just as I was sitting, blissed out, fumbling with a big slice of sticky fish with my slippery chopsticks, the extremely attentive waitress made an ostentacious display for our hostess of bringing the bumbling barbarian (me) a fork!

Grrr.

Later in the day, after handing me some delicious local street snack, someone else said to me cheerfully, "Better than pizza."

(!)

Being of Italian descent, I find this to be one of the toughest parts of Chinese culture to accept: permanent outsider status. The concept of being hosted with warmth and generosity while simultaneously being held at arm's length continues to confound me. But I try not to take it personally, especially after hearing how when a Chinese language teacher I met and her Australian husband would celebrate Ching Ming festival with her family, he was relegated to the lowest status position in the ceremonies, above only his own children. Again, the Italian in me says, What!? Once you are in the family, you're in the family and that trumps all. Not so in China. Doesn't matter who you marry. If you're not Chinese, you're still on the outside.

Granted, my persistently poor chopstick skills and failure to learn Putonghua might have something to do with the barbarian perception too.

Mercifully, my friend J-- is as fluent in my native Bay Area micro-culture as she is in her native culture, and treated me like an intelligent human being while guiding me through not behaving like an ass with her friends and family (at least I hope she did). And she also gave me a different kind of VIP treatment when we visited her hometown Guangzhou -- introducing me to her favorite foods.

One of my favorites among her favorites was breakfast at her mom's house including fresh, delicate, mellow-tasting cheong fan. Cheong fan are sheets of thin rice noodle made by brushing a rice mixture over cloth and steaming. How wonderful is that? It's poetic. It's awesome. You can eat cheong fan wrapped around fried crispy sticks or enfolding savory mushrooms or simply plain. All were delicious!





Another favorite was actually an entire meal at a restaurant called Bing Sheng. Apparently the restaurant started out as a snack joint, but continued building on its success and is now a group of restaurants with elegant, spacious interiors and beautifully prepared food. By beautifully-prepared I don't mean stiff, technical cooking, like what you get at Fook Lam Moon. The dishes we had at Bing Sheng were pretty homestyle -- char siu, stir-fried pig's innards, a simple crushed peanut pastry -- but the flavors and textures were nailed to perfection, judged by a standard of eating, not food theory. But then again, I'm a barbarian, what do I know ;-) For the record, the durian pastries appeared to be both technically and gastronomically perfect...









We ate so many other yummy things in such a short period of time -- dried fish skin with roasted peanuts, Chinese mango ice cream (exceptionally smooth, but not creamy), steamed milk, crispy duckling...the list goes on. But one I have to mention because it immediately lodged in my culinary reference bank: hot fresh soy milk. J-- is an enthusiast so we had this many times during our trip. At first you taste it and it tastes plain, raw, bean-y. Then you relax into how mellow it is, comforting and satisfying without being overly rich. Meanwhile the lasting impression is of freshness. Refreshing and warm? What an unusual combination. It's lovely. I would have it every day if I could. Here's a photo from Yun B&B in Shanghai, where the cook served us hot fresh soy milk with spring onion pancakes for breakfast...

Enchanting medicine

I am sick *again.* We did back-to-back colds this month. E was down with crazy aches, pains, shivers, flushes, and stomach hoo-ha for two weeks, then I picked it up for about a week, and then about five days later we both looked at each other and said, "Oh no, do you feel something in the back of your throat?"

And so, I've spent some time perusing the shelves of the local pharmacy and unexpectedly finding myself captivated by Chinese medicines. The packaging is charming and irresistible to me. Take, for instance this box of Po Chai Pills...

Po Chai Pills, incidentally, are "good for" fever, diarrhoea, intoxication, over-eating, vomiting and gastrointestinal diseases. According to Wikipedia, Po Chai Pills were developed in 1896.

The box they come in was clearly not designed in 2010. Looking at the picture above, can you see the HK skyline on the front from 20+ years ago? No 118-floor ICC building! Also, if you look at all of those intricate scrolls around the solemn doctor's portrait, they're actually embossed in the cardboard. And there are reflective dots with iridescent Chinese characters you can see if you hold the box at an angle with the light.

