StreetSmart

You might have noticed the StreetSmart logo in the right sidebar.  The annual StreetSmart campaign, which raises money to help the homeless, kicks off tomorrow.  It’s one of those ideas that is so simple: participating restaurants add a small donation to your bill (you’re welcome to increase it from the standard $2, but don’t forget your usual tip!).  As they note on the site – this isn’t even the cost of a cup of coffee, these days.  I’m planning to restrict myself to only eating at StreetSmart supporters for the duration of the campaign.  Restrict, though, is probably a misleading word – check out the list of supporters!  It’s certainly no hardship to eat that list.

For those of you following @StreetSmartAust on Twitter, you can also eat, tweet, and (perhaps) be treated.  (Remember to use #SSEats for your entries.)

Thanks to Ed at Tomato for revving up the Twitter and blogger communities to support this!

Recaps

I’ve been busy over at Reality Ravings this week.  Hell’s Kitchen is winding up, Beauty and the Geek is hotting up, and The Amazing Race is… really a tad boring this season.

Reading

I’ve finished Swallows and Amazons.  How did I not read this in my childhood?  Perhaps I got into too much of a Jill’s Perfect Ponies rut, because I know it was always on the bookshelf at the Mornington house.  It certainly would have fuelled some of the adventure fantasies during all those canoeing-fishing-campfiring Gippsland lakes holidays…  Next up?  Lord of the Flies, which I’m sure I’ve quoted and successfully answered trivia questions on, without having read it.

The second-last episode of Hell’s Kitchen (UK) aired here on Monday.  I’m not sure what I’ll do without my weekly dose of Marco once it’s over.  Great British Menu will be winding up at around the same time, I think, but there are three Anthony Bourdain series that arrived in the most recent Amazon shipment to get into, so I’ll cope.  Anyway, I’ve recapped HK(UK) over at Reality Ravings.

I’m still watching The Rachel Zoe Project and doing blitz recaps of that, as well.  It’s such a fun show to watch, but I hope there will be some personnel changes soon.  Taylor’s constant moaning is starting to get me down.  When it was directed at a floundering Brad last season, it was novel, but he’s found his feet and is one of the programme’s highlights so the carping is now just sad.

Reality Raver was talking up Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and I caught it for the first time today.  I’m not sure how I’ll fit it into the weekly schedule, but it’s definitely worth a look.  It’s Kitchen Nightmares for hairdressers, and loads of fun.  Jeff Lewis is back with Flipping Out, but his meltdowns seem to have been curtailed a bit by the Global Financial Crisis^TM – it appears he can control his personality when he needs to.  Pity.

It’s not all television, though.  After my reading list post, where I realised that 12 months of reading hadn’t reduced either of the 75 lists, I decided I had to make an effort to fit more real reading into my life.  Since posting the Guardian list, I’ve read two books (ok, so they were very short books) and I’m starting to catch up on my backlog of New Yorkers.  My copy of Middlemarch has been found and I think that’s the next project.

I’m not making much progress against either the Esquire 75 or Jezebel’s alternative 75 “must reads”¹. That’s not to say that I haven’t been reading, or that I haven’t been enjoying what I’ve read, but my belief that I am a reasonably “well-read” person has taken a bit of a hit from these lists. That’s why I was pleased to see the Guardian’s Books you can’t live without: the top 100. It’s even got The Magic Faraway Tree on it!

This, therefore, is the list I’m going to try to crack (although… The Bible? Really? I’m going to make an exception for that. Oh, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I mean, honestly.)

Anyway, the full list – with strikethroughs – after the jump.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling  (I have some of them, and I’ve read the first one… I guess that doesn’t count)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible  (Not a chance)

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

8 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare  (Again, I have them…)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I don’t understand the duplication, here. Surely TLTW&TW is included in The Chronicles?)

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (Maybe after I finish the Bible…)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (Now I really wish I’d joined the Dracula group post Infinite Jest, instead of the Gravity’s Rainbow group.  I’m not sure I can even find my copy of GR now…)

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (I’ve read these, and the Narnia books, so many times – does that earn me a pass on Five People?

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I can’t believe I haven’t read this. This will be my first “achievement” – I think I’ll read it tomorrow. Edited 25/10 to add: read it on the number 70 tram out to Burwood yesterday afternoon and loved it.)

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

The good news? I’ve read a lot of these already.  The other good news? There is a bit of crossover to the other lists, so Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Cold Comfort Farm and a couple of others will make inroads in two places.  The bad news? Well, I’m stating upfront that I’m not reading the Bible, but… I don’t think “reading the list” is a good enough incentive to get me to pick up The Da Vinci Code, The Lovely Bones or The Five People You Meet In Heaven.  Seriously.  Life’s too short.

As of today, then, I’ve read 62 of the 100.  I’ll try to remember to check back…

25/10 – 63/100 The Little Prince

26/10 – 64/100 A Christmas Carol

7/11 – 65/100 Swallows and Amazons

= = = = = = = = =
1. In fact, in the past year I have only crossed one book off the Jez list and nothing from the Esquire list.

Before heading off on our holiday, I did wonder how long it would be before I craved eating something “not Chinese”.  I was particularly certain that I’d miss the lovely, simple goats cheese and lettuce rolls from Fatto a Mano in Gertrude Street.

Of course, “Chinese food” covers such a range of cuisines.  Sure, I enjoyed my first lunch back at work, but we have been to both Hutong and Dumplings Plus for dumpling fixes, Nam Loong for buns and Noodle Kingdom for soup.  Re-reading “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper” also fired us up for some Yangzhou cuisine, so on Sunday we got cooking.

I’ve mentioned my irritation with Lonely Planet’s city guides before.  Why, oh why, couldn’t they include a map of the whole country inside the cover?  It wouldn’t have added too much distraction to the “city” focus and would have drawn our attention to the fact that Yangzhou is actually quite close to Shanghai.  Perhaps we could have tried their famous rice and the Lion’s Head meatballs there!  Alas, we were reduced to trawling the internet for a decent recipe for the latter (Fuschia Dunlop kindly includes a recipe for the former).

This is the recipe C cobbled together from a number of these sources.  This particular version makes a meatball in broth; other recipes present the meatball in a thicker sauce.  If we have a crack at that, I’ll post a comparison.

扬州狮子头
Yangzhou Lions Head Meatballs

Makes 4 servings

Meatballs
2 tablespoons dried shrimp
500 lean ground pork (note: it’s recommended that you buy pork belly and chop it up yourself¹)
4-5 cup water chestnuts, coarsely chopped
1 green onion chopped roughly into 3cm lengths
1 green onion finely sliced
1 x3cm chunk of ginger
1 green onion (including top), thinly sliced
1 tablespoons cornflour
½ beaten egg
½ tsp salt
3 tsp MSG
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tablespoon Shao Xing wine
pinch white pepper

Remaining ingredients
vegetable oil for frying
2 cups chicken stock
1 bunch of kang kong leaves.

Preparation

Soak shrimp in warm water to cover for 30 minutes; drain. Mince shrimp.

Chop spring onion in 3cm lengths. Peel ginger and crush with flat of cleaver. Put ginger and spring onion into pestle. Add MSG to pestle with 100ml of water. Use a mortar to squeeze out ginger and spring onion juice. Strain water out through sieve, squeezing out the juice. Discard the ginger and spring onion pulp.

Place mince in a bowl with 1/3 of the spring onion water, egg, white pepper, green onion slices, sugar, cornflour, wine, chestnuts. Use chopsticks to mix evenly, and stir together. Add 1/3 of spring onion water whilst stirring. When water is incorporated add the remaining 1/3, along with 15g salt. Knead meat for 2 minutes and rest for 30 minutes. Form into 4 meatballs.

Set wok in a ring stand and add oil to a depth of about 2 inches. Over high heat, bring oil to 350 degrees F. Add meatballs and cook for 3 minutes or until golden brown. Lift out and drain on paper towels

Place the meatballs in a large claypot with 1 cup stock. Simmer/steam for 1 hour (up to 3 hours) on low heat. Skim the soup, and add the kang kong leaves. Simmer covered for 1 minute and add salt to taste.

Serve, and enjoy!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

1. “The lion’s head meatball, for example, owed its irresistible succulence to the fact that the meat was hand-chopped into ‘fish-eye’ grains, and not minced or pureed”, Fuschia Dunlop, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, page 298

I’m still going through the photos from China (slowly! Resizing for the web takes time, although I’m sure there are quicker ways – hints and tips appreciated!) and have decided to break the Beijing photos into categories.  This should 1. take care of the is-this-Temple-of-Heaven-or-the-Summer-Palace-(or-even-Forbidden-City)? issues this end and 2. make the task seem less daunting for me.

