Delightful scorpions and seahorsies!  Both easily available in kebab form here in Beijing!  Okay, not so easily available, all the Chinese people I know draw the line at eating scorpions and seahorses.  But not at grasshoppers and fish heads, oddly enough… all seems the same to me.

Hope I didn’t kill anyone’s appetite.

What you see in the foreground here is tea.  To be specific, puer tea harvested from wild, natural growing tea trees that are poetically described as 千年古树 (1000 year old ancient trees).  What many people don’t realize is that the tea plant, camellia sinensis, grows as a tree in the wild.  It’s cultivated as a bush at tea plantations for convenience of picking. 

The background is the rest of our dinner.  Nice and classy.

I’ve been experimenting with various combinations of putting fruits and nuts in my salads.  This one is bits of almond and green raisins.  The larger chunks are cucumbers, tomatoes, and chinese pear, all on a bed of lettuce.  The balsamic vinaigrette that I later poured over it was perhaps not the best dressing to use… something more like an Italian vinaigrette might have been better.

The bread crust was not especially crunchy or hard, the way I like it.  Still, it was slightly nutty with bits of raisins in it, which made it go very very well with the wine and the others.

The wine was a Yering Station 2007 Chardonnay, from the Mornington Peninsula in Australia.  I once spent an afternoon helping put netting over a friend’s wine grapes on the Mornington Peninsula.  Learned quite a bit about the process of wine-making.  I quite like Australian wines.  They’re well made, cheap at the price, and without the pretention of French wine.

And the coup de grace: Liver paté, a simple olive oil dipping sauce, and Denmark Havarti cheese with jalapeno.  

This brought to you courtesy of being bored.

This recipe is one of the things my father got out of living for several years in a tiny backwoods village in Shandong Province during the Cultural Revolution.

Scallion cakes are simple in recipe, but hard to describe.  The key thing is the dough, which is simply flour and water in roughly a 2:1 proportion.  Though I never measure, I just start kneading and add more flour or water as required.  The best dough is hard–the longer your knead, the better the pancakes will turn out, so I recommend keeping going long after your forearms have gone numb.  If you want, you can put an egg or two in the dough as well for better color.

Roll out the pancake into a roughly round, flat shape, while making sure it stays non-sticky and flour coated.  Don’t worry about making it too thin at this point, it’s this step that gives it the many layers.  Lightly coat the surface with a fragrant oil, like peanut (or sometimes we use olive oil).  DO NOT PUT TOO MUCH OIL.  Best way to do this is just to put a few drops of oil in the middle, and then lightly bring the edges of the pancake to touch the center to spread the oil around.  Lightly salt the surface and add a few finely chopped scallions. 

Now, carefully roll up the pancake into a long thin tube.  Then curl the tube in on itself, sort of like a cinnabun–you’ll have coiled spring-type-shape made of the tube.  At this point, if you’ve added too much oil to the middle, it will dribble out the ends.  Flatten the roughly round shape you have now with your hand, and then flatten into a round pancake shape with your rolling pin.

Generously oil a flat frying pan, then put over medium heat.  Put the pancake on–cooking times vary from pan to pan and stove to stove, anywhere from just 2-3 minutes to 5-6 minutes.  Watch for the edge of the pancake to turn a light golden brown before flipping.

Simple, right?  This recipe is not complicated, but takes some practice to get right.

Cold Sesame Noodles

This is another fairly simple recipe.  Simply cook some long asian-style spaghetti noodles (sans egg) and then run under cold water.  The sauce is equally simple–the key ingredient is something called “ma jiang” 麻酱 (with an upwards, then a falling intonation) sesame paste.  Now, this usually comes as a thick paste, so mix in with water to make it the desired consistency.  Add some salt for a stronger flavor, and then mix with the noodles.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds and finely chopped cilantro.

Alternately, use buckwheat noodles (ala Japanese soba) instead of wheat noodles.

Wintermelon/Daikon Soup

The absolute key to making Asian-style vegetable soup with things like daikon or winter melon is slow cooking.  What my father typically does is put it in the slow cooker overnight.  If you don’t have a slow cooker, bring the soup to a boil and then back down to a very slow simmer for at least 3 hours.  Your home will completely fill up with the smell of it.

Daikon/Wintermelon soup can be very simple.  Throw in some old bones (pork works best) for flavor, and simply add some salt and soy sauce.  Experiment with the various spices to add, all will work–some options include star anise, ginger, garlic, peppercorns, bay leaves, ginseng root, etc.  Don’t overspice at the beginning, the true flavor doesn’t begin to come out until 2 hours in.  You can always add more later, but the real danger is ending up with an overly salty or heavily flavored soup because you added to much at the beginning.

It included some odd dishes, like the coca cola chicken.  A modern update to an old Chinese recipe of fried chicken. This is simmered using a reduction of coke. Like, you put the chicken wings in the wok, pour a 12 oz can of coke in, and simmer.

Some dishes, like this involved salted preserved duck eggs, I was less interested in learning the recipe for, much less trying.  I still can’t quite get over the texture.  Ick.

Some foods, of course, are very traditional.  I can never quite get the crimped edges right on dumplings… it’s an acquired skill.  These used to only be eaten at Spring Festival–they were a luxury food.  Sort of like turkey on Thanksgiving.  My relatives reminisce fondly about the days of scrimping to get enough white flour to make enough dumplings so that everyone could have a few.  Ah, the good old days.  Now dumplings are cheap and available everywhere.

You may know this as the funny fried crunchy stuff they have sitting on the table at Chinese restaurants. What you might not know that this is a dish traditionally served at New Year’s, called “Pai Char”. The recipe is simple. Dough, flattened and twisted, and then deep fried in peanut oil. There’s a video that shows how they’re made.

Pai Char the Video