Then, when you open the box, there are floral patterns on the box flaps that are so enchanting. I feel like they are the curtains of a theater, drawing me into the interior. What will I find next?



Tiny little Russian dolls (or Chinese dolls)! The big box is stuffed with a dozen or more little boxes with an even smaller rendition of the solemn doctor's face on them. Meanwhile a faint, spicy aroma drifts up from the box's interior...



And then...a plastic vial of brick-red balls with both Chinese and English writing: "Made in Hong Kong." On the top of the teeny plastic vial, four teeny-tiny Chinese characters.



The balls are dry and crunchy, with a mild, bitter, herbal flavor -- not unpleasant if you just chew a few. Am I supposed to chew them? I don't know. The box just says to take 2 bottles every two hours, four times daily. When E tried taking them, he emptied an entire vial into his mouth and chewed! Ack! Now he refuses to take them anymore. Whoops ;-)

The main ingredients are totally mysterious to me:

• Poria
• Radix Aucklandiae
• Herba Pogostemonis
• Semen Coicis (eh?)
• Rhizoma Atractylodis
• Radix Puerariae Lobatae

Apparently there was recently controversy about Po Chai Pill ingredients. In March of this year, the HK government recalled the product because the capsule form in Singapore was found to contain phenolphthalein and sibutramine, which can cause very serious side effects. In May, the HK gov gave Po Chai Pills the green light as tests of the bottle form samples showed no evidence of "the two western medicines."

Autumn green

Over Skype last week, M&D (mom and dad) were telling me how the light had suddenly and noticeably changed in Southern Oregon, where they live. Autumn is here.

Looking on the map, I see that their latitude (~42 degrees N) is comparable to that of Sapporo or Beijing (~43 N and ~40 N, respectively). In the winter the sun sets as early as 4:30. In the summer, the days stretch until 9 o-clock. In mid-Maine (~44 N), where E has spent many summers, the days stretch and shrink a lot too during the year.

Hong Kong latitude is 22° 15' 0" N. So the days did not get long here in the summer. On the summer solstice, the sun set at 7:10. On the winter solstice, it will set at 5:44.

Even without the cooling light, we feel autumn coming. Part of it is that this marks a full year for us in HK. E put his feet down September 1, and I followed in early October. So we're marking the beginning of a new year, a going-back-to-school feeling.

The other part is that the physical environment *is* changing here too, only not in the way we're used to. The concentrated heat and humidity are receding. Although still hot (~26-30 C), it was pleasant enough the other weekend to walk The Morning Trail, heading east on Robinson Road from our apartment, up Hatton Road, out of the traffic onto a pedestrian trail covered with trees, all the way up to the Peak. I love this walk. The round-trip is about 10K.

Once we reached the top, the views were spectacular. But it's funny -- there are great views all over HK -- so I found myself facing away from the black iron railing and looking at the spectacular colors of the moss growing on the rocks. HK may not have deciduous trees, but after the long, hot, wet summer, the moss turns orange, gold, and electric green:





I had these colors fresh in my mind (and my iPhone) when we finally celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival last Wednesday with our friends A and F.

We started by watching the Tai Hang Fire Dragon dance in Tin Hau, in which a long, scraggly strip of something is stuck all over with incense sticks to appear like a fearsome smoking dragon and paraded through the streets with loud drums. To tell the truth, after getting pushed and shoved by highly respectable HK ladies while we waited for an hour, I would have preferred to watch this YouTube video instead!

The evening took a more charming turn when F and her friend S insisted on lighting beautiful little autumn lanterns with real candles inside. There is something so magical about real candlelight. It reminds me of my childhood going to Waldorf school, and the Anthroposophic exercise of simply observing a candle as a way of meditating on one of the fundamental impulses in the world (light, illumination, awareness, goodness...). The meditation is not *thinking* about light, it's paying attention and experiencing it directly in a very simple form.



Next, we ate.

