Since last year I have a new job where I use my Chinese skills at the East Asian Library where I write about eresources, databases, search tips, books and other stuff at the library.

You can go to my photos on Flickr where you can see what foodie things I have been up to: allotment gardening, baking bread and home cooking mostly.

And the last new thing is a blog we started with our food-loving co-workers at the library: the Eating Library.
So if you don’t see much going on here, go find me at all the other places…

Lotus leaves are such perfect things – large and pretty and smelling faintly like grass like green tea. They give off a subtle perfume to anything you wrap it in for steaming. So lotus leaves are the first thing you have to buy when you want to make this dish: they come dried in a huge package from the Chinese store, 12 large leaves to one pack. They seem impossible to handle but will be pliable and soft once soaked in warm water for half an hour or so. The next thing you have to hunt for is a large chunk of clay, which I found at the handicraft store. Of course if you know your clays or know your river beds or where ever you can find it for free, please do so! I remember the Sichuan chef announcing in the morning before he made the dish he had to go to the Chengdu countryside to get himself some special kind of clay, though I suspected him of making up this mission just to get the afternoon off

As in a lot of Chinese recipes with strange sounding titles, there is a story to go with this recipe and a reason for its name. The story is there was a beggar in the Qing dynasty who stole a chicken and killed it, and wanted to eat it without anyone noticing the smells of cooking. He quickly hid the chicken in mud and then cooked it in a fire pit, covering it all up. Then after returning to the scene of his crime he opened the mud casing and the beautiful smells of the chicken came out. There is a variation to this story that says an emperor happened to pass by – supposedly Qianlong, who did a lot of southward travelling through his empire – and he was so attracted to the wonderful chicken smells, he stepped out of his carriage to share the beggar’s meal.

For this recipe, you will need:
1 chicken
2 tablespoons of Shaoxing rice wine
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
salt
3 star anise
100 grams of minced pork
yacai (black Sichuan preserved vegetable) – optional, very hard to come by outside Sichuan
2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
pinch of sugar
2 cm. chunk of ginger
2 tablespoons soy sauce
5 pickled chillies (leave them out if you don’t like hot)
toothpicks
dried lotus leaf
kitchen string
greaseproof paper
about 2 to 3 kilos of clay
hot oven or 200C barbecue
sesame oil

Soak the dried lotus leaf in hot water until soft and pliable. Drain on kitchen towel until needed. Wash the chicken, pat it dry and then rub salt on the inside. Salt the outside too, then rub with marinade of Shaoxing rice wine and soy sauce. Put 3 star anise into the cavity of the chicken. Marinate for 30 mins up to one hour.

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a wok, fry the minced meat until turning white, add yacai preserved vegetable if you can find it. Add 2 tablespoons of Shaoxing rice wine, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, half a tablespoon of sugar, 2 centimetres of finely chopped ginger. Add 5 deeseeded and chopped pickled chili peppers (from Sichuan): if you can’t get hold of these peppers you can leave them out, or substitute with home pickled chilies. Fry until everything smells good, then turn off the heat and let cool.

Take your chicken, fill the cavity with the cooled minced meat mixture and secure with toothpicks. Now take your presoaked lotus leaf, put the chicken on top and wrap the leaf all around the chicken. Then wrap a sheet of greaseproof paper around the lotus leaf and secure with kitchen string.

What I did next is study the photos of the Sichuan chef to see how exactly he covered the chicken with clay: he kind of caked it on with his right hand while holding the chicken in his left hand. So that’s what I did too. The problem with this method is that when caking the clay on here and there, halfway you won’t remember the thickness of the clay. Just by looking at the outside you can’t say which part was put on thick or thin – resulting in places with thin clay which crack during the baking process. I think next time I will roll out a slab of clay like a piece of dough, in an even layer of 1 centimetre thick, and then put on the chicken and wrap it around.

