Let's Talk About Xinjiang...

…because I love it and no one State-side seems to know about it.

Xinjiang is the westernmost province in China, roughly the size of Western Europe. It borders the Middle East, neighboring countries like Kazakhstan. Because of its proximity to national borders, Xinjiang is home to many minority groups, namely the Uyghur people. This group, of Turkish decent, is known for having distinct features, including cultural history and practice. For hundreds of years, the majority of Uyghur people have been Muslim, having converted from Buddhism in the ____. Many Uyghur families are traditionally nomadic peoples, and although that has mostly been left behind, the Uyghur people are known for their lamb kabobs, raising sheep much like Mongolians.

I’m particularly hyped about Xinjiang right now, having returned from a trip to Urumqi, Turpan, and the Bogda Mountains and there are SO many interesting aspects to talk about. But I’m going to focus on food of course! Xinjiang cuisine is very appealing to many Westerners because of the similarities with Eastern European foods. It might be hard to fathom that “Chinese” food could be meat and potatoes, but in this part of the country, it often is.

Here are a few of my favorite Xinjiang foods:

大盘鸡 (da4pan2ji1) – People love to translate this dish literally as “big plate of chicken,” which is a pretty accurate description except that it leaves out my favorite part…the potatoes! Chunks of chicken on the bone, potatoes, onions, green and red peppers, and garlic are all stewed together in a delicious sauce. Dapanji also goes great with wide noodles, which will often be brought out separately and dumped on top of the dish. This is a classic and a must at Xinjiang restaurants.

串(chuan[r]4) – They come in many forms and are eaten all over China, but chuanr really are a Xinjiang specialty. Who doesn’t love meat on a stick?! The most notable kebabs are 羊肉串(yang2rou4chuan4), lamb kebabs. They are grilled outside and seasoned to your taste, usually with cumin and chili flakes (辣椒). Pictured to the left, however, is a personal favorite, 鸡肉串(jirouchuan), chicken kebabs. Though not as common in Xinjiang proper due to a lack of chickens, many Xinjiang restaurants in Beijing and throughout China will have them. Delish.

烤馕 (kaonang) – Xinjiang is famous for its breads. They take many shapes and form, including extremely dense, bagel-like rolls. The most typical is nang, a round, flat bread, with seasoning that include sesame seeds or another variety of seeds. While I was in Xinjiang this past week, one of my favorite things was being able to walk down the street and grab a hot piece of bread fresh out of the kiln. Watching the vendors make nang is fascinating and usually involves slapping dough and flinging the finished product like a Frisbee.

Noodles Noodles Noodles – In Beijing I eat Xinjiang food all the time but I couldn’t have fathomed what a huge role noodles play in the diet out west. Everywhere you go there seems to be someone making noodles fresh, pulling the dough just a few minutes before it winds up on your plate. Try the 拌面 (banmian), a simple dish of noodles, covered with some veggies and maybe a few cubes of lamb. You won’t regret it!

Wusu Beer - A little heavier than your average Chinese beer, Wusu was the go-to Xinjiang beer in the Turpan Depression while I was there. Many people don’t drink in Xinjiang and beer isn’t served in Muslim restaurants for the most part, but walking down the grapevine covered streets of Turpan, there are tons of tables lining the streets outside the convenient stores covered in beer bottles on a hot afternoon. I’m definitely including this because I like this picture I took ;) but a cold beer isn’t a bad thing on a hot day either. 

Lord of the Egg Tarts

In 1989, Andrew Stow, an expat from England, developed a unique recipe for the perfect pastry: the egg tart (蛋挞). According to the sign outside his famous shop on Coloane Island, the treat is a combination of the classic Portuguese tart, with an English style filling. Out of an Industrial Pharmacist, a culinary legend was born...

Lord Stow, as he came to be known, left a legacy that continues to amaze me. Not only did these egg tarts become a specialty of Macau, they expanded to Hong Kong, and are served throughout China as a southern Chinese specialty. Few people know the name "Lord Stow" outside of the Macau/Hong Kong region, but the tarts reign across Asia and even in Dimsum restaurants around the world. 