A is always introducing us to delightful new things. He's totally low-key about it, but something intriguing invariably shows up at the table. This evening it was sea snails.

They were green. The same vivid green as the moss on the Peak, mixed in with grays and blacks.

I so wish I'd taken a photograph, but you know, sometimes whipping out your iPhone and hovering over everyone's food when they're hungry kind of kills the moment. So, here, courtesy of a blog called Japanitup is a photo of a sea snail (this one's not green, though).



What does a sea snail taste like? Not much, to tell the truth. But again, asking what something tastes like is so *Western* now, isn't it? The better question here is what was the texture like? I honestly didn't look at it too closely because I am still a wimp. But once it was in my mouth, my tongue and teeth told me the snail had two parts: one part had a chew that kept on chewing, the other part started out chewy, but eventually gave way to my teeth and broke into bits.

I don't remember a distinctive flavor, but the snails had a noticeable freshness to them. Not fishy at all.

We used long wooden skewers to pull our snails from their shells and dip them in a little sauce that tasted like ceviche. I don't know for sure, but I'm assuming it had lemon, coriander (aka cilantro), and onion or perhaps shallot? It was fresh and delicious. E ate TWO snails! I'm so proud of him. But he does love to dip.

Where did we eat? I have no clue. It was a brand-new hot pot joint in Tin Hau on the second floor off Electric Road. That's as much as I noticed because my eyes were fixed on the paper lantern with the "naked flame" that I was carrying on the tip of a wooden stick through crowds of people, up the steps, and to our table before I blew the candle out.

Drying ducks

Ta da!

This is my duck.

It's the first duck I've ever cooked in my life. It's a Cantonese roast duck and it was delicious.

What is the difference between Cantonese roast duck and Peking duck? Aha, good question. My duck instructor, who incidentally has taught the Cantonese Roast Duck class 40 times in 33 years of teaching at Towngas, was emphatic:

Peking duck is all about the skin. Cantonese duck meat is more delicious.

With Peking duck, they carefully extract the organs through a small hole to keep the skin intact. Then, they blow up the duck like a balloon, which separates the skin from the flesh and makes it roast more crisply. Obviously, this is done with an air pump in most restaurants, but I have to include this crazy photo -- courtesy of a Web site called The Labyrinth -- showing a (Japanese?) chef blowing up a duck with his mouth.



With a Peking duck, the skin is the main event. You cut gorgeous little rounds of crispy skin and fat with just a sliver of meat attached, and wrap it up in a fresh flour pancake with hoisin sauce, spring onion, and cucumber. There are many variations on the condiments, actually (and check out the amazing chopstick technique in the video too!).

Since a Cantonese roast duck is not inflated, the chef can get inside and season it thoroughly so that the flesh is delectable. In preparing our ducks, we first dried out the body cavity with paper towels, then gave it a splash of Mei Kwei Lu Chiew, which is a brand of "baiju" or white liquor, which is made from sorghum and flavored with rose. Then we rubbed the inside of the duck with salt, sugar, and five-spice powder, and tossed in star anise, sliced ginger, and crushed shallots.

The importance of this seasoning cannot be under-estimated. The aroma of the shallots and anise and duck fat are mind-bending; and the flavor infuses to the meat so it is absolutely delectable.

But the skin of the Cantonese duck is exquisite as well: delicately crispy, with more of the fat melted away, so your teeth get just a little playful resistance and then they sink into the rich, flavorful meat.

With both the Peking and the Cantonese ducks an absolutely essential step in preparation is drying. This is really different than any roasting of chickens I have done in Western recipes. It's not just giving the bird a wipe-down with paper towels. Grace Young describes the ideal approach in The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen:

"The most challenging procedure is 'drying' the duck for three hours in a room that is cool and breezy. Never make this on a hot day or in a room that is well heated, or you will run the risk of spoiling the duck. Traditional Chinese cooks feel that air-drying is essential; the drier the duck, the better it will absorb the flavors of the marinade and produce a skin that is crisp."