Today I tackled the smallest subset of Beijing photos – the pics from our visit to the Dashanzi Art District (also known as 798).  I was something of a reluctant visitor; the Wallpaper guide was all “oh, Dashanzi is so over, you’ve really got to go to [somewhere much less accessible]” and, to be honest, there was a lot of pretty kitschy stuff.  There was, however, some really interesting work and it was wonderful to spend time wandering around a precinct so thoroughly dedicated to art.  (Oh, and there was decent cake, too!) It’s definitely on the itinerary as a longer visit next time.

Chen Wenling’s “farting bull” – “Emergency Exit”, a commentary on the global financial crisis – was extraordinary, and Yan Pei-Ming’s “Landscape of Childhood” installation was truly affecting.  The photos do neither justice, but do serve as an aide-memoire for us – hopefully they give you an idea of the work.

Click here for the Dashanzi photoset.

China wasn’t all multi-dish meals and dumplings, contrary to how it must seem from the previous post.  Oh, no.  There were also breakfasts.  And snacks.  Many, many snacks…

My favourite snack in Shanghai was translated as “meat cake”, which sounds rather unappetising.  Imagine a nice, juicy meatball encased in flaky pastry – that’s the best I can do by way of explanation.  They were sold streetside throughout town.

Another variation on the “meat cake” was a favourite in Beijing – the roujiamo.  It’s basically a round bread (like a Turkish bread) and is split and filled with sliced, roast meat, chilles, coriander and perhaps shredded cucumber, lettuce and onion, depending where you bought it.  The meat can be pork, mutton or beef; naturally, muslim vendors serve either mutton or beef.  It’s been described as a “Chinese hamburger” but I thought it was more like a small doner kebab.  Delish.

I mentioned the lamb skewers in the previous post and they really were something else.  Our guidebooks indicated that they were very popular in Beijing, however we saw many more muslim food stalls in Shanghai than in the capital.  I’m not sure whether we weren’t looking in the right places, or whether the centre of gravity for Xinjiang vendors has shifted.  The kebabs usually comprised three thickish strips of lamb – two lean surrounding a strip of fat.  After they were cooked, they were dipped in a spice mix, unless you requested bu yao tai la (which we didn’t).

We tried a couple of variations of breads as street snacks.  One was cooked in flat, oval loaves of around 40cm x 20cm.  They were sprinkled with sesame seeds and some contained other, subtle spices too.  They’re sold by weight – indicate how big a wedge you want and it’s bundled up in a bag to take away.

The breakfast-on-the-run we had en route to the Forbidden City (and as a pick-me-up on other occasions, too!) was a flatter bread, “filled” with egg and sliced leek.  It’s similar to a Malaysian egg roti.

Spring onion cakes are another version of a fried flat bread/pancake filled with – you guessed it! – spring onion.  They are served as snacks and were also on some breakfast menus.  Noodle Kingdom in Russell Street does a pretty good one and I’ve even found some pretty decent frozen ones at the grocery in Melbourne Central.

Glutinous rice rolls – these are densely packed glutinous rice rolled around a filling. We tried one that had a sweet bean and youtiao filling.  Interesting.  Also on glutinous rice, one of our unsuccessful snack endeavours was a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in lotus leaf.  Perhaps it was that particular vendor, rather than the overall concept, but it was gloopy and nasty.

Steamed corn cobs.  Again – it could have been a dodgy vendor/end of day for the corn, but it was completely flavourless.  In South Africa, “mealies” are a staple and they look like corn cobs but with cream coloured kernals.  This corn was yellow, but the flavour was bland like a mealie.  I’m a huge sweet corn fan, so was bitterly disappointed!

Shanghai style shao mai are HUGE – not the delightfully dainty dumplings I’m used to.  Still, they were tasty and the size of them meant that one was a satisfying snack, while two puts you in danger of ruining your lunch.

Fresh youtiao have spoiled me for the packaged dough sticks you often get here: light, fluffy and perfect for sopping up the soupy goodness of congee. Mmmm.