While you can find a good egg tart in many a bakery, their quality and overall custard-y goodness are nothing compared to a warm one, fresh out of Lord Stow's oven. You can visit Lord Stow's Bakery in sleepy Coloane and take a tart to the waterfront where you can look across the water at mainland China. 

Not only does the bakery serve their famous treat though! They have a wide variety of baked goods as well as homemade drinks like lemonade, and delicious sandwiches. If a picnic by the water isn't your style (though it should be :)), the Lord Stow franchise has opened up two restaurants on the same block. I tried the Garden Cafe, where I had an AHmazing lasagna lunch and Thai tea. Apparently the Thai specialties are excellent as well. 

Lord Stow's definitely deserves high marks in my book for both deliciousness and the quaint but beautiful surroundings. If Macau is in your future, this spot is a must must.

The Particular Danger of Man-handled Chicken

Walking through the open air market a few blocks from my apartment complex tonight, I picked up some veggies for a home-cooked dinner. Mostly red peppers because they are basically the best vegetable created. I'm a little biased...my nickname when I was an international school kid was "pepper" because I was known for bringing fresh red and yellow peppers for a snack. 

My mission to create a broccoli and red pepper stir-fry in mind, I picked up some cooking supplies, including soy sauce and rice vinegar. Then, on an impulse, I paused at one of the meat windows, eyeing the chicken breasts. Cooking meat is a daunting prospect to me, especially chicken. One of my very few irrational fears is poisoning myself or dying from salmonella. Honestly I'm not sure how likely those risks are, but I've always been nervous handling chicken. 

My hesitation halted momentarily, though, and I asked the man behind the cooler for one chicken breast. Without hesitation he grabbed the biggest hunk of raw chicken with his bare hand, threw it in a plastic bag, and gave me the price. Let me repeat that: with his bare hand. I'm trying to imagine what would happen if I was in Whole Foods and the man behind the deli counter grabbed the deli meat, sliced it, and put in in a bag with his bare hand. There would definitely be some kind of outrage, maybe even a lawsuit. But nothing really phases me anymore so I collected my bag o' breast and headed home, more anxious about actually killing myself in the cooking process than the man-handled meat. 

So finished product turned out pretty well, though I need to work on my perfect seasoning mix. I sat down to eat while I finished reading the last few pages of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a book about a girl who discovers she has the ability to taste how people are feeling through the food they make. No spoilers but I will say the book is pretty sad, even though a "superpower" like that could be used for so many good things. I can't say I would be particularly excited by having to eat everyone else's depression or anger or insecurity, but it can't be all bad! 

If I had that skill tonight, I probably would have tasted the weary hands of the farmers who grew my broccoli and red pepper, the cold factory that made my noodles out of distant flour and eggs, and the jolly but bored hands of the meat seller living oblivious to the world of food safety regulations. Oh and the taste of my own anxious cooking as I cut the chicken smaller and smaller to make sure it was cooked through! We'll see if I make it to tomorrow :)

For when I am in the mood for Starbucks but there is none to be found...

Sometimes you just gotta have a super sugary, hot drink. And although there is coffee in China, I like to try more local specialties when I can. This year, to carry me through the winter and into the spring, my go-to beverage was hot milk tea (奶茶). You can buy it at any supermarket, and it comes in many, many flavors. I'm a sucker for the classic so I love Original Milk Tea, but you can choose from flavors like coffee, blueberry, mango, and strawberry.

The cups come with the ingredients packaged inside. When you open up the lid, you will see a straw, a package of the milk tea powder, a packet of sugar, and a cup of little jellies which make a great textural addition to the mix. Simply dump them in and add hot water, mix it up and enjoy!

Living in Tianjin, I have spent a lot of time traveling to Beijing on the high speed railway (which practically flies down the tracks at upwards of 300 km/hr). You can use the hot water machine right on the train and the 30 minute ride is the perfect length of time for the hot water to cool enough to drink. These milk teas have been the perfect treat to sip while watching 京津冀 blur by me!

Jintian Xiabu le me?

Hotpot is legendary. It is normally a meal consisting of raw meats and veggies which you dunk into a pot of boiling water and oil. Honestly, though, I hesitate to even define it as that, since many regions of China have their own versions of hotpot. I’ll delve into the plethora of hotpot varieties over the course of this blog but for now I want to start with the best basic hotpot chain in China, 呷哺呷哺 (Xiabu Xiabu).

It is the closest thing to fast food hotpot you could find, with a winding bar of individual hotpots, heating up to a boil on their individual hot plates. There is one in almost every major Chinese mall. At lunch time during the work week, the high chairs are filled with young people on their lunch breaks, and sometimes in the evening you will even see a young couple out for dinner in their PJs. True story.

On the menu they have the usual hotpot meats, but I would recommend the lamb. It is thinly sliced and cooks incredibly quickly. Xiabu has also been known to have little hotpot dumplings, although not every store carries them. If you can find the 火锅饺, though, they are amazing.

Balla picks: 1 plate of half potato and half sweet potato, 1 plate of lotus roots, 1 order of noodles, one plate of greens. Additional picks might include tofu skin, meatballs, needle mushrooms, and bailuobuo.

Once you order the combination of foods you want to cook, you have to pick what kind of boiling broth you want to cook your food in. There are 3 options at Xiabu, 清汤 (qingtang, a clear broth with light seasoning), 麻辣 (mala,
numbingly spicy), and a curry based broth (which I confess I have never actually tried). I go for the spicy one!

The final step is to prepare your sauce for dipping once your food comes out of the pot! The standard is a sesame paste (芝麻酱), which is given to you in a plastic packet that you have to squeeze into a bowl yourself. Weird but worth it. The sauce makes the meal. If you like cilantro, it is typical to be given a bowl of it to add to your sauce.

Oh and listen up for Xiabu’s spinoff version of the old “Numa Numa song” which is perpetually playing in restaurants across China!

Let the boiling, dunking, and eating begin!

For the broke college student who loves good grub...

I struggled with where to start. So rather than begin with an extravagant or completely unexpected food, I'm starting with something basic, seemingly boring, but ultimately completely addicting.

This food is 麻辣烫 (ma4la4tang4).

It is but a bowl of veggies, meats, and noodles, hand picked by the consumer, cooked in broth by the chef, and dowsed with sesame paste and maybe some hot pepper oil if you so please. Basically, malatang is hotpot made simple and cheap.

Malatang restaurants are almost exclusively hole in the wall restaurants. When you find one you will know it by the wall of raw ingredients and the cheap stools and tables filling the *usually* rundown joint. There will be a stack of metal bowls and a hook with metal tongs so you can go down the line and pick out the foods you want in your bowl. Usually the options consist of some green veggies, like spinach and cabbage, and then broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, mushrooms, rice cakes, melons, meat balls, fish balls, little sausages, tons of noodle options, and my personal favorite, lotus root.

Once you fill your bowl, the laoban weighs your food and then sends it back to be prepared in a cylindrical basket that is dunked into a giant pot of boiling broth. Make sure to tell them if you want it spicy or nah, because the spice can kick your tail if you aren't prepared for it! The completed bowl of malatang comes out in a nice broth with a spoon of sesame sauce on top.

And the best part...it usually costs between $2 and $3 (depending on how much you load into your bowl!)! Can you beat that price?? I would live at a malatang restaurant if it existed this way in the U.S.! Alas, malatang will probably only ever make it State side as a hipster fusion cuisine or a classed up food truck food.

Balla bowl: spinach, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice cakes, bailuobuo (the clear melon), broccoli, cauliflower, lotus root, and a nice clump of noodles. Extra spicy! And I am no meat eater but Mom will forever vouch for the meat balls and little sausage links.

Chinese Food for Geniuses

If you have lived in China, you might think you know a lot about Chinese food. I’m here to tell you that you don’t. I’ve spent the last 8 years living on and off in China, really delving into the cultures and foods of each region and people, and I still know nothing.

In the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some of my more recent discoveries, mixed in with some of my old faves. A wise observer of my family once said, “You guys really like to travel and eat.” So beware, my love of food runs deep and there is almost no limit to the number of posts I can write about it. For the old China hands out there, these m

ay be nothing new. For the non-China explorers, maybe this will open your eyes to a world beyond Chow Mein and fried rice.

Prepare your eyes for the feast ahead...