In 2006, I made two trips to China to see my now-husband. It was thrilling, scary, amazing, and eye-opening. I haven't written much about it and it's hard to tell stories without showing pictures. Telling someone who's never been to China about the trip- it's kind of like the kind of funny story you tell and follow up with "You had to be there." It was that intense.
But I digress. This is, after all, a food blog. Here are some of the wonderful (and strange) things that Jonah, Carol, and I ate in China. I suspended my vegetarian ways for 6 weeks and although my stomach barely lived to tell the tale, my taste buds wanted in.
Act 1: Home World, Lanzhou, Gansu Province
This was like Target and Whole Foods rolled into one. It was my introduction to the large scale of EVERYTHING in China. There were about five floors, each one more ADD-inducing. The displays were wonderful, an artist's dream of color and never-before-seen shapes and packaging.
I thought I'd seen every fruit and vegetable in existence. And then I saw The Pitaya.
I didn't know that it was at first, so I looked it up. Wikipedia, I love you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitaya Turns out it's commonly known as dragonfruit. Still, I call it Audrey.
Act 2: Eggs
Century Eggs, Tea-Boiled Eggs, and a Cautionary Tale of Strangers on a Train
Let's just let the Wikipedia post speak for itself:
"Century egg, also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, and thousand-year-old egg, is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice straw for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing. After the process is completed, the yolk becomes a dark green, cream-like substance with a strong odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, transparent jelly with little flavour or taste. The transforming agent in the century egg is its alkaline material, which gradually raises the pH of the egg from around 9 to 12 or more.[1] This chemical process breaks down some of the complex, flavorless proteins and fats, which produces a variety of smaller flavourful compounds."
If you're still reading, you're a brave soul. But not as brave as those who have dared to eat the century egg, and may I say, enjoyed it. Immensely. We ordered them wherever we saw them on the menu. Although they can have a strong aroma of ammonia, they do not taste like it and they are excellent, with the texture of a perfectly poached egg with a slightly jello-ish textural finish. I'm not doing a great job of selling them, am I?
Once we attempted to make the century egg and tofu dish we'd had there, and did a pretty darn good job. We also found this dish at Shangri-la restaurant in Belmont, on Belmont Street, which has a lot of wonderful and unusual Chinese dishes. There, they top the tofu and eggs with a delicious soy and ginger sauce and "ham floss" and I do not want to know what that is. I pick it out because it's fuzzy and I just don't want to know.
We also went to a lovely teahouse in Shanghai where they served quail eggs. I couldn't bring myself to eat them, but they were really lovely looking. They're hard-boiled in tea and slightly cracked at some point during the process, so the crack-patterns show up beautiful and brown. Here they are, with shells still on.
And now for my favorite egg story. In China, the most popular transport is the train. We took several overnight trains during our trips. In each car there are about a dozen rooms with four beds (two bunks) in each. During a trip to Shanghai, we traveled with a woman and her daughter. After establishing fairly quickly that they spoke no English and didn't understand our feeble attempts at Chinese, the mother seems to have decided to communicate through food. I can definitely respect that. Jonah is a FAST eater and perhaps because his plate was quickly empty, she gave Jonah most of her dinner despite his protests. And thus, he ate several helpings of bitter melon. Sucker. That'll teach him to eat slower. Anyhow, back to the point. Several hours after dinner, she took out some snacks. She offered me an egg and having eaten century eggs before, I was understandably cautious. Could I eat a whole one with out the ginger and soy chaser? I wasn't sure. I was relieved to see that it had a white shell and even after taking off the shell, it was still white. A good old-fashioned hard boiled egg. Right? Alas, no. I broke the egg in half and looked down in shock because THE YOLK WAS COMPLETELY BLACK. JET BLACK. ALL-CAPS BLACK. AND THERE WASN'T A DARN THING I COULD DO ABOUT IT. Because, when offered half, my loving husband clenched his mouth shut and wordlessly, he shook his head. So, my friends, I ate it. I ate the black egg. All of it. And I lived to write this blog. And to tell you that it was damn tasty. After I ate it, and once the woman and her daughter were asleep, Jonah produced a bottle of wine from his backpack and managed to convince me that if I drank half of it, straight from the bottle, the alcohol would kill any bacteria from the egg. I see now that he was trying to get me drunk on a train. Perhaps the egg was all part of his plan. That night, I wrote several postcards to my friends and family, telling them of the gastronomical encounter and professing my love and appreciation for them, lest I never see them again. Drunken, black-yolk postcards: I will never learn.
Writing this has made me hungry. I think, in light of recent posts, that I will choose oatmeal.
We fried up some tofu to put in the pad thai. It crackled and sizzled and became crunchy and chewy. Observe:
