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Weekend fun: Playing with pandan (a picture story)

March 13th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Food I can cook in China, Life

I love pandan. There, I said it! I’ve loved it since I was a tiny little girl. It was one of those things that would appear into my life as some delicious jelly or steamed cake and I’d be reminded of how much I liked this mysterious green thing. Then, just as quickly as it appeared, it would disappear into the depths of my digestive system… Anyway, it was the Mid-Autumn Festival of 2010, and I was eating a mooncake with an unknown flavor. I bite into it — it’s pandan in a glorious mooncake filling version! And determined to never let it get away from me again, I finally looked up what it was called. Pandan, apparently.

Fast forward 1.5 years. By now, I even know what it’s called in Chinese — 香兰叶 (xiang lan ye, which translates to fragrant orchid leaf, which is not what pandan is). The pandan offerings of Beijing are minimal, though probably not any less so than most cities in the U.S. And, my mommy has given me a cupcake maker. What is there to stop me? Naturally I’d see what I could do with what is apparently giant blades of grass. I got myself a kilo of the stuff from (where else?) Taobao, China’s version of eBay.

A kilo of pandan!

I think that’s about 50 or so leaves, and it only cost me 66 kuai ($10.44) total to have it overnighted from somewhere down south.

Naturally, I got to work right away. I read up on how to get the pandan extract from the leaves, and I even saw one recipe that called for pandan syrup. This is how:


Tie pandan in knots, then boil it in water and sugar!

And then this is how you extract pandan’s essence:

Chop pandan into tiny pieces, add a tiny bit of water and take a blender to it!

It should look something like this:

Nasty, whacked up pandan!

And when you squeeze all the water out of that, you get:

All that hard work for this?

And then that gives cupcakes a greenish tint and pandan-y flavor! While I consider these cupcakes a failure, they definitely got the flavor. Unfortunately, the cake was a bit dry and not as fluffy as I’d like, and I screwed up on the coconut buttercream by adding too much coconut milk. But this is exactly why I bought a kilo of pandan leaves! More pandan fun!

Pandan cupcakes!

Weekend fun: Gingerbread cupcakes with lemon frosting

February 20th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Food I can cook in China, Life

So I baked cupcakes over the weekend!

For my mommy, who doesn't eat them so I can eat them alllllll.

The cupcake craze landed in Beijing right about the same time I did, way back in 2009. Now, there is a gourmet cupcake shop near my office, two bakeries that deliver cupcakes to your door, and a trendy cafe that specializes in cupcakes.

Like everywhere else in the world, they are expensive little mofos, costing from 22 kuai ($3.49). For less than that, I could get a bowl of beef noodles and two rou bings for a not particularly healthy, but filling, dinner. Cost of living, folks. I don’t know why I have to pay U.S. prices for cupcakes in China, but it has something to do with bakers who are unwilling to use inferior Chinese ingredients.

I’ve only made cupcakes a handful of times with this tea cupcake set my sister got me a couple of Christmases ago. How charming! Too bad they only come in cute numbers, like four, so all that hard work gets eaten in the span of two minutes. That amount of effort is only justified for a few occasions.

So I’ve spent more than two years looking for a cupcake pan small enough for my oven. Not just for cupcakes, you know, but also muffins. But my oven is so small that even half-sized pans for mini muffins were too big! So I have mostly just been buying cupcakes.

An Easy-Bake Oven for not-quite grown-ups.

But now, I don’t have an excuse to indulge in these delightfully sinful treats anymore! My mommy solved all of these problems in one go, and got me this appropriately pink cupcake maker for my birthday! I was finally able to test it out this weekend and made a batch of blueberry muffins and gingerbread cupcakes. This could be the start of something very exciting, like cupcakes every weekend!

The unreported food shortage

February 9th, 2012 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life

There is a food shortage going on right now in Beijing. I went to three different restaurants for lunch today and they were all out of food.