Put the (heavy!) chicken on an baking tray and bake in a 200 C oven (or barbecue, like Big Green Egg) for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. After baking the package will stay hot for quite a long time! Mine burst halfway because of the thinness of the clay as I said and the increasing heat. Cracking it open was no trouble at all.

The chicken had the most wonderful flavor: grassy and rustic from the lotus leaves, and perfectly succulent from the clay casing. Brush with some sesame oil and eat with plain white rice and a simple soy sauce dip. Will definitely try again!

I now will share with you part of the most wonderful Chinglish recipe for Beggar’s chicken. Even when understanding Chinese perfectly, no one understands what direction this translation is taking! Usually you can kind of translate back and forth in your head to guess the real meaning, but this one, in places, turns out to be a total riddle.

“[…] system of law: the chicken claws ribs to get dirty, with knife blade struck decapitation, legs, feet, into the altar, add soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, salt pickled one hour. [sounds like some strange voodoo].

chicken out, the cloves, star anise grind at the end, plus kaempferol wiping the end of the chicken all over the body.

Wok into the Shuzhu You, fried onions, ginger and fragrant from fishing to go after, and then shrimp, chicken gizzard an small, button mushrooms, pork and ham under the small, shrimp into the wok fried Britain several times. Gachot wine, soy sauce, cotton sugar fry off-sheng, Dai Liang squeezed after the chicken stomach, beheaded squeezed blade, armpit put clove oil packet networks using pigs, chicken tight body, wrapped several layers of external Xian Heye truss with a fine hemp rope, grind mud wine Tan mixing of water from Canada into the powder stick flat on a damp cloth, tied difficult to set the middle with a damp cloth scoop up mud to make mud stick thrown off tight wet cloth, wrapped with the wrapping paper, poke a small hole in the.”

Good luck with that!

The emperor would fast for three days (although fasting didn’t actually mean he stopped eating, he just refrained from eating meat and drinking spirits), and then at sunrise of the morning of dongzhi he would perform a sacred ritual at the Altar of Heaven, including prayers and ritual sacrifices. In full imperial costume, he would climb the impressive three-tiered white marble platform at the Temple of Heaven before sunrise and kneel to pray for auspiciousness in the year to come.

Instead of having a western advent calendar, in which one has to open up a little window each day, ending on the Day of Christmas, the Chinese have a kind of chart known as the 九九消寒图 jiujiu xiao han tu, ‘Chart to Pass the Cold’. This chart, which has a time span of 81 days (9×9, a magic number) starts to be crossed off at Dongzhi, the winter solstice. When the 81 days have passed it is well into March, at the beginning of spring.

There are several styles in this type of ‘passing the cold’ charts, the most common one with Chinese characters. It consists of nine characters, each counting 9 strokes, making up a fitting sentence: ‘庭前垂柳珍重待春风‘，meaning “the courtyard’s droopy weeping willows await the breeze of spring”.
Another second chart of this type depicts a peach blossom branch with 81 white petals. Every day after applying their makeup, Chinese beauties could dapple the chart with their leftover rouge and color one peach blossom petal, in this way counting down until the beginning of spring. A third chart is only made up of 81 circles, strongly resembling Chinese ancient coins, divided into 5 segments each, made by drawing a square inside the circle. In these circles one can note down the weather conditions of that particular day. Coloring the upper segment means a cloudy day; the lower segment means a bright day; left side means a windy day; right side means a rainy day, and the center means that day was a snowy day.

This is a fun way to scribble one’s way out of the boring winter darkness and slowly approach the lighter days and the beginning of spring… Would you like to join me ? I have copied a set of passing-the-cold charts which I found on the web in a word document, which you can download and then print out your favorite. I myself will fill in the character one, one stroke for each day, but you can choose the flowers or the little coins too if you like those best. Wouldn’t that be fun?

