Better than ordinary 家常菜

On almost any corner in China you will find a place claiming to serve "家常菜" or "homestyle cooking". Sometimes this means they serve dishes known to the specific city or town, but other times the menu is made up of an array of generic Chinese food. Quality can also range form incredibly tasty to incredibly bad and it's really hard to tell expect from word of mouth or trial and error.

We are in Shanghai this weekend, staying with our friends Alex and Sean, and last night they took us to their favorite Shanghainese 家常菜 place. The place looked like any other nondescript, fluorescent-lit neighborhood restaurant with plastic garbage bag table cloths and dirty floors.

I did see something new though: at the table next to us sat a man, a woman, and a white poodle with a dyed pink tail. Not only was the poodle sharing the chair with the woman and actually sitting "at" the table, but on several occasions the man took a pair of chopsticks (luckily not the pair he was eating with) and fed morsels of his food directly into the dogs mouth! I was in too much disbelief to even try to take a picture of this.

Regardless, the food was really good and with a few small tweaks took ordinary "homestyle" cooking a notch higher. Some of the highlights:

Selection of cold appetizers: golden needle mushrooms, boiled edamame, and 四宝烤麸(have never been quite sure what it actually is, but found it translated as 'marinated bran dough with peanuts and black fungus' - trust us, it's good)

Main Courses: clockwise from top: 吓人豆腐 (tofu with baby shrimp) - a pretty standard dish and probably the weakest of the dishes we had; 橄榄四季豆 (string beans stir fried with ground pork and olives - a slight deviation from the standard stir fried string bean dish and one I really liked despite usually having an aversion to olives); and a tofu dish whose name I didn't catch that was also tasty and different from the standard fare.

Burning Down the House

This entry has nothing to do with food, but we've decided to make exceptions for comedies of errors. Our most recent adventure was of the electrical kind.

So, our humble abode boasts three lights - a bathroom light, a central ceiling light, and a closet light - all of which are naked bulbs. But, it's not so simple; only the bathroom light works on command. The closet light switch is stuck in the "on" position and we have to physically unscrew the bulb to turn it off. The central ceiling light has one halogen bulb and two empty fixtures; the main problem with this light is that the switch only sometimes turns it on -- presumably because the wiring in the fixture is corrupt.

Error #1
One evening upon arrival home, the central ceiling bulb flicks on with the switch, flashes, and then refuses to turn back one, leaving us with no choice but to light our room with the closet and bathroom light. We called the landlord's lackey; she came, took a look, and promised to call the electrician (who only works from the afternoon hours of 1 to 5) in the morning.

Error # 2 (same night)
Before bed (since coming to China, we've been retiring around 8pm), Owen went to unscrew the closet light. There was a crack, there was a pop, there was a flash like a 1950s reporter's camera, and then there was darkness intermingled with the scent of burnt halogen. The fan went dead, the TV went black, and we were left in darkness with only our mosquito tent to protect us. Not only was there silence from our room, but an eerie quiet throughout the whole apartment, including the rooms of the other two tenants.

We had two choices: one, go to bed or two, scramble around in the darkness searching for the fusebox. We considered that since the other tenants of the apartment -- local Chinese -- also loss their electricity that it would only be a matter of time before one of them reset the fusebox. We were wrong. After an indeterminate period of darkness, we finally heard commotion and the squeak of a cellphone keypad in the other room. They too called the landlord's lackey, who also came up to aid them. Over the next hour, we fell asleep to the melody of them groping around for the fusebox. When we awoke the next morning, the electricity was still not on.

As promised, the next afternoon the electrician did arrive.

Error #3
The landlord's lackey enlisted a diminutive electrician. In order for him to reach the central light fixture we had to stack a chair on top of our hard Chinese mattress and even then it was a struggle for him to unscrew the fixture. Predictably unstable, Owen had to steady the chair for the hour or so that he worked on it.


Error #4

Needless to say, the electrician was shocked at the shoddy state of the electrical fixtures that surely would not even pass the lax standards of the Chinese building code. Still, with a little electrical tape and a lot of ingenuity, he was able to patch together a few wires and restore one of the three fixtures for the central ceiling light.

Nothing that a little ingenuity and cooperation can't fix

Hypermarkets with Chinese Characteristcs

When moving to a new Chinese city, a useful thing to immediately locate is your nearest hypermarket (American equivalents would be Target, Walmart, etc...). When living in Beijing in 2002, it was Carrefour; Nanjing had Jinrenfa; and the second day here in Hangzhou we found a nearby Century Mart. Not only are these the most convenient places to find a wide selection of clearly organized and sanitarily packaged products from yogurt to shampoo to electric fans to new bicycles, but I find them to be one the best examples of harmonious cohabitation of western and Chinese culture.

Where else will you find:

Chips and Chicken Feet

Hershey's and Haw Flakes

Flank Steak and Pig's Feet

Peaches wishing you prosperity and good fortune

Budweiser being marketed as a world-class, high quality beverage?

(and you can ask an attendant for a trial if you don't believe it)

火锅

At the bookstore, I bought what can only be described as an exact copy of the Zagat Survey for Hangzhou. (They are online too at http://www.dianping.com/.) I've never had as thorough and well-organized of a restaurant guide in China before, and it's especially helpful for finding restaurant chains or types of food we've enjoyed before that exist in Hangzhou too.