Restaurant 1: Wild Honey

Boyfriend and I sit down, ready to try something new. It was 1 p.m., admittedly on the late end for lunch, but the small cafe was still full of diners. I chose a tuna sandwich; he went for some kind of pizza with nachos. The waitress (not even kindly) informed me that they are out of bread. Seriously, bread. A pretty staple ingredient for more than five things on their menu. Fine, croissant, whatever. We wait. Ten minutes later, waitress comes and tells us that they are out of nachos! But why did it take them 10 minutes to discover they were out of nachos? We left.

Restaurant 2: 钰花溪 Tangka

So this spicy ramen place seemed to be out of everything we tried to order. Out of six things we pointed at, they had two, which is what we ended up with.

Restaurant 3: Not really a restaurant

I went to check out an herbal tea shop to see if they had bubble tea. They didn’t. Not that they were out of it, they just don’t have it on the menu. Anyway, I tried to get a coconut sago thing instead, which they were out of. At this point, I just gave up trying to order anything.

Actually, it’s quite common to go to a restaurant and, upon ordering your favorite dish, be told they are out of it. Oh, geez, you wonder, why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning, like they do in the U.S.? But you grudgingly move on and try to order something else you like. That’s when you realize why they didn’t tell you what they were out of at the beginning — because they’d be reciting so many dishes.

Restaurants in China serve giant book-fulls of dishes, which means they need to stock a shit ton of raw ingredients. However, they don’t, and bad management/planning means that they don’t stock enough of lots of things to meet demand. I wonder if their lack of respect for demand stems from their Communist days.

Well, it could be worse. There could actually be a food shortage.

Penguins outside my office!

November 10th, 2011 by Johanna | 1 comment | Filed in China, Food, Life

The candy man staked out in front of my office today at lunch. Naturally, he and his cart captured my attention with all its colorful, sugary goodness. So many kinds of gummy candy! Gummy bears, gummy lychee, gummy Coke bottles, gummy worms, sour gummies…. Then, I noticed these!

March of the penguins.

Gummy penguins! My sister introduced me to these adorable gummy candy last year when she found them at some candy store in the middle of nowhere. As an added bonus, they were peach-flavored, my favorite! These ones are blueberry, though, and a bit pricey at 25 kuai per 500 grams (about $3.94 a pound). I snatched some up right away, spending my last 10 kuai before I realized I could’ve probably bargained a little. Maybe. It wasn’t much, and I wish I could have bought more! The candy man said he only rarely comes to my office — which is true. I’ve only seen candy being sold during lunch maybe once or twice. Now I can only hope our paths will meet again one day :(

Another pic after the jump! (more…)

The giant mango

October 14th, 2011 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food

I bought a giant mango. How giant? How about 1.5 kilograms of giant?

"I could swallow you whole. But you can't swallow me whole."

That’s, like, 3 pounds. It cost me, though. I paid 30 freakin kuai ($4.71) for it. But it was good. I treat myself so well.

The evolution of a street at lunch time

October 11th, 2011 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life, Work

If I ever had any doubts about the reality of a rapidly developing China, they may be tempered by the explosion of lunch time choices available to me right in front of my office. When I first started working here food carts parked on the sidewalk carried little more than unappetizing pre-prepared he fan, a takeaway box of rice with two or three kinds of dishes, usually a meat and stir-fried veggies. And back then, there were maybe one or two people with a Styrofoam ice cooler.

Fast forward 1.5 years, and now this place is teeming with vendors. There are still hefan sellers, but they are competing with 10+ other vendors who are selling much more creative things. We’ve only gotten more and more options as time went on.

The veterans:

  • Upgraded hefan carts that allow you to choose which dishes to go with your rice; usually there are six or so dishes to choose from.
  • Roujiamo, a Chinese version of the hamburger, which can be filled with anything from chopped up pork to Chinese sausages.
  • Jianbing. Actually, this just appeared today (or recently), which I’ll explain in a minute. But for some time now, there has been a giant jianbing maker. Imagine making a crepe that’s the size of an XL New York-style pizza, then filling it with the sauce and fried dough and onions and cilantro and stuff. That’s how big these jianbings are. I tried one once. It was not very good.
  • “Sushi.” Just rolls with vegetables.
  • Fruit.