The weather is perfect for making coffee granita (granita di caffe). It is so hot, what could be better than coming home and getting this ice cold granita, made of strong espresso and then lots of cold whipped cream?
I just love it in summer. It is especially good after a long meal of salads or barbecue. You don’t need to get up to make coffee, but just take a plunge in the freezer to serve it straight away.

Making granita does take some patience, but one batch will go a long way. You will need a stretch of time at home close to the freezer, since you have to use a fork to loosen up the ice crystals every 20 minutes or so. This might be during an evening you are home anyway, watching football matches for example.

The coffee is made with the cold-drip method (see Oliver Schwaner-Albright’s article in NYT), so you don’t need to brew the coffee. Just mix coffee with water and let the flavors come out. Your house will have a lovely coffee smell while it is steeping.

Here’s what you need:
for the coffee extract:
250 grams of espresso coffee, ground
8 cups of cold water

for the syrup (about 2 cups):
1 cup of white sugar (or more)
1 cup of water (adapt accordingly)

Start the evening before (or in the morning) by putting the espresso coffee in a large bowl. Then add 2 cups of cold water, stir slightly to combine, then add the other 6 cups. Let this mixture sit for 12 hours (or more) at room temperature. Do not stir or disturb, it will be fine.

Then pick a time you want to make your granita. I started in the early evening (and I steeped the coffee the night before). When you start making the coffee granita at about 5 PM, it will be finished by 11 at night.

Make a syrup of 1 cup sugar with 1 cup of water in a small saucepan until it all dissolves. You can use more (up to 1 cup more) if you want your coffee granita to be sweeter later on. Let cool.

Slowly pour your coffee mixture through a very fine sieve to get rid of all the coffee grounds. Do this again so you will end up with a clean coffee. Then mix with the syrup mixture and pour into a bowl fit for the freezer. Let sit in the freezer for 2 – 3 hours. I don’t know about your freezer, but in my freezer basically nothing happened until 3 hours at least.
When the mixture starts to freeze up, use a fork to break the ice particles and do this again, every 30 or 20 minutes. Set a timer, go to the freezer with your fork, and loosen up the ice particles.

The texture will change over time. From a darker coffee mixture it will turn more crumbly and lighter in color, almost like demarara sugar. When the texture of the granita (‘grains’) is like crumbs, your coffee granita is ready. You don’t need to stir again, just leave it.

Leave it in the freezer with a lid on the box, and then every time you feel like having a cup, scoop it out. Serve with lots of ice cold whipped cream… enjoy!

Get up, get dressed, grab one’s cook’s jacket and apron and go onto the street. Then buy a freshly baked bread from a vendor on the street, hop on a bus and get off at the right bus stop, just along one of Chengdu’s busy streets. Then take 5 minutes to jump away from traffic crossing some lanes, duck under an overpass bridge, and then crossing the third and fourth lanes to get to the Sichuan Culinary Institute on the other side of the street. The building is old now (they will move this summer) and there are many Chinese students walking about, or studying in the classrooms, all wearing white cook’s jackets. And we are with our small foreigners’ group walking to the ‘demonstration building’.

Here the chef and his assistant (plus an interpreter) prepare the dishes of the day in the demo classroom. First they write everything on the blackboard, do the translation, and then do all prep work. Then the chef prepares the dishes (ever so skillfully) and tells us what is important to remember. We all make diligent notes and snap pictures, and try to remember the steps.

At lunch break we wander into the back streets of the Institute where one can find small restaurants serving noodles, baozi, dumplings or simple Sichuan stir-fries. There are also many teahouses as we discover later on in the week, where you can just sit and relax and NOT eat since we’ve had the leftovers from the demo.
In the afternoon, it is back to the classroom but now to the cooking room section. Here are 10 wok burners and each of us gets their own chopping board and cleaver. Of course we get a wok and a wet towel to steady the wok with while cooking. Our ladles go into the different sauces or we scoop up the oil.