(p. 180)

Well, in my class, we were bad. We cheated. After seasoning the inside of the duck, we sewed it up with a metal skewer (you pierce the skin on the same side of the flesh instead of back-and-forth to achieve a tighter seal). Then we took the duck by its broken neck and held all 3.5 lbs of him over a wok with boiling water and ladeled the water over him to contract his skin. Then we prepared a glaze of maltose, vinegar, coloring, and water and evenly basted him with it.

I don't know if the duck was a he or a she, but since it had the head on, I began to feel some affinity. His roasted head below...



Anyway, we then put the duck in the oven at the lowest possible temperature, with clothes pins under his "armpits" so even that part of the duck would be nice and crispy. Next we used another clothes pin to "cheat the oven" into thinking that the door was closed so it would run its fan with the door open. So the oven got dry and warm, but the moisture could still escape. Once this was done, we put in the duck on a roasting rack and turned four times at 10-15 minute intervals. Here's what mine looked like after drying:



Before trying to teach myself about Chinese cooking, I was never aware of the critical importance of managing moisture in cooking. Here's another example from Grace Young:

"When preparing stir-fry vegetables, the vegetables should be washed several hours before the meal, so that they will have time to air-dry before stir-frying. Do not be alarmed if the vegetables appear slightly limp by the time they are cooked. This is preferable to wet vegetables. If the vegetables are wet, they will not stir-fry in the pan but will instead immediately begin steaming."

(p. xvii)

When I took a stir-fried noodles class, we boiled the noodles first, then dried them with a kitchen towel before stir-frying.

On the other end of the spectrum, I once defrosted beef in a hurry for a Yan-kit So recipe for Tangerine Beef. Since the beef was so wet from the defrosting, I unwisely omitted the two tablespoons of water from the marinade, in the process achieving a remarkably tough and dry result. If you read my first post about Towngas you will see that meat soaks up water, so it is important to always include it in marinades so the meat will be juicy.

I'm just starting to be aware of the importance of managing moisture and heat in cooking... But I have a feeling that these are critical skills. Literature about Chinese food often talks about "awakening" the ingredients with heat, so I will write more about that as I learn more...

High art with instant noodles

Isn’t this beautiful?

The red-brown of the faux wood table echoing the cognac hue of the chicken slices, complemented by the chipped blue paint on the dish and little green pile of spring onions. Meanwhile the white reflection of the doorway and the white napkin… Wait a minute, they actually gave me a napkin? Incredible!

This dish really is proof positive that culinary artistry doesn’t require fancy ingredients.

The waitress at Lan Fong Yuen on Gage Street in Central called this “chicken noodles.” The Chowhound experts described it as “instant noodle lo mein with scallion/ginger oil and grilled brazilian chicken.” Whatever. It is really, really good.

Those of you not familiar with HK tea shops would probably be surprised to learn that there’s a whole genre of dishes built around instant noodles. When there is a vast array of fresh, semi-fresh, hand-cut, wheat, rice, you-name-it noodles available, why on earth would anyone bother? Well, think back to your last Cup-O-Noodles. They have a distinctive texture and springiness, don’t they? Pretty darn good if you don’t think about how cheap or what’s in em, eh? HK milk tea joints do amazing things with the kind of ingredients you'd find in a bomb shelter.

My noodles at Lan Fong Yuen were perfectly prepared. Not mushy at all. Tender to the tooth, a hair softer than al dente, full of springy life. They were splashed with a light sauce that was subtly sweet and had a hint of five spice or something in the realm of nutmeg. In one corner was a big pile of scallion/ginger oil – the same delicious stuff they serve at your standard HK BBQ meat joint (a distinctive flavor you will cherish if you ever try it) – and in the other corner was a pile of stewed cabbage that abruptly called to mind the Polish food in my old Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. Or maybe my Hungarian grandmother’s stuffed cabbage. Maybe both. Definitely startling in the context of this dish.

On top of everything was beautifully golden-brown, pan fried (grilled?) chicken slices. My favorite part: dark meat, thigh and drumstick. But get this, it was deboned! Maybe that was the Brazilian part. The chicken didn’t have any strong seasonings. It was just salty and roasty and chickeny. Yum.