Toffee fruit rods.  I was disappointed when the Fruit Rod King in Lonsdale Street closed before I’d made good on my threats to stop there and buy a fruit rod, so I was thrilled to see such a range of toffee covered fruits and fruit portions on sticks in Beijing.  I’m not sure what the fruit was that I tried – it could have been crabapple – but it was pretty good.  I was keen to try the grapes and the orange portions, but we ran out of time.

Drinks

Beer

Local beers were cheap and available at convenience stores (All Days, Lawsons, Kedi) in Shanghai and little bottle shops in Beijing as well as at supermarkets.  Ordering beer at a restaurant was always accompanied by the question “ice?”.  The first time we said yes, we expected that it might be served like a bia hoi, over a big chunk of ice, but it was just cold from the fridge.  I’m not sure who orders lager and asks for it to be room temperature, but it was the same everywhere we went, so it must be a common thing.  The local beers – Tsingtao and Yanjing were the ones we stuck to – are very low alcohol and can be a bit on the sweet side, so aren’t for endless boozing.  Beers brewed under licence (Heinekin, Budweiser) were also low alcohol, so the low price might reflect an alcohol tax – imported beers could get pricey.  Having said that, the otherwise overpriced supermarket at Times Square had an impressive range of European beers and it was cheaper to buy a bottle of one of those than a 340ml can of Schweppes Diet Tonic.  Go figure.

Paulaner has a number of micro-breweries in Shanghai and they are hugely popular.  We dropped into the Xintiandi branch for a beer after dinner on a Wednesday night and the place was heaving with people (and a Filipino cover band).  Not bad, given that they were charging 75Y for a half litre of their draft.  By contrast, 75Y at the deserted Bund Brewery got us a litre each.

Wine

Yes, wine is produced in China.  Not only that, but one of the labels – I can’t remember which one – has recruited a French winemaker to spruik its product.  Good on them.  We only discovered the existence of the wine because C was intent on sampling some baiju.  The woman in the Zhapu Rd supermarket saw us looking at the lethal spirit and guided us towards a Grand Dragon cabernet sauvignon, gesturing to indicate that it was good.  It was only a couple of bucks, so we figured we could try it for a laugh and… it wasn’t so bad.

As a result, we sought out local wine in supermarkets and bottle shops throughout Shanghai and Beijing.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the Grand Dragon again, but we tried the Great Wall (not so good) and Dynasty (better than Great Wall, but no Grand Dragon) and a Dragon with a different label.  All in all, I think we managed a fairly comprehensive survey of Chinese cab sauvs, but being no wine expert, the best I can say is “we opened the bottles and didn’t pour any of it down the sink”.

Coffee

Coffee at cafes is expensive relative to the cost of everything else, and thus didn’t seem to offer much value (for us, that is – the Starbucks all seemed to be doing fairly well).  We had a caffe latte at At Cafe in 798 and I felt as though I’d been transported back to early 90s Brisbane.  A tall glass; a small, strangely located handle; a vaguely tan colour but no discernible flavour; an almost impenetrable centimetre of foam on the top.  To satisfy our need for caffeine, we stuck with tea in the evenings and convenience store coffee-in-a-can in the mornings.  Mr Brown’s was the best.

Juices etc

Watermelon juice was a bit of a lifesaver in Shanghai’s heat, so I was pleased – for a change – to see so many juice bars.  Mr Donut made tasty granita style drinks and I developed a bit of an obsession with the pink grapefruit drink stocked at most convenience stores.  I’m sure it was mostly sugar, but it was still pretty good!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Well, I’ve reached the limit of food reverie – now I’d better get back to sorting the Beijing photos.  Oh, I wish the imperial family had thought to use different colour schemes to more easily differentiate the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, Lama Temple…

I always forget to take a notebook with me when I go on holidays. This means that one of the first essentials once a destination is reached is to find a stationery shop (the others being eat and find some tonic. The latter proved difficult for the second time in as many holidays – we need to rethink our duty free purchases). Travelling in Korea, Japan and Malaysia has raised my expectations of stationery but it soon became clear that I wasn’t going to find anything as cute as “Pochi and Mongi together forever, happiness always” in Shanghai (try a Morning Glory shop near you). After the supermarket in the basement at Times Square managed to achieve the ultimate disappointment – instead of not stocking tonic, it only stocked diet tonic – I realised I was going to have to settle compromise and bought a serviceable but mostly unremarkable exercise book¹.

Flipping through my notes from the trip, I am struck by the contrast in detail. Each dish in every meal is recorded, but a whole morning in the Forbidden City is noted in two lines:

- eggy pancake b/fast on the run towards Forbidden City
- lots of ppl but many areas deserted – so huge

Clearly the most important aspect of our visit to the Forbidden City was the breakfast en route. No wonder Mao didn’t care to visit².

So the highs, and not-so-highs, of the food in China…

Shanghainese

The food of Shanghai, according to guidebooks and websources, is characterised by sweetness and oiliness. Funnily enough, “Shanghai” food wasn’t ubiquitous in Shanghai – that honour is probably shared between Sichuanese and Cantonese food. With a bit of effort, and some mis-steps due to the abysmal directions/datedness of our guide books, we did manage to track some down.

Near Shimen No.1 Rd metro – un-named (at least, name un-noted!) restaurant. We headed out on a rainy night, in search of a Xiao Nan Guo and found something that looked like a cheesy “gentlemen’s” club. (As it turns out, I think it was the place we were searching for – we found another branch of it when wandering around the French Concession a few nights later and it had the same cheesy logo). Our mission had been to try Shanghainese food, so we were determined. We eventually found a place that identified itself as having local food so we ate there on the basis of that criteria. We ordered a yellow croaker, which came in a sticky, sweet (but not too oily) brown sauce, gorgeously silky eggplant, pork and peanuts and some green vegies. Sounds like a lot of food for two people, doesn’t it? The difficulty in travelling somewhere like China as a couple is that you either order what you can eat and miss out on trying a lot, or you order more than you can eat and waste food. Given how cheap food was, we tended to stick with the latter, making sure not to order rice (who needs filler?). Oh, and we ate all of what we ordered at this place…

Xinjishi - again, not the restaurant we’d planned to eat at. This time, we’d managed to find a cab and headed for the Ruijin Guesthouse, to eat at their branch of Xiao Nan Guo. It had gone – moved to Donghu Road, as we discovered later. It was packed, but the waiters found us a little alcove off the main part of the upstairs dining room, so we wedged ourselves in and proceeded to order up a storm. We started with some cold dishes: the salted chicken (good, but I really struggle with the shards of chicken bone that seem to break off and pierce my gums whenever I get chopped poultry on the bone), five spice beef slices (delicious), and shredded radish (surprisingly more-ish). Onto the hot dishes, and we felt we had to take advantage of being in Shanghai during hairy crab season. The waiter recommended the crab and bean curd and it was lovely. We couldn’t go past Grandma’s braised pork, which was rich, dark, sweet, and we felt we’d ordered so much we could leave the offally bits. To maintain some western semblance of balance – eat your vegies! – we ordered some greens, and some corn with pine nuts. Amazing food.

Xiao Nan Guo – yes, we did finally get there… in Beijing. The drunken chicken was so-so (I think my shard tolerance was even lower than usual) and the claypot eggplant was silky but had a little too much dried prawn for my liking. I’d chosen the lotus root stuffed with glutinous rice, so I persevered with it for longer than I would have usually. It would have made quite an interesting dessert, or perhaps we needed more diners at the table so share the joy. On the upside, the braised trotter was sublime and the snowpea and bamboo shoots were fresh, crunchy and a perfect balance to the trotter.

Xiao long bao

These delicious, but dangerous, dumplings deserve their own heading. They are native to Shanghai and I’m not ashamed to say that we ate them wherever and whenever we could over the first week. On our first morning, once we cottoned on to the fact that it was two hours earlier than we’d thought, we stepped into the only foodery that seemed to be open on East Nanjing Road. The waitress, clearly fearing that we would take forever to choose, rather forcefully suggested the crab xiao long bao and a couple of bowls of noodle soup with pork and mushroom slivers. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that they were our first XLBs in Shanghai, but I still think they were the best. The version we tried in Old Town – again for breakfast, this time with congee and char siew bao – were good; the Crystal Jade ones were very good; but the fast food joint near Shanghai Station and the cafe at Hongqiao airport proved that it was possible to make average xiao long bao. Even so, they were probably on a par with those at Hutong here in Melbourne, if you’re benchmarking.

Beijing

Well, of course, there was the duck. We didn’t get nearly as much of it as we’d planned – the restrictions and security checks around the Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square/Chang’An Ave precinct ahead of the 60th birthday celebrations led us to rule a couple of places out. Still, we had two ducks, and both were lovely. The first one was at the Wangfujing location of Quanjude and it was very good. The skin was perfectly crispy, the duck was tender, the pancakes and sauces were tasty. Despite mastering the art of not filling up on unnecessary starches, I couldn’t help but eat my way through my entire steamer of pancakes. C was more sensible and left some of his.

Carving the duck

Our second duck was at a place in Dongzhimennei Daijie. This was better than the first duck. The skin seemed even crispier and more of the fat had rendered off. There was also a sweeter – perhaps slightly smokier? – flavour to the bird. Added to that, the service was much friendlier and the atmosphere was nicer – the section at the back of the restaurant looked like the House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill.

“Homestyle” cuisine was what was on offer at many local neighbourhood restaurants. It’s hard to define, but was generally hearty and flavoursome. At one place we had beef balls in a sweet sauce – the sauce definitely reminded me of a Sichuanese sauce but without the sichuan pepper. We also had a lovely dish of tofu braised with a range of mushrooms and the sorts of brackeny shoots you sometimes get in Korean food.

Sichuanese

When it was good, it was very, very good. Even when it wasn’t good, it wasn’t dreadful. And it did seem to be everywhere.

First, the not-so-good. Exhibit A was a meal of fish-flavoured pork slivers on rice at a fast-food style place near Shanghai Station. Cheap, filling, just not exceptionally tasty. Still, what do you expect for about $1.50?

Moving up the scale was the restaurant in Shatan Houjie in Beijing. Just down the road from our hotel and a cheap and cheerful place to grab lunch whilst our room was being readied. Ordering gong bao chicken is a bit of a cliche, and their rendition was fairly pedestrian – a little too close to inspiring a chorus of “mama’s making Kantong, doesn’t take long for the word to get around” for the Sichuan hall of fame. On the bright side, the cumin lamb was lovely – salty and spicy with the kind of rich muttony smell and flavour that we don’t get with our sheep meat here anymore. Mmmm.

In less salubrious surroundings, in a little street near the Lama temple in Beijing, we fanned away the cigarette smoke and enjoyed a very good fish-flavoured pork dish and savoured the peculiar sensation of fresh sichuan peppercorns in our fried beans with dried chilli.

Our best Sichuanese experience came at Sichuan Citizen in Shanghai. Naturally, we over-ordered like fiends, choosing a range of cold and hot dishes. The cold sliced beef shank with cucumbers was phenomenally spicy. Not exactly what I was expecting, but delicious nonetheless. The sea bass was lovely but the star was the pork ribs with eggplant. This was my first experience of really good quality sichuan pepper and it seriously blew my mind. When I bit the first peppercorn, there was a burst of heat, and then a tingling feeling began right down the back of my jaw. After a few seconds, the entire left side of my mouth was buzzing. A really odd sensation, but it’s amazing how it seems to take away the heat of the chillies, leaving just the flavour. We are desperate to get our hands on some good stuff now that we are back…

Other regional cuisines

Dong Bei

Zhapu Road, which is lined with restaurants for a number of blocks, was close to our hotel in Shanghai. The problem with a street like this is that it’s very difficult to make a decision on where to eat. We finally managed to settle on a small place that specialised in Dong Bei cuisine. The Lonely Planet doesn’t provide maps of China in its city guides (how stupid!) but we managed to figure out that Dong Bei means North West and was therefore pretty close to Korea. As was the food. We had an amazingly fresh, custard-like tofu in sauce and some cold sliced duck to start, then followed it up with a kimchi-esque twice cooked pork (lots of cabbage, naturally) and a dish of fried pork pieces in a crispy rice crust, with a sort of sweet/sour sauce. That wasn’t quite what we were expecting – we thought it was going to be those little fried rice cakes that go all crispy and puffy and then crackle like demon Rice Bubbles when the sauce is poured over. What we got wasn’t so theatrical, but it was still delicious. Look out for Dong Bei food!

Yunnan

Yunnan borders Burma, Laos and Vietnam and the food certainly had similarities with those cuisines – lots of tangy fish-sauce/limey flavours with fresh chillies and coriander. We had a lovely baked fish, some Dai-style eggplant and a rather unusual potato dish that resembled a rosti in lovely surroundings right on the lake. Mmmm, fried potato!

Cantonese

Always reliable, verging on boring as a result of familiarity, but it came to our rescue a few times when we needed to find a place for a late lunch. We had some delicious roast pigeon in Yunnan Road, but our worst restaurant meal was at a Hong Kong place in Pudong – nothing particularly wrong with it, just boring. Made me feel as though I’d missed an opportunity. Still, the Cantonese dumplings we ordered at Crystal Jade almost made up for that.

Others

We had a noodle soup from a place that identified itself as serving “Shandong” cuisine. Shandong is a province not far to the south of Beijing. The soup was nice – I guess what separated it from other, similar dishes was that the noodles resembled linguine. We also had the trusty Lanzhou noodles, which I love, and were so desperate when one of our duck quests failed that we ended up at a restaurant in a mall where I had some Hainan Chicken Rice and C had a claypot chicken rice with mushrooms. Okay, so they were more Malaysia than China, but they were unexpectedly good.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

It does seem as though all we did in China was eat, doesn’t it?  We actually did a lot of exploring that wasn’t food-related and I’ll get to that.

After I cover the snacks…

1. It came in a plastic sleeve which, for some unfathomable reason, has a ziplock-style open/close on the back cover.

2. No, really, the Forbidden City was amazing.

I’m slowly working through the photos.  Digital photography has made life much easier, in some respects – knowing that there won’t be horrendous processing costs for potentially dodgy pics frees you up to snap away.  The downside? Over 200 photos from a two week holiday.

My Picasa account now has sets from Shanghai and Suzhou.  Given that China is a heavily populated country, I was quite surprised by how many shots we have with no people in them.  I was not surprised by how many photographs we have of buildings – that’s par for the course when the travelling companion is an architect and takes possession of the camera.

I will write more about the trip soon when I 1. find a minute and 2. get to a point where I feel I can articulate my thoughts properly.  I am, however, constantly remembering amazing dishes and meals we ate while we were there, so perhaps food might be my starting point (who’d have guessed?!).

Having arrived back home on Saturday, I was sure I’d be well and truly blogged up on the trip by now. The past four days have disappeared in a catching-up (on sleep, washing, giving-cats-attention) frenzy and it’s back to work tomorrow with no post yet written.

So… why not cannibalise an email in the interim? The following, therefore, is adapted from some possibly inarticulate thoughts scrambled together after a couple of days in Shanghai.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Not only is the internet free with our room (at the rather wonderful Astor House Hotel), but there is also a computer supplied. I can only bear to have it on for a few minutes at a time, as it is incredibly noisy (and I thought I was inured to noise after walking the jackhammered streets here). I tried to check Twitter – blocked. Ditto for access to WordPress. Hmmm. I can send tweets via text message, but it feels rather strange not to be able to see others.

We’ve already had to make a slight change to our original itinerary. The plan had been to take the overnight train to Beijing because I’d heard of these fab deluxe berths – a cabin with two soft beds, an ensuite (ensuite! no trying to balance while squatting on piss-soaked floors!) and DVDs.  Unfortunately they seem to be a figment of my imagination as nobody here has heard of them, not even the English-speaking woman at the “Service Excellence Counter” at Shanghai station.  She was quite keen for us to shut up and pay for two beds in a four berth, but somehow spending the night with a couple of potentially throat-clearing strangers robbed the venture of romance, so we decided to stay an extra night in Shanghai and fly to Beijing on Saturday. The hotel is an absolute oasis – enormous room and so quiet and comfortable. Lovely to come back to. Apparently Ulysses S Grant stayed in this room (Celebrity Room, Famous Man Lived), so it must be good.

C is doing brilliantly with the Chinese, although of course when people hear him speak they just respond in rapid fire without modifying vocab for a non-native speaker. It has resulted in a couple of misfires, but then who doesn’t want lamb hotpot for breakfast?

The trip over was fine, the only major drama was over what I should fill in for the mandatory “health declaration”. I was honest, so was pulled over in the arrivals hall by a woman in a mask who asked me some questions and took my temperature. It was normal, thank god. The Maglev from the airport into town was amazing – 30kms covered in about 8 minutes. Of course, then we had to get a cab the remaining 5 kms, which took about half an hour. Traffic here is insane. There are road rules, apparently, but it’s not entirely safe to assume that a green pedestrian light means you can, or should, walk.

