The weekend is when I have time to try out fun food — things that I actually love to eat. In most cases, it means desserts. Sometimes it means a nice breakfast. This past weekend, it meant pancakes, banananananana pudding and carrot cake!

Blueberry Pancakes

Who needs a box mix?

Main ingredients: flour, milk, eggs, blueberries.

Special flavorings: wildflower honey from Israel, baking powder. Easy to find, but since the Chinese rarely bake, I had to pay $4.41 for the imported stuff. Which only means I’ll be baking a lot more now.

Total cost: I’d say about 20 RMB ($2.94), mostly on the blueberries and eggs, for 14 5-inch pancakes, or just enough for Colin and me. For plain pancakes, the total cost would have been about 8 kuai ($1.18).

Banana Pudding!

I miss the South!

Main ingredients: bananas, eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla wafers. I couldn’t be bothered to go to the Western food market (rain + laziness), so I subbed them with these almond shortbread cookies. They turned out to be a dark brown color, so the crumble on top of the pudding looks a bit like dog food :(

Special flavorings: vanilla extract. A 29-milliliter bottle of McCormick’s Pure Vanilla Extract is 55.50 RMB ($8.16).

Total cost: 60-65 RMB ($9) for about six servings. My special banana bowl cost 150 RMB ($22).

Carrot Cake with Orange Frosting (sorry, no picture)

Main ingredients: carrots, flour, confectioner’s sugar, orange.

Special flavorings: baking powder, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, grated nutmeg. I guess the Chinese use ground ginger because that was cheap and came in a small packet. The grated nutmeg, though, came at U.S. prices.

Total cost: About 30-35 RMB ($5) for four mini-bread loaves.

I got the craving for this heart-attack-waiting-to-happen as I was going through my old pictures. It’s a pretty simple recipe, requiring few ingredients and not too much work, either. I tried to make it a little healthier by adding chicken and broccoli. Alas, they were still covered in the alfredo, but what can I say? I love dairy, especially cheese.

A heart attack for this cheesy goodness will (almost) be worth it.

Main ingredients: fettuccine, cream, parmesan; chicken; broccoli.

Special flavorings: red pepper.

Total cost: a lot! About 100 RMB ($14.71) for three servings, plus extra alfredo sauce and half a box of fettuccine.

If you are what you eat, then would that make me really good? Everything I eat is really good.

A craving for potato pancakes snuck up on me earlier in the week, so we finally made some last night. What goes with potato pancakes? We ended up just getting pork, sauteing them in bite-sized pieces.

All in all, a pretty cheap meal that was made more expensive by the lack of local bulk potatoes. We ended up having to buy the pre-packaged kind.

You see, in China, they have about three different kinds of the same item, each with a different price point. Not being well-versed in Chinese, I have no idea what the differences between each kind, except that one (the cheapest) is “regular,” the more expensive (usually pre-packaged in a small tray and plastic wrap) kind is organic and the most expensive is … more organic? Needless to say, the pre-packaged produce usually looks a little nicer, but are sometimes five times the price of the regular, pick-what-you-want kind. It usually isn’t worth it. For example, I have gotten a bag of regular potatoes for less than 1 kuai (15 cents); the special potatoes I got for these pancakes — four of them — cost about 12 kuai ($1.76). In other words, this dinner could have been much cheaper.

Pork on the left, potato on the right.

Main ingredients: pork, potatoes.

Special flavorings: sour cream accompaniment.

Total cost: 25 RMB ($3.68) for two servings of pork and 12 potato pancakes.

We made chicken and rice flavored with curry and orange juice for dinner last night, an easy recipe to get us back into cooking mode following a long weekend of eating out. I’ve never had it before, despite it being a pretty common dish anywhere in the world. Needless to say, I’ve never made it before, either. Cooking rice in something other than a rice cooker? Weird! But the dish was really easy to make, despite taking a relatively long time to cook. And the ingredients were easy to get. Added bonus: it’s a pretty healthy and well-rounded meal!

After I get cooking down, I'll tackle presentation.

Main ingredients: chicken, rice. Both easily and cheaply bought, since the Chinese eat both in rather large quantities. We threw in some carrots, as well.

Special flavorings: curry powder, orange juice. Ditto.

Total cost: 20-25 RMB ($3.50) for four servings. The chicken accounted for about one-third to one-half of the total.

So I’m slowly getting back into the cooking/eating mood. My boyfriend recently moved in with me, and I’ve been having fun playing house. This has led me to try to build up a library of recipes that I can make without too much hassle. The caveat: China.

We’re not very picky eaters, but we do miss our Western dishes a lot. Also, I’ve not had much experience cooking Asian cuisine, aside from chao fan, chao mian and mostly just things that can be chao‘d (i.e., stir-fried).

Thus, the things we can make have been constrained by: (more…)