The ones who made it:

  • Liang fen/Liang pi, which is a cold dish with glass (starch) noodles, sliced cucumbers and other vegetables, tossed with a peanut sauce and oil.
  • Dumplings, now both steamed and fried, as well as fried baozi.
  • Cheap ice cream. This is gone now as the temperature has gotten colder.
  • Deep-fried squid balls, a Taiwanese street snack.

The noobs:

  • Wonton noodle soup. Seriously, what? I can’t even find wonton soup in most restaurants, and now it’s being sold on the street.
  • Chuanr. The ubiquitous skewers that are everywhere.
  • Roasted sweet potatoes. Technically, this is a seasonal snack, and they’ve been around before, but I’m putting it here because it’s just come back.
  • Roasted chestnuts. MMMMMMM.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten one or two things. Every once in a while, the police will come and I’ll get caught in a stampede of flatbed tricycles fleeing the scene, with still-hot metal plates trailing heat and oil behind them.

These carts are also in addition to a revamped bloc of restaurants next to our office, which all got facelifts or were shuttered and replaced with fancier, chicer restaurants. This facelift, of course, meant that my kiosks selling breakfast/lunch street food, such as jianbing and shaobing jia ji dan, and bubble tea were both dismantled. But today, as I mentioned earlier, I saw an extra jianbing cart out on the street in front of my office. And who was running it? The same lady who used to work at that breakfast stand. Good to know she’s back in business.

Speaking of bubble tea, when I first started working here, there was no bubble tea. That changed last year when the bubble tea kiosk on the small street next to my office. (Perhaps you’ll remember it as the one that got knocked down and came back as a tent at the start of summer.) Since then, two more ‑ or three, if you count the one going in the opposite direction ‑ have opened, which either shows the popularity of the drink in China or the lack of imagination of Chinese business owners. But I can’t get enough of the stuff, so I’m not complaining.

And the best news: my tea shop is closed temporarily again. Seems they are building a sturdier structure made of wood and metal. Might be good for my tea shop boys come winter.

Signs of life!

August 17th, 2011 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life

At some point last week, I peered into my basil pot and saw that the soil was all dry and had receded. I mean, the soil line was, like, a good inch lower than it was when I first filled the pot. I’m not really sure why.

I panicked. I was so busy keeping the temperature constant that I’d forgotten to water my plant! So I swooped up the pot and ran to the kitchen sink and blasted the tiny, helpless seeds with water. Ugh. Now there were water holes in the soil, and I’d flooded the seeds. There really is something wrong with me. Dismayed, I tried to smooth out the soil with my fingers and un-bury my future basil plants.

Then, on Sunday, seven days after I’d sowed the seeds, I tentatively peered into the cup. I thought I was seeing things! So I put on my glasses and looked again. Something’s totally growing in there! Look:

One week old.

I did it! I got something to grow! My killer green thumb is now doing the opposite. Onto the next step. Something about selecting the stronger-looking ones and getting rid of the pussies. Right. When am I supposed to do that?

Exercising my green thumb

August 8th, 2011 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life

I’m growing basil. Well, I’m TRYING to grow basil. I have a notorious killer green thumb. I bought this basil pot in, like, February, so I hope it’s still growable. Anyway, now you can follow its progress with me!

Please, please something grow.

Here it is, at planting time. Maybe I should name it? But I’m going to eat it, so maybe not.

The instructions say that basil will begin sprouting after about seven to 10 consecutive days of temperatures between 21 degrees to 25 degrees Celsius. And that’s it! Not very instructive. Unfortunately, it’s about 10 degrees Celsius warmer in Beijing. Does this mean I should turn on the air conditioner to make it a constant 25 degrees? Or will it be OK with the temperature fluctuations? Help! I need advice!

Things I have eaten recently

July 16th, 2011 by Johanna | Leave comments | Filed in China, Food, Life, USA! USA!

A few weeks ago, I wished for decent goi cuon, the delicious, wonderfully fresh Vietnamese spring rolls. This is a summer staple in my family, and my mother made me all jealous and homesick when she told me they were making some on their beach holiday with a bunch of family friends. But HA. Enter Susu, a new upscale Vietnamese restaurant hidden in a hutong near the heart of the city. For less than 100 kuai, I can roll about eight of these babies myself. So last week, I did!

Clockwise from bottom left: Rice vermicelli, leafy veggies and rice paper wrapper, pork and shrimp, and the finished product.

Unfortunately the noodles were too crunchy, the pork and shrimp were tasteless, and the fish sauce was too sweet. (Plus I had to ask for more fish sauce after every single roll because they only gave me a tiny bit every time. WTF?) But still good enough to eat.

I also got around to having my Fourth of July hot dog about five days later. This is the same chili cheese hot dog that I got two years ago, on my first July 4th in China.

Yay America!

And finally. I returned from England with just a box of wine gums, to my dismay, and none of the other goodies England has to offer. But one morning, on a convenience store breakfast run before work, something caught my eye:

"Jia fa dan gao."

It’s a box of Jaffa cakes with Chinese characteristics. This cannot be good, I thought. Especially since it’s got blueberry jam, and not the usual orange. So I bought a box because I love Chinese bastardizations of Western crap, and sure enough, it was awful. Very crumbly. It was so bad that I can’t even remember what it tastes like, just the general feeling of regret for putting it in my mouth and chewing it. Oh well.

The quest for bun, or how my food cravings can be satisfied in Beijing

June 15th, 2011 by Johanna | 1 comment | Filed in China, Food, Life

I love Vietnamese cuisine, especially in the summer when its refreshing dishes are often served cold. And its use of uncooked dipping sauces for flavoring is a great alternative to the greasiness and saltiness of Beijing fare. (I really love fish sauce!) As of late, anything Vietnamese has been my favorite food.

You’d think that, with Vietnam so close to China and its food sharing many similar ingredients with some regional Chinese cuisines, that good, cheap Vietnamese wouldn’t be so hard to find. You would be wrong, like I was, though. I mean, why would you pay more than 6 bucks for a bowl of pho? You don’t even have to do that in the U.S., and if you do, it’s a total rip-off. But alas, any foreign cuisine, even if it’s Asian, automatically means developed country prices, so my limit for a bowl of pho is 40 kuai. They can be 60 RMB or more here.

There are actually quite a few Vietnamese restaurants in Beijing, including two popular ones in my second home of Sanlitun. One is pretty expensive and not worth the price; the other has French influences and a hefty menu that makes it too easy for me to run up a pricey tab. There’s also a couple of sketchy-looking banh mi shops that have gotten decent reviews. At any rate, I’ve never really cared for banh mi, but now that I think about it, I’m kind of craving one.

None of these places beats my small neighborhood Vietnamese dive. This is exciting! We’ve been frequenting this place near once a week since we moved. The first time we went, it was just us. The second time, one person came in for takeaway. Now, every time we go, there seems to be more and more diners. It’s affordable: a large bowl of pho is 20 kuai ($3.08) and if you get a combo meal, you get a tiny side and drink for about a buck more. The dish itself isn’t as amazing as what you’d find in the U.S. because the quality of ingredients in China just isn’t there, and the ratio of noodles to beef always errs on the side of the noodles, but I am more than satisfied with the broth (never too oily or sweet) and the fact that $3 still gets me all the trimmings (basil, bean sprouts and a lime wedge).

My only complaint about this restaurant is that its menu is rather limited. It has three kinds of pho (with beef, beef tripe and chicken) and a rice dish that came with grilled pork. It has sides of include chicken wings, spring rolls and fish cakes. Basically, I only eat the pho.

But then, to my delight, when boyfriend and I went last night, the place was nearly full and they had expanded their menu. (They also raised their prices slightly, but not by too much.) In addition to pho and rice dishes, they had bun, which is pronounced like boon and you have to inflect your tone up. I’ve been craving this dish ever since I had it in Yunnan at my mommy’s second cousin’s house. I’ve actually had it, or similar, a couple of times already (in London and last Friday at Muse), but my craving just won’t go away! MMMM crispy lettuce and vegetables, cold rice noodles and grilled pieces of pork. I could eat this all day. Bun is also really fun to say, like a balloon inflating.

Now if only I can find a place that serves banh cuon, banh beo and decent goi cuon…

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