I am not a winter person. Even though I have spent most of my life in cold cities (Boston, New York, Beijing), I always dread their endless winters. Some people from northern climes can wax poetic about snow, fire places, and ski season. Me, I conjure up flu season, ugly long underwear, and bitter winds that lash across my face. No offense, Winter, but I would love to avoid you altogether by skipping to the tropics. Or hibernating until spring.
Until science finds a way for humans to sleep for 4 months, I am finding solace in the next best thing. Alcohol. More specifically, hot alcohol.
Mulled wine, also called Glühwein in Germany and Glögg in the Nordic countries, is simply wine heated up with spices and sugar. It's an especially good drink to make if you live in a country devoid of good wine, like China. Domestic brands are mostly undrinkable, and any imported wines are either bottom-of-the-barrel gunk (literally?) or bottles 3 or 4 times the cost overseas. (How I miss Trader Joe's wine shops.) With mulled wine, you can buy the cheapest wine that is still drinkable, and allow the spices and sugar to take charge.
Read MoreThe first pomelo I bought this season was the size of a bowling ball. The other person in my house does not eat pomelo, and it took me 2 weeks to finish.
Winter is pomelo season, and sure enough, these big fat babies are everywhere. It's the grapefruit for people who don't like grapefruit. The taste is less tart, and the big meaty segments make it healthy for day-long snackage. Pomelo is also loaded with vitamin C, making it excellent for warding off seasonal cold and flu.
This pomelo I bought yesterday was the smallest in the bin. Still, it took me about half an hour to fully dissect.
Read MoreWonton noodle soup is one of the few dishes I set very high standards for, almost to the point of obsession. Because of cravings for an ideal bowl of wonton noodle soup (and seeing my relatives), I have paid way too much for same day plane tickets to Hong Kong. When I get wontons that are all or mostly pork, I feel cheated. And I rarely visit wonton noodle stands outside of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, for fear of getting inferior versions.
Yes, it's rather compulsive behavior. But the behavior applies to any sort of a purist, whether the love is sushi, borscht, cocktails, or xiaolongbao. We all have certain foods we put on a pedestal.
If you can't get to Hong Kong, the next best cure for wonton lust is recreating the darn thing at home. After tinkering in the kitchen for over a year and a half, I have updated an older post on this very topic. For me, an ideal wonton noodle soup must include the following: fragrant broth consisting of pork and seafood umami flavor, springy al dente egg noodles, and wontons containing at least 50% shrimp.
Here are the details, if you would like to recreate my ideal Hong Kong-style wonton noodle soup at home.
Read MoreLast week I helped out at a Thai cooking class at The Hutong taught by my friend Sandra of Savour Asia. As we sat down to a meal of mango salad, pork laap, and red curry chicken, I realized how much I missed having lemongrass as a kitchen staple. In New York I could easily take the train to Chinatown whenever I wanted to cook with lemongrass. In Beijing, Sanyuanli market has several stalls selling the aromatic stalky grass, but is such a trek from my apartment that it doesn't enter my cooking consciousness at a moment's notice.
After scooping the last of my laap mu into my mouth, I decided I must must must get lemongrass that day and make iced tea. Lemongrass and ginger iced tea is my drink of choice with Thai food if I want something lighter than iced tea with condensed milk. A somewhat long trip to Sanyuanli later, I had four stalks of fresh lemongrass to take guilty whiffs of and inspire bleary yearnings for a trip to Thailand this winter.
Read MoreLately, I've been dissatisfied with the chili sauces I find in stores. Many of them taste of preservatives, and almost all have ingredient lists over 10 items long, including MSG or some offshoot. (Yes, I know MSG isn't that bad for you, but if it's a restaurant staple in Beijing I might as well limit the amount consumed at home.) Chili sauce is such a basic blend, yet store-bought brands contain ingredients decipherable only through a Chinese-English chemical compound dictionary.
So recently I decided to buy a bunch of fresh red chilis and make my own sauces. I used the tiny little bird's eye chilis, but you can also use larger red chili peppers for a milder sauce. I donned plastic gloves and spent half an hour mincing my chilis. (Too many painful incidences of having residual chili oil on my hand when removing contacts made me become extra cautious.) That was the only labor-intensive part. Then I just cooked the chilis with yellow rice wine and dark rice vinegar, stir in some sugar, and seasoned it with a little salt. Done.
Read MoreIn these last few days before The Election, I have been trying to ease my political anxiety through food. When I catch up on my Google Reader and NYTimes in the morning, I find myself reaching out for snack. A chocolate bar to gnaw on, a cookie to hold on to, a tub of ice cream to drown oneself in. I don't think this is healthy. It's resembling how many women try to ease first date jitters or calm oneself after a devastating break-up.
I have also been cooking nonstop. More often than not, my Firefox tabs extend 10 or 15 long, a window into both my news and food addictions and my ADD: Food Blog Search, NPR, Tastespotting, NPR, Epicurious, NPR, my own blog, NPR, Twitpic of Obama-lanterns, NPR. A few times I had so many recipes open that I forgot which dish I just bought ingredients for.
And like most people using cooking as anxiety distraction, I have taken a step back from experimentations to attend to my comfort food needs, mainly soups, noodle soups, and cookies. Not that comfort food is 100% successful at getting my mind off things. Last night I got so distracted by an article on swing state exit polls that I burnt a batch of the banana chocolate chunk cookies. Then as I was analyzing the Times' latest Electoral Map I managed to burn another batch.
Read MoreThere are many things about the US that I started missing immediately after arrival in China: unrestricted internet, entertaining TV, concept of "personal space", the use of bleach and other disinfectants in public restrooms, just to name a few.
Then there are the foodstuffs that, after months of searching, I came to realize are simply impossible to find. Chinese beers may cost pennies, but anything with actual hops are 3 times the Stateside price. Vegetables are insanely cheap, but good luck finding a decent box of cereal for less than $8. Markets have massive bins of Sichuan peppercorn and any dried seafood you'd desire, but I can't find cardamom anywhere in the city.
Therefore, friends and loved ones who go abroad are essential to a worldly cook's sanity. When Jacob returned from his last trip to Hungary, he toted back not only foie gras (hugs!!!), truffles (hugs!!!), and a plethora of Eastern European liquor (drunken hugs!!!), but also whole cardamom and cloves. It's amazing how much those two spices can automatically freshen up your kitchen cabinets. And it was fitting we would take turns making tons and tons of chai.
Read MoreI made this for dinner early last week. By the time Jacob and I were halfway done, we were already sniffling, with sweat beads ready to form. Even in the pantheon of Sichuan cuisine, this is one helluva spicy dish.
Shuizhu niurou (水煮牛肉) is translated literally into English as "water-boiled beef", a rather benign name for such a potent tongue-burning dish. Restaurant versions usually come in a clay or iron pot, with about 100 chilis foating on the surface of the bright red broth, and a few pieces of beef poking through. It could more aptly be named "water-boiled chilis with beef garnish." The fish version can be equally alarming. But for spice fiends and native Sichuanese, this fiery dish is pure delicious comfort food.
Fortunately, the version I made at home is manageable, though just barely. The nice part is that if you don't care about how impressively red the broth is, you can adjust the spiciness to your tolerance level, by 1) using less chili bean sauce, or 2) leaving the dried chili peppers whole instead of chopping them up and unleashing the beastly seeds.
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