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.

Mooncakes, inside and out

It wasn't until moving to Hong Kong that I realized what a culinary prude I was.

We Westerners are so skittish and squeamish about what we put in our mouths.

If it's too soft we don't like it. If it's slippery we don't like it. If it's too chewy we don't like it. If it's smelly we don't like it (except cheese, of course). If it's...ambiguous...we don't like it.

Ambiguous? Yes, a dish that doesn't fit squarely into the categories "savory" or "sweet." For example, mooncakes. Most people would probably say that mooncakes are a "sweet" dish. They have a thin skin of sweet pastry covering a dense lump of lotus seed paste, which is smooth and bland and quite sugary.

But on the inside is a salty, crumbly, dense, slightly sulfuric duck's egg, baked right into the middle. For Westerners, this just jumbles our entire gastronomic mental framework. We have no place in our realm of reference experiences in which to relate to this alien thing: the mooncake.



My friend J-- from Guanzhou gave me my first mooncake. It was a foggy, grey October day in San Francisco and we were bundled up in fleece jackets after a long walk at Fort Funston. Driving back through the Sunset District she told me to stop because she wanted to buy me a mooncake. We brought it back to my house and made a pot of tea on my beautiful old gas stove...

My first bite of mooncake was pleasant enough. I've got a sweet tooth, so I generally like anything sugary, regardless of how strange. It had that kind of flat sweetness I also associate with some Italian cookies. Just sweet and that's all. But I found the glue-y denseness of the mooncake intriguing. Then I hit a piece of the duck's egg...

Oh boy. I had this very strange sensation of biting into something that tasted...biological...like it came from my own body. Since I'm already being gross here, I'll say that the closest reference experience I could muster was eating my own boogers as a little kid. (Now, I know you're going to all run out and buy mooncakes!)

This kind of threw me for a loop... Damn, it, I am an adventurous eater! But man, that salted duck's egg freaked me out.

That was maybe four years ago. When we visited Hong Kong last September, I found myself thrust into a barrage of mooncake advertising in anticipation of the Mid-Autumn Festival. The amount of commercial riffing on the concept of "mooncake" is incredible. There are snowy mooncakes, green tea mooncakes, Haagen-Daaz ice cream mooncakes, Starbucks mooncakes, even butt-shaped mooncakes from the GOD store (check out the blog Red Cook for a rundown).

I have certainly partaken of these blasphemous mooncakes -- I can't resist a sweet hockey-puck-shaped treat -- but I continue to contemplate the traditional mooncake with lotus seed paste and duck egg. Gradually, as I have eaten a few slices here and there, I have begun to accept the proposition: a thin, sweet oily skin that gives way to one's teeth just so, an assertive dense shot of glue-y sugar, a mind-bendingly-weird morsel of crumbly egg. And just when it starts to overwhelm, you take a nice sip of hot Chinese tea -- which washes the dense material out of your mouth, its bitterness neutralizing the sweet and salty flavors, its spicy/herbal aroma refreshing your senses.

The entire experience is a workout for your senses and your mind. Now I'm finding that I crave it...

Which is why, having developed this complex relationship with mooncakes, I enthusiastically signed up for a mooncake-making class at Towngas Cooking Centre (they're going to have to pay me commission here soon). I wanted to get to know the mooncake better. I wanted to understand what makes a mooncake a good one or a bad one.

It turns out that mooncakes are quite simple in terms of of ingredients.They contain:

• Sugar syrup
• Flour
• Peanut oil
• Lye water
• Lotus seed paste
• Yolks from salted duck's eggs

While the ingredients are simple, the process for making mooncakes is very specific, and small errors (or God forbid, improvisations), result in big disappointment. I'll show you what I mean...

Here are the steps for making mooncakes:

Mark your calendar -- I'm serious! In total, a home cook will need two weeks to one month to achieve excellent final results. The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese calendar. In 2010, that turns out to be Sept 22nd. If you wait too long, you won't get the right consistency syrup and your mooncakes won't be glossy from the oils soaking out.

Think beer and honey -- The first step is to create a syrup that goes into the dough covering the cake. The syrup is made with two types of sugar crystal, ostensibly for "stability." The final product should be the color of San Miguel beer and it should have roughly the consistency of honey. If it's not thick enough, your dough will have the wrong consistency and it will be impossible to cover the lotus paste balls.



Fingertips first -- Put your oil in a liquid measure, then add the syrup and lye water (if you put the syrup first, it will stick). Spread out your flour, make a well in the center, and pour the liquid in the middle. You'll notice that the oil and syrup won't mix. With your fingertips, work the flour into the oil part of the liquid until you can integrate it with the syrup. If you don't do this, you won't get a smooth and consistent dough.



Keep an eye on your eggs -- After carefully measuring your ingredients (135-140g of paste will fit into a mooncake mold), make a ball of paste, create an indentation, and then place your egg yolks inside, making sure not to leave any air bubbles. Then, make indentations at the top -- like a bowling ball -- so you know where the eggs are. Otherwise, you may wind up with top-bottom eggs instead of side-side eggs.



Keep the edges fat -- Measure 40g of dough for each single-yolk cake (experts can do it in 37g). Make a small pancake and slap it on the paste ball. Spread the dough out with the heel of your hand so that it covers the entire ball. As you're working, remember to keep the edges of the expanding pancake fat -- otherwise, you'll run out before you finish.



Don't use too much oil -- The next step is to put your balls into a mooncake press, put them on an oiled sheet, and then press down. You need to oil the press and the sheet first. If you are a bit overzealous, like I am, you will over-oil everything, which will result in your mooncakes sliding to the edge of the pan while they bake -- and then they will brown unevenly. Don't do this.



Don't use too much egg -- Mist the cakes with a spray-bottle of water and bake them in three rounds: 10-15 mins at 190C, 8-10 mins at 170C, 8-10 mins at 150C. After rounds 1 and 2, brush the tops gently with egg. This gives the mooncake color. If, however, you're overzealous like me, you will over-egg the delicate dough, muddying the shape. Don't do that, either.



Wait (don't refrigerate) -- After all of that, let your mooncakes cool completely. Then put them upside down in a tupperware container. Don't do this when they're hot or you will crush the design. Also, do not refrigerate at this point or you will cause the oils to congeal and they won't come to the surface. Give the mooncakes 3-5 days of sitting unrefrigerated to become nice and glossy. Then, they can be stored up to 2-3 weeks.

My mooncakes came out slightly lopsided and muddy-looking, but they were golden brown and delicious! Next year I'm sure they will be perfect ;-)

If you're still reading, you may also be interested to know that mooncakes have an interesting history... When China was ruled by Mongolians during the Yuan dynasty (13th & 14th century), leaders from the previous Song dynasty organized a rebellion, coordinating their attack by sending out messages hidden in mooncakes during the Moon Festival.