Well, almost yum. Here I have to pause because, while this dish may be a miracle of culinary achievement with cheap ingredients, it is also a tragedy of cheap ingredients. Because, while the chicken was deliciously prepared, perfectly moist with slightly crispy skin, the meat itself tasted…cheap. Funky afternotes that made me wonder where these chickens came from and what they ate.

And then I looked down, just beyond my pretty open-toed sandals to see a pretty, cognac-colored cockroach scuttling toward the kitchen.

So I refreshed myself with the awesome iced milk tea in my rubbery blue cup (Lan Fong Yuen takes credit for inventing HK milk tea), and resolved to wear different shoes next time…and see if the ginger milk tea will chase away those ambiguous flavors next time.

Crossing the (texture) line

The other night I was sweet-talking E, baby-babying him, massaging his shoulders. How on earth was I going to persuade him?

"Sweetheart..." (maybe not such a smart starting point).

"Yeeesss?"

"I want to...ask you for something."

Raised eyebrows.

"I was wondering if you'd be willing to...um...expand your palate?"

He gives me a you-gotta-be-kidding-me kind of look. To start out with, he *will* eat some weird things, like preserved beancurd, which is sharp, gooey, intense, and totally amazing. But in general when it comes to lung or windpipe or intestine -- or just snake -- he digs in his heels. I'll bet you're digging in your heels right now too!

This is an impediment to my aspirations to become a Chinese gourmet, since he and I eat the majority of our meals together. Vast swaths of menu go untouched.

I think most Westerners feel confused about Chinese food. On the one hand, they've usually eaten some delicious dishes -- like Kung Pao Chicken. But they've also come into contact with Chinese dishes that totally freak them out. For example, one of my family members recalls a meal with what they describe as "Assassinated Chicken" and "Duck and What Duck Eats."

I think most Westerners understand that China is a serious food culture, but they wonder whether they've really had good Chinese food. Because, well, is it supposed to be rubbery and pokey and gristly like this?

Right now I'm reading Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She's a smarty-pants English girl who got a scholarship to study in China, dropped out of her classes and fell head-over-heals in love with Sichuan food. She even trained as a Chinese professional chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.

In her memoir, Fuchsia directly addresses this gastronomic line in the sand that few Westerners cross. She nails it so completely, I'm going to quote essential passages and hope you enjoy:

"Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you're really inside."

"Most Westerners are only willing to grapple with something if it is particularly delicious. Anyone in their right mind, surely, would agree that lobsters are worth a bit of grapple, but shell-on prawns? It's a matter of opinion."

"Fiddling around with a bony fowl's neck for the sake of a few wisps of silky meat, as the Chinese do, or working your way through a pile of small husky melon seeds, seems like a crazy waste of time and effort."

"[Foodies] have no difficulties with the middle ground of Chinese eating, and may enjoy, as the Chinese do, the struggles to extract and separate. Yet it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture."

"Certain textures are especially prized. Cui, for example, denotes a particular quality of crispness that is found in fresh crunchy vegetables, blanched pig's kidneys, and goose intestines, not to mention sea cucumbers that have been properly cooked. Cui crispness offers resistance to the teeth, but finally yields, cleanly, with a pleasant snappy feeling. It is distinct from su, which is the dry, fragile, fall-apart crispness of deep-fried duck skin or taro dumplings. Some foods, like the skin of a barbecued suckling pig, can be described as su cui because they offer both types of crispness, simultaneously."

(Quotes from p. 136-138 of Fuchsia's book.)

I am so inspired by this, I can't tell you! I aspire to develop this kind of gastronomic awareness and discernment. If I can develop this awareness in the Chinese gastronomic realm, will it change how I experience Spanish, Italian, French cuisine? Will I be able to bring more nuance and deliciousness to all of my cooking?

I absolutely want to find out. So this blog post is a plea to my sweetie to please-oh-please come chew goose intestines with me... I promise it will be worth it.