One example is the hot pot chain 小肥羊 (Little Lamb). We actually found a newly opened branch close to our place that was not yet included under the Hangzhou restaurant guidebook's 小肥羊listing and shared a boiling pot of 半麻辣半清 (half spicy/half not) broth in which we cooked orders of 冻豆腐，羊肉，牛肉，金针菇，鱼丸，白菜，土豆，年糕，蛋较，等 (frozen tofu - doesn't translate well but trust me it's good in hot pot-; lamb; beef; golden needle mushroom (enoki); fish balls, thinly sliced potato, "rice cake" - another inadequate translation-; dumplings with egg wrappers, etc).

It may not look good, but it tastes good

Beware: Your breakfast could kill you

Thursday, June 19: Our first breakfast in Hangzhou

We stayed in a downtown hotel our first night, which included a buffet breakfast in the lobby restaurant. I love Chinese breakfast spreads because outside of a few exceptions, I'm not a big fan of what are traditionally thought of as breakfast foods (waffles, pancakes, omelets, etc...) and except for the few usually unsuccessful attempts at Western breakfast foods, Chinese breakfast buffets consist of various options including dishes such as tea eggs, stir-fried tofu, vegetables, meat, and boiled/steamed/fried dumplings. Both of us especially enjoy a bowl of 粥 (hot rice porridge). This buffet had two types of porridge - I went for the one with the black century eggs in it and Owen went for what looked like plain porridge; in most instances mine would appear to be the more daring of the two, but the hotel's English translator must have been mixing up his food and medical dictionaries, as the plain porridge Owen ate was translated as:

The Good Life in Hangzhou

We arrived in Hangzhou on June 19 and will be here until August 7. With some funding from the University of Rochester, Owen is carrying out a project at a genomic research center at Zhejiang University's medical school. I'm along for the ride, and actually enjoying this temporary period of absolutely no real responsibility and being in China with no strings attached. There are downsides to where we are - we are in the 'remote' campus of Zhejiang University and even the locals laugh when we tell them where we live; it's hot and humid and the mosquitos are vicious; and I'm still partial to NE China - but we're making things work and I've found several things to fill my days (with the option to sit around and do nothing but read almost always open). We've bought a crappy bike which gets us to where we need to go, found a great breakfast spot (more on that later), have made our bed a mosquito-free haven with the simple purchase of a mosquito net/tent, and I've found two Chinese department tutors from north of here (one even from Harbin!)

This free time should also allow me to keep an active commentary on the food in our life. I've already got a number of entries in my head and photos downloaded off my camera that I'm about to start putting together now. It's been a bit of a delay with blogspot blocked for the first few days we were here, then the search for an internet place where the USB drive wasn't locked away. I think I've found my dusty, dimly-lit place though and while it gets quite busy in the evenings, I can come here in the mornings and work in relative peace with just the hard-core guys who played games through the night and a smattering of other males who make me wonder why they don't need to get jobs.

My workspace

Wedding Weekend

Seeing that I'm using marriage to rationalize my change of heart about having a blog, our wedding weekend in Salt Lake City seems to be a good place to start.

Thursday, June 12: The actual wedding event

We had a sit-down dinner and of the various aspects to plan, I probably enjoyed setting the menu the most. We were satisfied with the dinner, with one exception: at the tasting, they served us individual soft-centered chocolate lava cakes, one of our favorite desserts. Had I listened to my slight doubt about their ability to hold up for a catered event, I would have been right. By the time they got to the table, the centers were soft no more. So, it tasted like a chocolate brownie cake, which I guess would be fine for those with no expections, but it didn't come close to oozing chocolate goodness.

The only food-related picture I currently have from the wedding is one of us cutting the cake. We went with a red velvet cake since it worked perfectly with the off-white and crimson color scheme. The cake may not look very large in the photo, but even after freezing away the top tier, that cake fed not only the wedding guests, but a significant number of family and friends for the rest of the weekend.

Friday, June 13 - Sunday, June 15: Weekend Festivities (aka "group honeymoon")

Having a wedding on a Thursday is not the most convenient for guests and we really appreciate our friends and family taking time off from work and other committments to join us during the week, but the upside is that the formal event is all over and done with before the weekend even starts, giving us the weekend to kick back and relax with everyone who was still around. Alex found us an amazing house right in the Cottonwood Canyons area, right around great hiking and biking.

The house was beautiful and had a big open kitchen and outdoor grill. It was the first time in over two years that my five Middlebury roommates and I had all been together as a group and Friday night's dinner prepared by Jessie and Eloise reminded me why we really need to have ladies reunions more often.

A new purpose for an old blog

In the past year or so, I've learned that almost all of our married friends/family have blogs. I'd never really considered "blogging", but I guess now that Owen and I were married for the second time just over a week ago (what we term the first time was a small, official ceremony in his Grandma Jacquie's backyard in March; photos on Emily and Bryan's blog: http://wheelerwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/03/owen-wedding-part-one-photo-blog.html), I now have an excuse to start doing so. I also found out that Owen had an old blogspot account, so rather than starting up a new one, I've usurped his and given it a new purpose: to document our new life together through food.