Fuchsia Dunlop – Shananigans Blog

Getting to Know Cantonese Food in Hong Kong

The spice stall at Jiang Tai Market — The spice counter at Jiang Tai Market

As I write the kitchen is suffused with the scent of fresh sesame oil from Derry’s baggage plunging me back into Jiang Tai market in Beijing where I purchased it from the spice counter on Monday of last week. In my minds eye I can see Claire and Shan at my side while Derry takes Dermot around to the fruit sellers and fish mongers, the butchers and bread makers. A child who loves every kind of fruit, he is mesmerised by the fruit stalls as he gestures at lychees and dragon fruit, peaches and blueberries and tries to reach the display. He comes back clutching a large plum given to him by a friendly stall-holder, deftly retrieved by Shan until it can be washed at home.
I was the first of the family to leave China this time and for the past week I’ve been in something of a jet-lagged fog, unable to sift the memories and write until all my family were restored to their appointed place in the world – Claire safely back in Sydney with Mike, Derry home from his special week of Ye Ye time with Dermot, Shane, Shan and Dermot briefly returned to nuclear family status until MaMa rejoins them again from Urumqi. Today Dermot has been checking the spare room in their apartment, wondering where his Grandad has gone, wondering where all of us have gone I’m sure and how come we are back behind a little rectangular screen again. At times when we are on Face Time he goes around to the back of the iPad in search of the back of our heads or tries to offer us some of his food, a book to read, his finger paints but gradually he is making some sense of the bizarre world he lives in where his extended family swoop in at intervals to bundle him up with hugs and attention creating a jumble of laughter and music and foot-stomping dancing to family favourite songs thrummed out by Shane on the guitar. And then it gets quiet again and it’s just him safe in the love of his MaMa and Daddy. He’s getting used to it I think. I’m not sure I ever will.
So many memories to sift. This last trip was all the more special because I got to spend time alone with my daughter Claire for the first time in many years and then to watch her fall in love with her nephew and god son all over again. She and I had just two precious days in Hong Kong together. She bounced into my hotel room at 6.30 on a Thursday morning fresh from a flight from Sydney, hauled me up to the roof-top gym and swimming pool and, over a breakfast of eggs and fresh fruit, planned how to pack the most into our time. She took charge of the sight-seeing of which more in the next post. I had food on my mind as usual.
I have to admit that I’ve been a bit dismissive of Cantonese cuisine. I associated it with the type of food we often get in run of the mill Chinese restaurants and take-aways here in Ireland – the westernised version of recipes carried by immigrants from Guangdong Province in the south east of China – cloying sauces, sometimes sickly sweet, heavy on sugar, vinegar and MSG, low on spiciness. In China the region is known for the variety, quality and freshness of its ingredients and for allowing the natural flavours of the food to come through rather than overwhelming them with oils or spices. When I first visited Shane and Shan in Beijing two years ago and asked Shan to introduce me to the food of a different Chinese region each night, we went to a very good Cantonese restaurant called The Canteen but after a week of Sichuan, Hunan and Yunnan food I found the meal a little too bland for my taste.
Claire shares my passion for food so I had fretted about how to make good dinner choices in a city that deserves its hashtag #WorldFoodCity but where it is all too easy to get it wrong. Although our options ranged from French to Japanese restaurants, we both wanted to set our prejudices against Cantonese cuisine to one side and give this one of the eight great culinary traditions of China another try on its home turf. We also wanted to get beyond local specialities such as dim sum and roasted goose and get some sense of how modern cuisine is evolving in Hong Kong.
The Chairman, No. 18 Kau U Fong, Central, HK
I decided to got with a suggestion via Twitter from Fuchsia Dunlop for our first night – The Chairman where she had eaten well on a recent visit. I emailed the restaurant to discover they were fully booked throughout our visit but the lovely Danny Yip came back later to say they could squeeze us in if we arrived at the very start of service that evening.
Our taxi driver spent many minutes in deep consultation with the doorman at our hotel poring over a map before whisking us across from Mongkok through a network of tunnels and freeways into the Central district of Hong Kong Island in search of Kau U Fong street. I decided to “help” with Google Maps on my iPhone while he regaled us with stories of the differences between Hong Kong people and mainlanders and the six phrases of Mandarin we needed to survive on the mainland. More like a Dublin taxi driver than a Beijinger he had many opinions on life in Hong Kong – too crowded, housing too expensive – and was more than willing to share them. Google Maps was having difficulties coping with the serried layers of this SoHo like part of Hong Kong and much recalculating was going on so he dropped us somewhere in the vicinity in a narrow, chaotic street and, after a few up and downs via side streets and steps we found The Chairman, a simple shuttered exterior with washing hanging above.

Inside this small restaurant was an oasis of calm, white tiled walls, white table cloths, a still and soothing space. We were the first to arrive and Arta the Maitre’ d took charge. Arta is a treasure. A native of Hong Kong, he has lived and worked in Australia not far from where Claire now lives and is passionate about food and wine. It took only a moment to decide to let him do the choosing for us from the a la carte menu.
After a little appetiser of cherry tomato with apple slices soaked in raisin wine we had starters of wild clams stir-fried with chilli jam and basil and squid in shrimp oil with mustard seed. These were beautifully executed dishes, the seasonings bringing out the perfect freshness of the seafood. Pairing wasabi with cooked shrimp was a revelation and one I will try at home.

Next came a whole steamed fresh flowery crab in aged Shaoxing yellow rice wine. Words fail me to describe the umami of this dish, lovingly prepared at our table by Arta to make it easy for us eat without making too much of a mess.

We had two meat dishes – The Chairman’s Soy Sauce Chicken and braised spare ribs which came with a a parcel of wild mushrooms – and a side dish of braised seasonal vegetables. I mix up all my Chinese greens but these had a slightly bitter flavour that balanced the sweeter dishes.

Dessert seemed beyond us but Arta insisted we try half portions of their specialities – homemade almond sweet soup, pickled ginger ice-cream and Osmanthus and wolf berry ice-cream. Light as air but tingling with flavour these gentle desserts were the perfect end to our meal.

The Chairman with its proletariat connotations is aptly named. This is essentially simple food using the very best of local ingredients, fish caught in the early hours in the South China Sea, great tasting free range chicken and pork, organic vegetables complemented by seasonings from old-style condiment stores. There is a premium to be paid for food of this quality and provenance – our bill came to 2,286 HK$ including wine and service or about €216 – but by Hong Kong standards was good value at that price. Oh and I believe Heston Blumenthal had eaten there a few nights earlier and was also suitably impressed.
Thank you Arta for some of the best service we have ever experienced and restoring our faith in Cantonese cuisine.
Ming Court, Level 6, Langham Place, Mongkok, HK
For our second night we had planned to eat street food at Queen Street Market in Kowloon but by the end of the day we had walked nearly 14 km sight-seeing in temperatures of 35 degrees and we were exhausted. I had spotted that there was a Michelin starred restaurant Ming Court in our hotel at Langham Place. As Michelin stars seem to be dished out like confetti in Hong Kong our expectations were not high but we were tired and very hungry. The restaurant turned out to be a delight and a surprise . It specialises in contemporary Cantonese cuisine artistically presented in beautiful circular rooms accented with replica Ming Dynasty pottery and modern Chinese landscape paintings. The service was impeccable and friendly and we opted for the Tasting Menu priced at 598 HK$ each (about €57) which included a glass of wine and featured Gold Medal winning dishes from the 2013 Hong Kong International Culinary Classic.
As light levels were low in this very beautiful space I couldn’t get good photos but our menu went like this:

Dragon Quartet

Scallop, Prawn, Sea Urchin, Black Caviar; Pu-Er Smoked Fish; Osmanthus-scented Foie Gras, Lotus Root; Bean Curd Spring Roll, Assorted Greens, Peanut Butter

Bird’s Nest Soup

with Matsutake Mushroom and Bamboo Pith

Minced Shrimp and Chicken Thigh Duet

Pan-seared Chicken Thigh, Minced Shrimp, Black Truffle, Buttery Pumpkin, Chicken Liver Pate, Crisp Rice

Stir-fried Waygu Beef, Thai Basil, Cashew Nut

Lotus Leaf, Fried Rice, Roast Duck Meat

Mango, Pomelo, Coconut, Sago Cream

This was another exceptional meal of which the highlights for me were the Spring Roll filled with mushrooms and served with peanut butter sauce – who would have thought that combination could work so well – and the Waygu beef stir-fry which I will have to try with Pat Whelan’s Irish reared Waygu beef from James Whelan’s Butchers.

With a bottle of Chablis and service charge included our bill came to 2,183 HK$ or about €208.

Both these meals were expensive by Beijing standards but for a very special short break they were a fantastic re-introduction to Cantonese food.

Hengshan Hui, 1/F, Kerry EAS Logistics Building, 21 Xiaoyun Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Prompted by our Hong Kong experience, Shane and Shan took Derry to a neighbourhood Cantonese restaurant in Beijing last weekend- Hengshan Hui – 衡山汇.

They tortured me with the photos below while I had a lonely breakfast last Saturday and made me long to teleport back to Beijing to join them. Their meal, served with flat rice noodles, cost just 513 RMB or about €60 for the three of them and Dermot.

Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian – Hunan Spiced Potato and an easy Chinese dinner party menu

I’ve started Chinese lessons. Once a week Wei Wei, who was Shan’s bridesmaid, comes to my house. We spend a few hours poring over her notes while I try to get my head and tongue around Chinese phrases, echoing the sounds and tones familiar in Beijing. My dream is to surprise Shan’s Ma Ma, my qing jia mu, with a text message in Mandarin characters and by addressing her in Chinese the next time we meet. I’ve a long, long way to go.
The language lesson finished, Wei Wei and I roll up our sleeves, get out the cleaver, chopping board and wok and she teaches me a new recipe. To start with she is helping me to recreate some of the dishes I came across on my last visit to Beijing. It’s fun, the hours fly by and I am learning at all sorts of levels.
Wei Wei writes her own blog MyChineseKitchen.com and is an accomplished Chinese cook. Her Mum and Dad taught her basic techniques from a very young age in her home town of Tianjin and she has wielded a cleaver for as long as she can remember. Next week her parents are coming to visit her and her husband Oisin in Ireland for the very first time, no doubt bearing a suitcase full of ingredients like Shan’s family did at Christmas.
Last weekend our friends Brenda and Jimmy were coming to Sunday dinner. I wanted to serve a meal like Shan and her Ma Ma would cook, a selection of dishes for sharing, some spicy, some light. Gan guo tu dou pian was on my mind – a potato dish that I had tasted in our favourite Chinese Duck Restaurant XiHeYaYuan in Beijing and which I wrote about here. Gan guo translates loosely as “dry wok”. It is a style of cooking that comes from Hunan Province where the food is rich and spicy and in restaurants in China it is served in a little cast iron pot at your table over an open burner. As well as gan guo made with slices of fried potato and smoked Hunan pork, I had also enjoyed gan gou niu wa, made with bull frog, at our Hunan dinner at Pindian in Wangjng.
As luck would have it, Wei Wei also loves the dish which she and Oisin used to have every time they visited a local Hunan restaurant they called “The Cheap Place” in Beijing . She has come up with her own recipe for gan guo potatoes which tastes exactly as I remember it in Beijing and she has set out the steps for making it in detail here on her own blog. We used her recipe for my first cookery lesson and as we worked she taught me the Chinese words for the ingredients and helped me improve my knife skills and cooking techniques.
The next day I made the dish again working without a recipe, using the instincts Wei Wei had helped me develop to balance the flavours. My proportions were a little different to Wei Wei’s so here is what I did.
Hunan Spiced Potato – Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian

(Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main course)
Ingredients

3 firm medium potatoes
4 slices of Hunan smoked pork or pancetta or smoked streaky rashers, rind removed
1 red chilli
1 green chilli
a small thumb of ginger
4 cloves of garlic
1 leek
½ an onion(red or white)
1 stick celery
1 spring onion
cooking oil
coriander to garnish (optional)

For the sauce

1 tbs hot bean sauce
2 tbs light soy sauce
¼ tbs dark soy sauce
1 tbs shaoxing rice wine
2 tsps sugar
salt to taste

Preparation

Wash and peel the potatoes and slice them about ½ cm thick. Wash the potato slices twice in cold water to rinse out the starch and pat them dry.
Slice the pork or bacon into thin pieces a littler smaller than the potatoes slices.
De-seed and thinly slice the chillies; slice the ginger, peel and slice the garlic.
Slice the leek, onion, celery and spring onion into julienne strips.
Mix all the sauce ingredients and set aside.

Cooking

Heat sufficient oil in a wok to about 140 degrees to fry the potato slices in batches until golden, setting them aside to dry on a dish lined with kitchen roll.
Empty all but just over a tablespoon of oil from the wok. Over a medium-high heat stir-fry the chilli, garlic and ginger for a few moments to release their aromas being careful not to burn them. Add the pork slices and stir-fry until they turn colour.
Add the leek, onion, celery and spring onion and stir-fry briefly before adding the sauce and mixing well.
Fold in the cooked potato slices and keep stirring until the sauce has almost evaporated, being careful not to break up the potato slices. Season with salt to taste. Serve immediately, garnished with coriander if using.

I had some of the very special cured pork from Hunan Province which Shan used in her home-style dinner. It has an amazing umami flavour and adds an extra jolt of authenticity to the taste. But any good quality cured or smoked pork or bacon can be used, even Italian pancetta.

This was just one of the dishes I served at dinner last Sunday. Here is the full menu:

Confit Duck Spring Rolls with Tom Chef’s Chilli Jam

*****

Adam Perry Lang’s Beer Can Chicken

Sichuan Dry-fried Green Beans, Vegetarian Style

Broccoli Stir-fried with Garlic

Bai Cai with Ginger, Dried mushrooms and Oyster sauce

Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian

Steamed rice

*****

Strawberry, raspberry and orange tart

We slow-cooked the Beer Can Chicken to moist perfection on the Big Green Egg. APL’s recipe has enough Asian flavours going on to make it a good foil for Chinese vegetable dishes.

I used the recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice for the vegetarian version of Sichuan Green Beans but you can also use the recipe here on the blog and just omit the pork.

I had picked up some interesting Chinese leaves from the Asia Market with long green stems and delicately flavoured leaves. Wei We said they were a type of Chinese cabbage – bai cai . Shan had given me some wonderful speckled dried mushrooms which are called xiang gu because of their excellent flavour.

Wiang Gu Dried Mushrooms — Xiang Gu Dried Mushrooms

Rehydrate a few dried mushrooms in hot water for half an hour, then slice them thickly and stir-fry them with a few slices of ginger and spring onion (no garlic) until soft before adding the bai cai until it wilts down. Add a dash of oyster sauce, season with salt and the earthy flavour of the mushrooms combined with the delicate cabbage will transport you to MaMa’s kitchen in Beijing.

I worked the way Shan had taught me in Beijing, preparing all the ingredients well in advance and lining them up in separate dishes, cooking the lightest vegetable dishes first and then, a quick wipe of the wok and on to the next one so that I was able to get each bowl to the table in quick succession and join in the conversation.

Dessert was a random find from Twitter – a recipe from Catherine Fulvio’s blog to which I added a few raspberries. This was a great success and has now been included in my limited repertoire of sweet treats. We loved the crunchy, no-bake base, which was made from amaretti biscuits, and the tang of passion fruit, yoghurt and orange zest in the filling.

No bake strawberry, raspberry and orange tart

Now it’s time to start planning my next visit to China in two weeks time. Nai Nai hugs coming up…

Hunan dinner at Pindian Cuisine, Wangjing

I have to hand it to my daughter-in-law Shan. She keeps pushing out the boundaries when it comes to our dining experiences in Beijing – both geographically and in terms of the food. She has been trawling through the Chinese equivalent of Groupon for deals on line and reviews by Chinese diners to find places that might appeal to my ever-broadening tastes but that also serve dinner early and have high chairs for Dermot.
Last night’s excursion took us a 20 minute taxi ride further out of the city to Wangjing, a sub-district of Chaoyang and one of those new suburbs that has sprung up on the ever expanding perimeter of Beijing since the early 1990s. It is in the north east corner of the city just inside the 5th ring road. So many Koreans live there that it is known locally as Koreatown. The name translates as “View of Beijing” but you would be hard pressed to catch a glimpse of the city through the endless rows of sky scrapers. It is an unlikely place to find Hunan food but Shan had tracked down a restaurant called Pindian there that serves an authentic version of the cuisine.
Hunan is one of the steamy inland provinces of China, not as far west as Sichuan province. Its chefs and home cooks produce very hot, spicy, bold and colourful food for a hot and fiery people, with an emphasis on sourness. Local chefs use boiling, roasting and steaming to make dishes that are hot and sour, charred and mouth-numbing, fresh and fragrant, crispy and tender. The recipe for Chairman Mao’s Red-Braised Pork from my archives is a good example as is Hunan Style Crispy Chilli Beef.
Cookery writer Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Cookbook is my bible of Hunan cooking and I get lost in the world she depicts of the birthplace of Chairman Mao and the exotic, spicy dishes created there. Ihave tried many of her recipes at home but, apart from a few recipes I learnt at Hutong Cuisine cookery school when I last visited Beijing, such as Hunan Steamed Fish, I have never tasted the food of this region while China.
I plan to get to Hunan Province some day but, like any capital city, Beijing is a melting pot of all regional cuisines and I was delighted to be getting the chance to taste the real thing here. I knew to expect it to be even spicier than Sichuan food but without the same addiction to numbing Sichuan pepper. Apart from that I had an open mind and I have one rule when eating out with Shan – try everything put in front of me at least once without asking questions.
Pindian was on the first floor of a modern block and was a large, well-lit room with tables designed to cater for family gatherings and private dining rooms off to one side. It’s layout with Chinese lanterns and double happiness pendants dangling from the ceiling was typical of thousands of family restaurants through the city and millions throughout the world. A large fish tank filled with enormous goldfish lined one wall and was ideal for distracting Dermot. Our table was at a window overlooking the suburban street as workers made their way home from the city.
The Groupon deal Shan had found included a set menu to which she added two other dishes so that Dermot would have something less spicy to eat.
To start with we were served a jug of warm and rather sweet corn juice and glasses of warm water and we ordered some Yangjing beers to go with them.
The first plate to arrive at our table was gan guo niu wa – a dish made with bullfrog and served sizzling at our table. Shan was surprised I had never eaten frog before, not even frogs legs in France. The meat was very tender with a consistency a little like chicken but lots of small bones to be dealt with. It was scattered with chillies, spring onions and peanuts. The flavour and cooking style was similar to the “drying pot” potato we had at our Peking Duck restaurant, XiHeYaYuan on Saturday night
The dish of wide flat rice noodles stir-fried with Chinese cabbage that was served next was a lovely light accompaniment to this and the other dishes that followed.
Sizzling beef with green chillies was lip-tingling hot and the star of the night. The chillies – hang jiao – used are spicy hot but full of flavour.
Shan had ordered dried radish with smoked pork which is a regional specialty but what was served involved equally tasty dried green beans. I loved this dish. The smoked pork is bought part cooked, thinly sliced and tossed with the dried vegetable, mashed whole garlic, ginger, chillies and spring onion. And the good news is that Shan has ordered some of this smoked pork on line so that we can try out a variation of this dish at home.
Steamed whole fish came in a soy sauce and facing me with doleful eyes. I fear I will never get fond of the appearance of whole fish but the flavour was good. It was served splayed so that you could remove all the flesh from the bones without ever having to turn it over as that would be unlucky – it symbolises a fishing boat turning over in water.
A free range chicken was chopped into pieces and cooked in a rich broth flavoured with ginger, spring onion and other spices. In northern China it is typical to remove the meat from the soup with your chopsticks and eat it boiled rice before drinking the broth at the end of the meal as a soup. It was delicious.
A plate of little deep-fried buns rounded off the meal. I wasn’t sure whether they would be sweet or savoury when I bit into them – one of the hazards of eating out in China. In fact they were like sweet little donuts.
With the Groupon deal the total cost of the meal for the four of us was 242RMB or about €28. By any standards this was excellent value.
And now, if asked about Hunan food, I can say “I’m partial to a bit of bullfrog myself”.

A Tale of Two Ducks and dinner at XiHeYaYuan, Beijing

There is a wild wind blowing in Beijing. It’s rattling the windows of Shane and Shan’s 21^st floor apartment. And if you watch closely you can see the other block sway. It’s making an adventure of the walk to the neigbourhood restaurant, requiring me to keep a vice like grip on the handles of Dermot’s buggy to avoid him and me being bowled over by its force and catching underneath the hood to spin it back sharply, exposing him to the majestic strength of the elements on the city street.
The wind merely adds to the obstacle course that’s involved in venturing out with a toddler along the sidewalks of this manic city. Footpaths disappear into a heap of rubble forcing you out onto the busy thoroughfare. “Green for go” pedestrian crossings give only the vaguest indication that you might have right of way. Taxis change lanes erratically veering onto the footpaths at a whim to drop off their passengers. Drivers slam open their doors or take off at speed without casting a backward glance to check for unsuspecting pedestrians. A man manouevres a motorised tricycle laden with market produce down the cycle lane while smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile phone.
And that’s just on our road – Jiang Tai Xi Lu – in the north east of Beijing
Unfazed by all this, Dermot is loving his evening jaunt to the local Peking Duck restaurant XiHeYaYuan at the Indigo Shopping Mall. He is absorbing the sights and sounds of his native city and enjoying the force of the gale on his face, as he tries to play “peep oh” with the windbreak on his buggy.
He was equally unfazed by our arrival this morning, greeting us with laughter and bao bao (hugs), careering around the apartment to show us his new found skills and deciding that suitcases on wheels are far more fun than any toys or books they contain.
Inside the Indigo Shopping Mall all is calm and piped music soothes the windswept as newly middle class Beijingers explore this westernised wonderland before choosing one of the stylish restaurants around the glass dome-covered courtyard for their evening meal.
XiHeYaYuan is one of those restaurants and has become our restaurant of choice for the first or last night of our visits since it opened last March. I reviewed it on the blog last April. It may be a modern, chain restaurant but it knows how to serve a perfect roast duck as well as a host of Sichuan inspired specialities.

"Now what shall I choose?" — “Now what shall I choose?”

Once again we let Shan do the ordering. We polish off the duck while she chooses 8 dishes in all including rice and noodles.
In keeping with Chinese tradition, there are two cold dishes – Sichuan spicy noodles and a cold vegetable – wo sun, spiced with jalapeno peppers, which Shan says is a member of the asparagus family but I don’t recognise it.
Some of the dishes are familiar – dan dan noodles, Sichuan fried green beans cut small the way Shan prepares them and a lattice of pork-filled pot-sticker dumplings with black vinegar dipping sauce.
Two of the dishes are new to me – a “Drying Pot” dish of potato slices with onions – gan guo tu dou pian, chillies and thinly sliced pork belly in an aromatic sauce cooking away over a burner at our table. Edamame beans, speckled with mince and tasty but not spicy. The names don’t always have a direct translation and I will be searching my Fuchsia Dunlop cookery books when I get home in an effort recreate them.

Licking the plate clean — “Sure I had to lick my plate clean!”

There is lots of food on the table but because it is mostly vegetarian with just traces of pork and beef we don’t feel over full at the end. It certainly satisfies my need for a Sichuan kickstart to the holiday though. And the total cost of the meal for the four of us and Dermot? 504 rmb or just €60.
After the meal Dermot and I go walk about, or at least he potters around the courtyard as I trail after him. He is charming every one he encounters, flirting with pretty young Chinese women, making friends and swapping bao bao hugs with a little boy who calls him “younger brother” and looking back once in a while to check that I am still there and that he has permission to venture just a little bit further.
As we trundle home once again through the evening traffic, night falls and a perfect crescent moon hangs over this city of contrasts – the wind has earned its keep. It has blown away the smog to give us a rare star-lit sky.
I check my in-box when I get in to find that Claire and Mike have cooked Peking Duck in Sydney so that they will feel closer to us and their godson. She didn’t know we were also having duck tonight – food connecting our family across the continents once again.

Claire's splendid Peking Duck — Claire’s splendid Peking Duck

Spicy Steamed Beef with Stir-fried Lettuce – a new take on steak and salad

I sometimes day-dream about stepping back in time to visit Chengdu in Sichuan Province as it was when Fuchsia Dunlop learned to cook there, of wandering the narrow alleyways of the old Manchu district where spare ribs and chicken simmered in clay pots, steaming bowls of dan dan noodles were offered to passers by from makeshift snack shops and bamboo steamers towered high under the wooden eaves over huge woks of bubbling water. Fuchsia describes such scenes so vividly I almost feel as if I really have been there as she lifts the lids off the steamers to reveal chunks of beef embraced in a layer of rice meal and scattered with spices, coriander and spring onion – a Sichuanese speciality known as fen zheng niu rou.
My suburban Dublin kitchen with its stainless steel gadgets and appliances is far removed from those atmospheric alleyways but it is still possible to create a meal in well under an hour which evokes the flavours and smells of those original pop up restaurants and in the process to be catapulted back into some global folk memory of a time and place I never knew.
Take last Friday for instance. I arrived home pleasantly exhausted after a very busy week. I was mulling over a discussion at a lunch at PwC to celebrate International Women’s Day where Dr. Brad Harrington of Boston College speculated that the debate about work life balance has moved on from one about conflict to one about integration. That resonated with me – the more we women integrate all the different aspects of our lives into one, the more comfortable we become in our own skins. Cooking is part of that balancing act for me, an age old ritual in which I can lose myself and a way of finding an inner rhythm while I unwind and switch off the busy clamour in my head. Cooking Chinese food calms me when I’m tired, with its emphasis on balance and harmony, yin and yang and maintaining equilibrium in the body.
I had picked up some sirloin steak and a head of iceberg lettuce on the way home and I was tempted to serve up a simple steak and side salad. Instead I decided to try out something new. I’ve had a Miele Steam Oven for over a year now and, while I use it all the time for rice, vegetables and fish, I’d never steamed beef in it. I somehow imagined that meat prepared that way would be grey, anaemic and unappetising. Leafing through my copy of The Food of China for inspiration, I came across a steamed beef recipe that sounded worth a try and I had all the other ingredients in my store cupboard.
It’s a ridiculously simple dish and, with very little added oil, it’s also very healthy. The beef is thinly sliced and marinated in a fragrant sauce of Sichuan chilli bean paste, rice wine and soy sauce then dusted with toasted glutinous rice flour mixed with aromatic spice before steaming. The result is a succulent dish of melting beef with a rich dark colour which just needed a scattering of sesame oil and spring onion to finish it off. While I cooked it in a perforated stainless steel container in my steam oven, I could have just as easily used a bamboo steamer over a wok and been one step closer to those Chengdu alleyways.
My recipe, adapted slightly from The Food of China, is below. It was only later when I started researching the origins of the recipe that I realised that I had actually cooked a reasonably authentic version of fen zheng niu rou. The major difference is that, in the original version, long-grain rice would be dry-fried for 10 to 15 minutes, perhaps with the addition of some star anise and cassia bark for flavour, and then ground down in a pestle and mortar to a texture a bit finer than couscous. This would give a slightly nuttier texture. Cheaper cuts of beef can also be used, cut slightly thicker and steamed for several hours. It’s almost impossible to overcook this dish. You will find some nice variations in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery.
Now that I’ve discovered the joys of steaming meat this way, I plan experimenting – grinding the rice myself in a food processor, using ground star anise or five spice powder with pork and ground sichuan pepper with beef or lamb, adding in some chilli flakes, placing some chunks of carrots or butternut squash on top of the meat in the steamer. The possibilities are endless.
As for the iceberg lettuce, I took a tip from my daughter in law Shan – the Chinese always cook their lettuce – and served it hot tossed in oyster sauce and sesame oil as described below, along with some steamed rice.
Steamed Beef with Rice Flour – fen zheng niu rou – 粉蒸牛肉

Ingredients

450g sirloin steak

Marinade

1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs dark soy sauce
1 tbs Pixian chilli bean paste*
1 tbs Shaoxing rice wine
1 thumb ginger, finely chopped
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
1 tbs ground nut oil

Rice flour paste

125 g glutinous rice flour*
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp sesame oil
1 spring onion shredded

Method

Cut the steak across the grain into thin slices and each slice into bite size pieces.
Combine the marinade ingredients, mix well with the steak and leave to rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature.
Dry-fry the rice flour in a non-stick frying pan or a wok over medium heat, stirring frequently until it is brown and smells roasted. Add the cinnamon and mix well.
Drain any excess marinade from the beef slices and toss them in the flour and cinnamon mix.
Place the beef in a bamboo or metal steamer lined with greaseproof paper punched with holes and steam over simmering water for 20 minutes.
Toss with sesame oil and garnish with spring onion. Serve with stir-fried lettuce and steamed rice.

Stir-fried Lettuce in Oyster Sauce – hao you sheng cai – 蚝油生菜

Ingredients

1 head of iceberg lettuce
1 tbs groundnut oil
4 tbs oyster sauce
1 tsp sesame oil

Method

Remove the root from the lettuce, cut it in half and shred into wide strips. If you need to wash it make sure to dry it thoroughly so it will stir-fry rather than steam.
Heat a wok over high heat and add the oil. When the oil is very hot, add the lettuce and stir-fry until wilted. Then add the oyster sauce and stir to heat through. Remove from heat, toss with sesame oil and season to taste.

A word on ingredients
*Pixian chilli bean paste is made with broad beans fermented with chillies and salt to give a rich tangy sauce. It is named for the town of Pixian in Sichuan Province and is know locally as the “soul of Sichuan cuisine”. It is described in pin yin as douban jiang. You will find it in jars or sachets in your local Asia supermarket. Watch out for the four characters on the packets below.

This one is called Pixian Broad Bean Paste

If you can’t find Pixian chilli bean paste, you can substitute Lee Kum Kee chilli bean sauce (also known as toban djan or toban jiang) which is widely available. You can also substitute Laoganma chilli bean paste made with soya (black) beans if you are stuck. Or leave a comment on the blog and I will send a sachet of the authentic version to you by post from my stash of supplies from Beijing.
Glutinous rice flour is not the same as ordinary rice flour. It is made from a particular variety of sticky rice that has a glue-like consistency when cooked. It does not contain gluten. I have included a photo of the brand I use below.

Glutinous rice flour — Glutinous Rice Flour

PS
In other news my grandson Dermot decided to start walking in Beijing last week, just a day or two short of 13 months old. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology he was able to show off his new found skill to me via Face Time five minutes later. Thank you Shan for having the thought to share that special moment with his long distance Nai Nai. It meant more than words can say. I’ve just added a video clip of his first steps below. I’ve watched it over and over and I still get a lump in my throat each time.
Dermot walking

Xinjiang Lamb with Cumin and Red Onion and Memories of Urumqi

Car seat… Check
Travel cot… Check
Buggy… Check
Random impulse buy of two outfits for 3 – 6 month baby boy from Next… Check
Purchase of four books of Adam’s Amazing Adventures by Benji Bennett to read Dermot to sleep… Check
Shan’s Irish entry visa… Check
Shane’s Beijing resident’s permit and visa to return to China… Check
Lively 3 month old grandson… now in possession of Chinese exit visa and Irish passport and watching his bags being packed to travel to Ireland for the first time this day week… CHECK!!

Impulse purchases — Dungarees on impulse

A big “thank you” to my Twitter friends who helped me borrow the equipment needed. We will be poised and ready to welcome the three of them home next Saturday. We can hardly contain our excitement. 🙂
Meanwhile it’s strange the way food can evoke memories and cumin combined with lamb is a case in point.
Cumin is grown in Xinjiang province, the vast north western province of China where Shan comes from, and where the Muslim Uighur street vendors use it whenever they cook their trade-mark lamb kebabs on portable barbecues. For me the distinctive aroma of cumin and lamb combined will be forever associated with our first trip to visit Shan’s family.
The other night I was playing around with a lamb version of Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe in her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook for beef with cumin when the scent of the cumin, mingled with sizzling red onion and lamb and flecked with ginger, garlic and chilli, plunged me back into a backstreet in Shan’s home town in Urumqi, Xinjiang province one hot, dry night early last July.
That day we had visited Tianchi – Heaven’s Lake which is perched at an elevation of 2,000 metres above the gobi desert plains below and lies 112 km east of Urumqi. A place apart, Tianchi deserves its Chinese AAAAA– level scenic spot status and its brochure description “like a shy girl deeply encircled by mountains you can even not find another one like it in the heavens and the world.” It also deserves, and will get, a blog post all of its own. Tianchi freezes over in the winter so it is only accessible in the summer months and is fed by the snows as the ice melts.