We changed our watches over on the plane, but I’d forgotten to change my phone time. This is how we came to be wandering around downtown Shanghai watching elderly people exercise at about 7.45 on a Sunday morning. They weren’t just doing tai chi, either: there were martial arts, ballroom dancing and calisthenics. There was also an open air hair salon being manned by young men in military uniforms, as well as a free (and very public) dental clinic for “Love your teeth week” in People’s Park.

Dancing in the park

Shanghai’s hosting the 2010 Expo, so half the city is a construction site, including most of the Bund. Roads are being dug up, buildings torn down, renovated or rebuilt, and the Shanghai mascot is everywhere, promising “Better City, Better Life” or, as a series of enormous mis-printed banners had it: “Beeter City, Better Lufe”.

I wonder who lost their job over this...

One way to divert tourists from being disappointed over not being able to see one of the city’s main attractions at it’s best is to create another mascot:

Welcome to Shanghai Tourism Festival

This little chap – apparently a deer – seems to be rather pessimistically wearing a jetpack whilst riding a plane.  According to Sinotour, the festival “will be grandly staged from Sept. 12 to Oct. 6″, so we were clearly favoured when choosing the time of our visit.  So far we’ve seen nothing beyond the mascot at most major intersections to suggest a festival of any kind, but we’ll keep a lookout.

The Shanghai municipality seems to be generous when it comes to acknowledging the “modelness” of its work units.  It’s rare to go past a building without a sign declaring “model work unit” – I was relieved to see that our hotel has been so recognised.

I'm not sure what this model unit did

The food seems to be universally good. The first night we struggled to find somewhere to eat (I’d been warned that evening meal times are generally early, but had chosen to ignore that).  C negotiated for some fresh seafood at a local place and even though we were probably charged stupid-foreigner-didn’t-ask-the-price price it was relatively cheap. There are lots of Uighur places selling lamb on sticks as snacks, and we’ve had baby dove (pigeon),pork ribs, crab dumplings, noodle soups and, of course, this morning’s lamb. We were actually expecting some pan-fried dumplings we’d seen being cooked outside, but they are “guo tie” and C apparently ordered “guo zi”. The dumplings were just going to be a snack, so we also ordered hun tun (wonton) soup. Our breakfast table was groaning under the weight of it all but the other diners didn’t seem to bat an eyelid.  I’m quite confident that even the Fish fighting cock willow tree food at the food court in West Nanjing Road would have been tasty:

The fragrance explodes the squid food

I’m lucky that C reads some Chinese and is happy to get the dictionary out to decipher words he doesn’t know.  This means we’re not limited to seeking out places with English and/or picture menus, which makes life both easier and more interesting.  And, given time – which waiters are not always keen to do – he’s also able to make a bit more sense of The fragrance explodes the chicken valuable food.

Today’s been wet and gloomy, so we wandered in the rain rebuffing repeated offers of 10Y umbrellas (yes, 10Y is less than $2. No, we’re not usually that stingy, it’s just that we’re not used to rain lasting for longer than a few minutes and umbrellas are annoying). Once we were thoroughly soaked, we decided that we should probably get some sort of rain protection. C did some on-the-run negotiations with an umbrella seller – I ended up with a plaid pattern and he’s being protected by a black umbrella with the slogan “no comment”. We escaped the rain into the Museum and spent a couple of hours with ancient bronzes, calligraphy, chops, jades and ceramics.

The subway is cheap, easy to use and trains come with almost alarming frequency.  Cabs are also cheap and seem to be everywhere, unless it’s raining.  Everytime we catch a cab or try to get information at a ticket office I whisper to C “tell them we’re on a race around the world”, but I think he hasn’t mastered that particular phrase.  Either that, or he’s strangely unwilling to indulge my reality TV fantasy.

I feel as though we’ve seen a lot (my aching feet seem to agree) but there’s still a lot of ground to cover over the next few days… and that’s before we even hit Beijing.

I’m behind with Top Chef Masters, and I’m still behind with Hell’s Kitchen, too. This afternoon enabled me to catch up on episode five of TCM and the recap of that is posted over at Reality Ravings.

The Springboks are playing the All Blacks as I type this, so I will soon be losing the television to a delayed replay of the game. That puts paid to the plan of catching up today…