It is such a great experience to cook by yourself in a complete Chinese kitchen! The chef watching your steps and your knife work, cutting ingredients, then getting the right condiments from the small bowls next to the stove – I learned so much just by watching and doing – and really deepened my knowledge of Chinese cooking, techniques and flavors.

Going home after class, strolling through the streets and getting back to the hotel or just popping down for a coffee. And then of course dinner later that night or other snacks on the streets, or tea somewhere along the way… All the time wandering about in the friendly and relaxing city.

The picture you see here is a bamboo chair completely covered in cabbage. The cabbage will dry out and then be pickled in salt. Don’t you think it is funny when you come across these chairs all the time? China is like that. You bump into funny things all the time.

About the move – (this is the boring part)- I’ve been forced to leave my old address at my own server since blogger stopped supporting FTP publishing since May 1. This might all sound rather technical and I don’t want to bother you with it, but I will have to move my entire blog by reposting my old blog posts on WordPress. Also, I want to repost all the earlier comments, so my new blog will be mirroring the old blog. Then, when I’m all finished, I will have reroute the old place to the new blog. What a hassle!

I haven’t been back to Chengdu since 1991- then we arrived at one of the most luxurious hotels of the city, after weeks of off the beaten track traveling through Pakistan, Xinjiang and Gansu. We were exhausted, took long soaks in the fragrant bath and then went up the roof bar to have a hamburger. Which shows how desperate we were for some ‘civilization’!

Still, the hotness of the hotpot we had then still lingers to this day! So tomorrow I will fly there and join the little group dedicated to learn all there is to learn about SIchuan cuisine.
Hopefully I will be able to blog through the ‘great fire wall’ of China – I plan to twitter and post photos to Flickr. So in case you won’t find any new stories here- check out the other hangouts… 成都见 Chengdu jian! (see you in Chengdu)

For this recipe, you will need:
1 to 1.5 kilos of pork belly in once square piece
1 bowl of Shaoxing rice wine
1/2 bowl of soy sauce (ie Kikkoman) for flavor, a little bit of dark soy sauce for color
1/2 bowl of white sugar
a bunch of spring onions
a piece of ginger
preferably: a Chinese clay pot (they come cheap in Chinese supermarkets, 8 euros will get you one)

Take a pot or wok, fill it with water, and put in the pork belly. Raise the heat until the water starts to boil, lower the heat and let simmer for about 2 minutes. Take out the meat and discard the water.
After cooling, cut the meat into perfect squares of 6.5 cms wide (2,5 inches). To make it perfect, trim off odd pieces of meat. The precooking has made the meat shrink, so it will keep its proper size.

Take your Chinese clay pot – this is an earthenware cooking vessel with a lid, glazed on the inside, perfect for stewing on a low fire. Line the clay pot with a discarded piece of sushi mat, or some wooden satay skewers. This is to keep the juices from burning your meat afterwards. (Well- I skipped this step and it happened to me, so you know). Then put long pieces of spring onions on the bottom (fit to size), smash your piece of ginger with a knife and add on top. Now fit in your pieces of pork, skin side down on the spring onions. You might have to force them a little bit but don’t worry, the pork will shrink during the cooking process and will have ample room later.

Add 1 bowl of Shaoxing rice wine. If you think that is too much – you are not alone. There are a few versions of this Dongpo pork, this of them being ‘stewed without any water’. Braising pork in only rice wine and soy is of course going to be super delicious. Then add half a bowl of nice soy sauce. Sprinkle around 7 to 8 spoonfuls of white sugar on top of the meat, cover with a lid and put the fire on. After you start to hear the juices bubbling, put it on the lowest possible heat and simmer for 2 hours.

Be careful though – your fire might not be as low as you think and then your sauce might thicken, caramellise and burn – so do check now and then and add a little water or rice wine to the stock in the clay pot to prevent it from sticking. You don’t need to touch the meat.

After 2 hours, the meat will be juicy, soft, and almost falling apart. Take the pieces out carefully and put them, now skin side up, in a serving bowl (with lid). Put the bowl in a steamer and steam for at least half an hour. The whole steaming process sounds like quite a hassle, but believe me, you will be very happy with the results! You can also do the cooking beforehand and the steaming just before you want to eat, so you can finish some rice and green vegetables to go with this dish.

There are some variations to Dongpo pork – for example, in some recipes the first step involves frying; some recipes use way more water than rice wine; and some recipes call for steaming the meat in the end for 2 to 3 hours (improving its softness). Some wrap the chunks of pork in strings of bamboo leaves or ‘tribute greens’, to create beautiful looking ‘gifts’, and some recipes add star anise, cinnamon or Sichuan peppercorns to the braising liquid. This recipe is the basics – which you can adapt to your liking. Enjoy!

Quick version of steps:
precook (shrink) pork; cut into cubes; line clay pot with sticks, spring onions & ginger; add pork- skin down; add rice wine, soy, sugar; braise 2 hours; take out; change to serving bowl with lid; steam half an hour.

Pictures: Dongpo pork

Sitting in the front row (and in the back rows too!) one could smell the lovely fragrance of Sichuan pepper being ground to a fine powder (to be sprinkled on Mapo tofu later on). Fuchsia handed out a small bowl of this Sichuan pepper so everyone could have a taste. They were (or it was, because I had only one!) was the most powerful huajiao I have ever had. Although Fuchsia warned everyone just to bite on it gently for 3 times and then spit it out, most of the participants started coughing and scraping their throats for at least 5 minutes. Even after getting a huge glass of water, my mouth felt this tingling numbing effect for a long time!

Fuchsia did all the Sichuan classics in her cooking class which lasted over more than two hours: spicy cucumber salad – fried in a wok; fish-fragrant aubergines; twice cooked pork, Mapo tofu and Gongbao chicken. She not only did all the cutting and stir-frying, but was talking all the time about Chinese culinary traditions, her travels in China, and her experiences in becoming a Chinese chef.

Seeing an expert at work (and she is!) really makes a lot of difference. Dunlop is great in explaining the different styles of flavors (using Chinese culinary terms as well), and can show it by bringing out a different combination in every dish. It is not just chiles and spices, but a careful mixing of ingredients to get a totally different end result. For those who think Chinese cooking is only about stir frying at the highest fire possible: it is not. Fuchsia Dunlop takes her time and sniffs the wok regularly to see if the flavor is there yet. Her Gongbao chicken was truly great – it had the stickyness of the sauce all around the ingredients- and her twice cooked pork incredibly awesome – I’d order every dish in a restaurant if I had the chance.

And perhaps I will -after today’s lunch at the Baozi Inn I’m planning a meal at Bar Shu tomorrow, the restaurant where Fuchsia Dunlop devised the menu and acts as consultant. When I go home, I’ll have enough Sichuan flavors to keep me going for a while!

Here are more pictures from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sincerely Sichuan class at Divertimenti, London

I made it myself the other day, and it really is not hard. YouTube videos, for example Maangchi‘s one, make huge amounts with massive cabbages. The cabbages one buys here in the supermarket are about twice as small, and I recommend just one plain Chinese cabbage for starters, to get a feel of the whole kimchi making process and to see if you like it!

For this recipe, you will need :
1 Chinese cabbage
kitchen salt

kimchi-mixture:
1 cup of Korean chili flakes (red pepper powder, 90 grams)
1 cup of rice flour, sugar
1 yellow onion, 6 cloves of garlic, piece of ginger
3 spring onions, some sprigs of Chinese chives (12 or so)
4 centimeters piece of daikon radish (or 15 small European red radishes)
fish sauce

Cut the cabbage in half lengthways. Then make a cut on the stem side, but don’t cut through, only halve the stem – the cabbage is still attached at the leaf side. Immerse the two cabbage pieces in cold water for 20 minutes, drain.

Sprinkle the cabbage with salt all over: lift up the leaves and put in salt between all nooks and crannies of the cabbage. Now leave to sit for two hours.
Turn the cabbage after two hours (some liquid will have come out of the cabbage) and leave again for two hours. You can make the kimchi mixture in this time (read further down).

After these four hours rinse the cabbage in plenty of water, getting rid of all the salt. Don’t forget this step (I did once, and the kimchi tasted foul later on!). Then wring out all water from the cabbage. It will be very limp. Try to make it as dry as you can.

Make the kimchi mixture sometime in these four hours of waiting:
Add one cup of rice flour and 1.5 cups of water to a pan. Slowly heat the mixture, stirring constantly, until it thickens to a kind of paste. Add 4 tablespoons of sugar when it starts to bubble and cook for 1 minute more. Take off the heat and let cool.

Cut up 3 spring onions into slices, a couple of sprigs of Chinese chives into chunks. Whizz a piece of daikon radish, 6 cloves of garlic, a piece of ginger and a smallish yellow onion in a food processor until all cut up (you can do it with your Chinese cleaver too). When the rice flour mixture has cooled, add your Korean chili flakes, 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and the daikon-garlic mixture and stir to combine. [some recipes call for raw chopped up oysters at this stage, but we leave those out for now]. Add the spring onions and chives. It will become a deep red spicy sticky mixture, like a paste. Put aside until your cabbage is ready.

Making the kimchi:
Use your hands or kitchen gloves to rub the spice paste all over your cabbage. Lift up the leaves to rub the paste everywhere, covering the cabbage all over with the red chili mixture. Fold the cabbage pieces neatly in their original shape and fit them snugly in a plastic container. Cover with lid and put away at room temperature for two (!) days.

During this time, the cabbage will start to ferment and the kimchi will get its unique flavor. After two days, there will be small bubbles in the liquid surrounding the kimchi and the smell will be fresh and sour, reminding perhaps of sauerkraut. Remember the kimchi smells clean and zingy, never foul or off-putting! Move the container to your refrigerator, it will keep for months.

Just today I had it the fusion sauerkraut way (a la zuurkoolstamppot): I mixed some shredded kimchi into potato mash, turning the mash into a beautiful red and great spicy dish. Like so many spicy things, kimchi is highly addictive – you soon might want to make more!

Watching a video is much easier. There is a series from CCTV or Beijing TV which is quite nice. Every time the Beijing host invites a new cook or a new guest and they do one or two recipes. It is great to listen to the beautiful Beijing accents and see a dish develop.

This dish is inspired by their video of fried eggplant strips.

For this recipe, you will need:
2 or 3 slender Asian (‘Japanese’) eggplant
50 to 100 grams of minced meat
cornstarch
2 cloves of garlic
knob of ginger
sugar, sweet bean paste, sesame oil
salt, soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, Shaoxing rice wine
(optional for ‘prettying up the plate’: small bell pepper dice)

Start by cutting the eggplant into chunks about 7 cms long. You might cut the eggplant into 3 to get equal size chunks. Cut the chunks into half and then into strips – don’t make them too thin, just a little bit fatter than finger size. Put them in a bowl of salted water.

After 10 or 15 minutes, take out the eggplant strips and squeeze them dry. Then coat all over in cornstarch and put aside. Fry the eggplant strips in a wok with hot oil until they are golden brown and crispy. Drain on kitchen paper.

After frying the eggplant strips, take out the oil (if there is any left) and leave 3 tablespoons. Fry about 100 grams of minced meat. Add soy sauce, Shaoxing rice wine, sugar, salt, chopped up garlic and ginger cut into strips to get a nice mixture. Add a little water to make a sauce, then return the eggplant strips to the pan.

Coat all eggplant strips with the sauce, stirring and turning, and add small chopped dice of red and green bell pepper for color (if desired). The eggplant will be very crispy, but not too oily because of the cornstarch crust. Great dish for the Chinese repertoire!