We had trekked for more than 2 hours up 2,500 steps and over a distance of about 7 kilometres to finally come over the crest of the mountain to the vista of the beautiful lake with its backdrop of snow-capped mountains. I had marvelled at the stamina of Shan, who was in the early stages of her pregnancy at that stage, and her little 5 year old niece Xuen Xuen who had matched us step for step.
It was 9.30 pm by the time we arrived back to the outskirts of Urumqi. Our driver asked, through Shan, what we felt like eating for dinner and having worked up an appetite on mountain air we said anything served with a cold beer (Shane and I had the simultaneous thought that we supposed a burger and chips would be out of the question!).
Our driver took us at our word and whisked us into Urumqi city centre through the rush hour traffic. On a bustling summer evening, this city of 4 million people was growing on me, revealing its own haphazard charm. Suddenly we were on a back street, just metres from the heart of the city, with run down apartment blocks on one side and a ramshackle building on the other which housed a pop-up restaurant on the ground floor spilling over on to the street and serving only kebabs (“chuan’r”) and beer.

This was one of those places you would never find without insider knowledge, or if you stumbled upon it it’s most likely that you wouldn’t risk eating there. It doesn’t have a name but it was our driver’s local and, during the summer, the eating and drinking goes on there until the early hours on plastic tables strung along the side of the street. The young couple who run it come down from further north near the Mongolian border for the summer months and build up their reserves from the takings to survive the harsh, bitterly cold winters.

Our driver brought us inside to pick our chuan’r and they were dusted with a spice mix of cumin and chilli, cooked on barbecues outside and brought on platters to our table with large bottles of beer – water and tea were not available.

The selection of chuan’r for our table of 10 included: duck pieces, whole small lake fish, squid, crab sticks, chicken wings, chicken stomach, chicken pieces with soft bone, blood (a kind of black pudding), courgettes, green beans, leeks, aubergines, potatoes bread and of course lamb, all dusted with spices. The vegetables and bread were sliced thin like crisps and cooked over the barbecue.

The Gao family — Xuen Xuen and her Mum and Dad enjoying the food

This was delicious food, zingy fresh, all char-grilled without oil and an experience of street food we would never have had without local insight. As the sun finally set and the scent of cumin and chilli wafted across to us on the night air, the Chinese chattered on around us and the cold, weak beer lulled us into that particular sense of peaceful wellbeing that only healthy exercise followed by a good meal can produce.

Eating out Urumi style — Eating out Urumqi style

At the end the owner simply counted up the sticks – long ones for meat, medium ones for fish and short ones for vegetable and calculate the total bill at 2 or 3 RMB per stick. The bill for the lot, for 10 people including beer came to around €35.
Before we left, the owners insisted on having their photos taken with us as the first westerners ever to eat there while the other locals wanted to know all about us. Ireland is now very popular in that part of the city of Urumqi and in a small village near the Mongolian border.

So in memory of that magical evening in Urumqi and with thanks to Fuchsia Dunlop for the inspiration, here’s my recipe for lamb with cumin.

Lamb with Cumin – zi ran yang rou

Ingredients:
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Getting to know Chinese Ingredients and their uses

Well its about time that I revealed the answers to the last competition on the blog and some of the things I learned along the way – like the fact that two of the ingredients were not what I thought they were and it took readers of my blog to put me straight! Here are the answers to those fiendish questions.
Who am I and what am I used for?
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Hunan Steamed Fish – duo jiao zheng yu

There’s beginning to be a rhythm to Sunday mornings since I came back from China. With the arrival of summer time, it’s the best time of the week to catch Claire and Shane on Skype. Today one is returning from a Sunday afternoon swim in Icebergs at Bondi in temperatures of 28 degrees, the other is out catching some fresh air in his local Beijing park in the early Spring sunshine. Hurry up Shane as Sunday morning is also the time for my weekly glimpse of Dermot, noting the changes I cant pick up in photos, watching him react to the sound of our voices and focus on an iPad screen with interest and hoping he still remembers us.

Beijing park — Shan and her MaMa playing pingpong

While I wait for my Skype “slot”, I reflect on the week gone past, revisit notes, photos and memories of China and Australia and write.
Today I’m thinking about the way the chefs in a Chinese kitchen sing out cong, jiang, suan – spring onion, ginger, garlic – like a rhythmic hymn throughout the day, so fundamental are these three ingredients to many Chinese dishes.
When I grew up in Wexford in the 1960s, we used to call salad “lettuce and leeks”. I was embarrassed when I got to Dublin in the early 70s to discover that I was officially a “culchie” and what I knew as “leeks” were actually scallions or spring onions. Leeks were a different thing entirely and a vegetable I had not come across before. (Yes, our vegetable selection was that limited in those years. The most exotic vegetables I knew were carrots, parsnips and cabbage.)
I was amused to discover that in Beijing the terms leeks and spring onions are also used interchangeably. That’s because, until transport systems improved, the colder north had a very limited range and supply of vegetables for most of the year and finely chopped leek works as a good substitute for the more seasonal spring onions used further south – a very handy discovery if, like me, you find spring onions hard to keep fresh at this time of the year. The frugal Chinese will always use the cheapest substitute readily available.
One of the recipes I learnt at Hutong Cuisine which uses this trinity of cong, jiang, suan is duo jiao zheng yu, a simple, healthy way of steaming fish with an added kick from pickled chillies. In Hunan the dish is made with enormous fish heads from a river fish such as bighead carp – yong yu – because these are regarded as a delicacy and the tastiest part of the fish with lots of interesting textures. In her Revolutionary Cookbook, that bible of Hunan Cuisine, Fuchsia Dunlop talks about how this dish was all the rage in Changsha when she lived there. Waiters would emerge from kitchens bearing enormous steaming platters of fish heads flecked with scarlet chilli, black bean and spring onion.
Our cookery teacher in Beijing, Chunyi who trained in Chengdu in Sichuan province, despairs of westerners who throw the fish heads away but she did allow us to make the dish at cookery class with a river fish fillet.

