Cooking Class (Part 2)

Yep, I've finally done it-- I learned how to cook. Oh, I can make things like toast, eggs, spaghetti, frozen things, and toast. But a body does not live on toast alone, and we must supplement our diet with other things. Things like Chinese food. I'm not going to talk a lot about Chinese cooking class. I think the pictures will say it all.

This is a picture of my classmates, Matthew and Sarah. Sarah is also my roommate.
This is sweet and sour pork loin. Mmmmmm...
Kung Pao Chicken. Mine was so totally way better than the kind they make at Safeway.
This is called "Fish Fragrant Eggplant". It's not like fish, and it's not like eggplant. Of all the dishes I've tried here, this is one of the best.
This dish I liked the least. It's a salad of sorts, but the sauce was too heavily seasoned with the Sichuan peppercorn. The peppercorn has a very distinct flavor. It's well known for the mouth-numbing qualities it has.
Those of you who read my other blog know that I have a bad habit of taking pictures of people's rear ends. So as not to dissapoint you, here's the ladies who taught our class.
After each dish was completed, we all sat down to eat. We made five dishes in all, but by the third one, we were stuffed. This is us at the end of class.

It's Sunday!

Ordering food at a restaurant is the challenge of a lifetime. I try to go to restaurants that have pictures, or at least a menu written in romanized Chinese. Even with the odds working for you, you can still have problems.

For lunch today I found a restaurant with pictures and ordered what I thought were short ribs. When my food arrived, I realized that what I recieved were not ribs, but thick, fatty pieces of ham. Ham hock ham. Although I don't have a problem with this kind of meat, it just doesn't suit my tastes. And besides that, there were a couple of ham hock hairs to contend with.

I pushed the offending meat to the side of my plate, and not more than three minutes later a waitress came by to ask why I wasn't eating it. She asked if I thought it was too greasy, and then apologized and asked if I wanted something else. I was stunned! This was the absolute BEST customer service I have ever recieved in China. These people were awesome. They continued to refill my tea, they offered to replace my meal (there was really nothing wrong with it), they even gave us a discount for the trouble!

I wish my Chinese was better, I would love to tell them just how I felt...

Cooking Class

I don't have a lot of food news to report. I ate some mysterious meat today, but that happens to me quite often here. No, the real news I wanted to report was that I have signed up for a Sichuan cooking class. We'll be making five dishes with a Sichuanese chef and hopefully through the process, learn how to cook some Chinese food for myself. The class is happening next Saturday. My roommate and I both signed up for the class at a nearby youth hostel. I'll let you all know how it goes...

Oh Bloody Hell!

I wish it had remained a mystery. I could just chalk the incident up as another “don’t ask”, and forget all about it. But no, we just had to go to that restaurant and order that dish.

About a week ago, my Chinese roommate brought home three bags of food. She distributed one to me and my roommate, and we all sat down to eat. The food was good; some kind of vegetable soup with duck meat. It was all very tasty except for one of the ingredients: large, glutinous, brown chunks of something. I tried one of the chunks and thinking it innards, pushed it to the bottom of my bowl.

Anyway, today I was again invited to go have dinner with a couple of the Chinese students. One of the students helped me buy a bike earlier in the day, and I wanted to thank her by not letting her pay for the meal. She rattled off half a dozen dishes to the waitress, and we settled in for the wait.

Our dishes arrived one by one. First the corn with red pepper, then the eggplant in a spicy sauce, then the soup, followed by several other dishes too delicious for words. Lastly the waitress placed a large, steaming pot of chili oil, underneath which lurked those glutinous brown chunks.

I asked the Chinese student to tell me what the mystery ingredient was.

“Blood.”

“What?”

“It’s blood. B-L-Double ‘O’-D. Blood.” All the Americans paused. In unison, we plastered on our fake smiles and commented on how good the food was.

My classmate leaned over and asked me, “What’d she say? Blood?”

“Yep.” One of the other students clarified matters for us. The broth itself wasn’t blood, it was the brown glutinous chunks.

I don’t know. Blood was just never meant to be an ingredient. It was pretty gross. I posted a picture of the chunks I found online. This isn’t the dish we ate, but it gives you a pretty clear picture of what they look like.

More Food

Today a couple of Chinese students took a classmate and I out to lunch. I trust the students to find and order good food for us. However, today I was commanded to point at the pictures in the menu and order a couple of dishes for the group.

I found something that looked like noodles in broth. I ordered it, and promptly tried it when it came. It looked like noodles, but when I tasted it I realized I was wrong.

The “noodle” was chewy. It tasted like acid. My classmate and I spent close to five minutes trying to figure out what exactly we were eating. Finally we decided to ask the Chinese students. One of them requested my dictionary. A minute later he found the definition and turned the dictionary my way so I could see. It read, “Intestine.”

IABB (I Ate Bugs Bunny)

I announced on my other blog that I had moved into a new apartment. My roommate and landlord is a Chinese woman who works at the school I’m attending. This year is the school’s 110th anniversary, so they arranged a huge celebration to take place at on of the school’s four campuses. My Chinese roommate had two tickets, so she gave one to me and promised me that this would be sooo great!

The day of the celebration, we decided to go furniture shopping to buy a bed for the second bedroom (my other classmate has yet to arrive). She took me by bus out past the third ring road (way out in the boonies) to a furniture mall. Although the mall was new, it was modeled to look like traditional Chinese architecture. Actually, the mall looked like a HUGE faux Forbidden City. We entered through one of the “gates” and entered a shop. Each shop was dedicated to a particular piece of furniture. One store sold only coffee tables, one sold hide-a-beds, one sold kitchen tables, etc. We ended up buying a bed that folds up into a couch.

Anyway, if you’re reading this you’re probably wondering when I am going to get to the food part of this post. Here you go:

Leap ahead in time to the Sichuan University’s 110th anniversary celebration. Picture me squished between my Chinese roommate and about another million Chinese people. The last time we had both eaten was at the Forbidden Furniture City, so we were both starved. I was hoping I could find some sort of snack food at the celebration, but no such luck. Presently, one of my roommate’s friends walked up and passed a bag to her. She grinned and told me it was some “traditional Chinese food.” I asked her what it was, “Rabbit head.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want some? It’s very good. Hen hao chi!” She dug into the bag and pulled one out. It was small, about the size of a rat’s head. I looked over as my roommate sucked out the tongue, pulled the meat off the roof of the mouth, slurped at the eyeballs. Just when I couldn’t get anymore grossed out, she put her fingers on the jaw and broke it off the skull.

“Try it. Its good.”

“But the brain—you can’t eat that!” Just then, she poked a finger through the base of the skull.

Slurp, slurp, slurp…

I slowly raised the rabbit head to my mouth and pulled the tiny bit of meat from the cheek. I was done.

“You are sooo brave. None of the other students will ever try this food…”

Hmm. Maybe so, but I won’t be eating it again.