Hutong Cuisine Hunan Steamed fish — Hunan Steamed Fish at Hutong Cuisine

The magic ingredient is chopped salted chillies – duo la jiao – which has a hot, sour, salty taste and a beautiful red colour. I brought some back from Beijing but the good news is that the same brand is available in the Asia Market for just a few euro.

Last weekend we were in Duncannon on one of those rare pet spring Saturdays. We detoured from an 11 km walk to pick up some fish, fresh from the sea, at Fish Ahoy in Arthurstown. Late in the day beautiful, firm cod fillet and haddock was what they had left. I tried the recipe below on the cod and loved the way it enhanced rather than smothered the flavour of the fish. I served it with Sichuan fried green beans and salt and pepper cauliflower.
I baked the fresh haddock fillets on Monday brushed with homemade chilli oil and served them scattered with a little ginger and spring onion. Simple and delicious.
The Hunan steamed fish recipe below is from Hutong Cuisine. Fuchsia Dunlop’s version of this dish is on page 167 of Revolutionary Cookbook and uses whole lemon sole, gutted.
Steamed fish with minced chilli – duo jiao zheng yu

Hunan steamed fish — duo jiao zheng yu Ducannon style

Ingredients
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Sichuan Flavoured Stir-Fried Duck

There’s a Leonard Cohen song titled “Waiting for the Miracle to Come” which begins “Baby I’ve been waiting…”
That’s what I feel like these days as we anticipate the birth of Baby Shananigans while hoping that we will be waiting a little while longer. It has been more than a week since the baby first attempted to make a surprise early appearance. Shane is coping and Shan seems a model of calm and good humour as she sits it out in Beijing. I wish I could say the same for myself…
My thoughts stray to those weeks we spent in China last summer and the lovely outings we had in Xinjiang Province with Shan’s family when Baby Shananigans was just a little speck in our imaginations. We spent one of those days at Tianchi, the beautiful Heaven’s Lake perched 2,000 metres above the arid desert terrain around Urumqi. The lake is inaccessible at this time of year when it fills from the melting snow of the surrounding mountains. In summer it is a breath of fresh air and an escape from the oven-like basin below. I have great photos of that day out which I must include in a travel blogpost sometime soon. You really do feel closer to heaven there.
Shane and Shan and baby we are wishing heavenly blessings your way and praying that all will be well.

Shane & Shan at Heavenly Lake — Shane and Shan at Tianchi, Heaven’s Lake, July 2012

Despite all that’s going on, we still have to eat so I try to put together something nourishing and tasty from whatever is handy. Yesterday I found 2 barbary duck breasts in the freezer, some odds and ends of vegetables in the drawer and with them I made a variation of Dongting Stir-fried Duck Breast from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook on Hunan Cuisine.
Sichuan Favoured Stir-fried Duck

Stir-freid Duck — Sichuan-flavoured Stir-fried Duck

Serves 2 to 3 people
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Shopping List for Turkey Leftovers Shananigans Style

Ah Christmas. Bittersweet. Shane home from Beijing for a few days. Wonderful to have him around. Shan and MaMa in Beijing as Shan is too advanced in pregnancy to travel. Claire and Mike visiting friends in Melbourne. I would love to bundle them all together under one roof here in Ireland, even just for Christmas Day.

Putting the fairy on the Christmas tree this day last year

From the time Claire first moved to London over 10 years ago, part of our Christmas ritual is that she makes Jamie Oliver’s Italian meatballs on Christmas Eve whenever she is here. It doesn’t feel the same to have them without her but Shane had a longing for a western style supper as a change from Chinese food so I cooked them last night. We use the recipe in our battered copy of The Naked Chef but you will find a variation of the recipe here.

Jamie's meatballs — Christmas tradition – Jamie’s meatballs

I also baked a batch of ginger biscuits as Shane had a yearning for this memory of his childhood when I posted the recipe for them a few months back. Now I’m sure that when he comes back from meeting his friends in the pub he will enjoy both…

I’ve spent the evening sorting out how I will do the Christmas dinner this year – what stuffing recipes for the turkey, what vegetables, what starter, what dessert. As there will only be 3 of us I was tempted to have a crown of turkey but Christmas just wouldn’t seem the same without a whole bird roasting in the oven. So I ordered the smallest turkey I could find and now I’m thinking about the perennial problem of what to do with the leftovers.
Usually I start looking up recipes on Stephen’s Day when the shops are mostly closed and stocks of fresh vegetables have run out. This year I’m trying to get ahead of myself and be prepared so I’ve dug out some recipes for some simple salads that give a Chinese twist to turkey leftovers. I’m posting the ingredients you will need now in case you also want to pick up any of them as part of your final Christmas grocery shopping and I will post the full recipes the day after Stephen’s Day.
1. Bang Bang Turkey
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