the moon festival

This week has been a big week for China. Wednesday was the 60th anniversary of the Peoples' Republic of China and today is the Moon Festival, China's second biggest holiday.

The Moon Festival—also called the Mid-Autumn Festival, or zhong qiu jie, is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month in the Chinese calendar. This is supposedly the day when the moon is largest and it's a holiday kind of like our Thanksgiving. It was originally a celebration of the autumn harvest, but now it’s an excuse for families to get together and eat.

On the night of the festival, people gather in parks and look up in the sky at the lucky moon and eat pastries called moon cakes, or yue bing. Moon cakes are round little cakes that have ornate patterns molded into their tops from the wooden molds they’re baked in. They are coated with a shiny sugary sugary glaze on the outside and on the inside they are dense and rich. Most have a sweet lotus paste filling or a sweet red bean paste. The best moon cakes also have a duck yolk in the center of the filling. This may sound a little unappetizing, not many western deserts have straight-yolks in them, but the chalky yolk in the center of the sweet filling and dough makes these little cakes pack a punch of flavor and textures that will fill you up fast.

People rarely make moon cakes at home. Instead they buy them packaged in beautifully illustrated red boxes from shops and give them as gifts during the holiday. I think of them as the equivalent to our fruitcakes we give at Christmas.

Any Asian grocery store or bakery will have moon cakes for sale. I plan on eating some tonight under the full moon and giving thanks for the harvest, or rather the fact that I didn't have to harvest this year.

-Nate

a good read: the fortune cookie chronicles

 One of my first days in Chinese class in college I asked my professor who was from mainland China where fortune cookies came from in her country. She said, "what's a fortune cookie?" 

I said, "well, they're Chinese good luck cookies that they give out at all Chinese restaurants." Duh, I was thinking, how could she not know what fortune cookies are, she's from China! I brought one in for her to see. She opened it and thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen. This was the first time and not the last that I realized I had a lot to learn about China.

I recently read a new book called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, 8. is her middle name). The author, Jennifer, investigates the origins of Chinese food as it exists in America and why it is so different than traditional Chinese food. She opens the book with a story about the winners of a 2005 Powerball lottery. Normally there about 2-3 people who pick all the correct numbers and win the pot, but on this particular drawing 110 people all picked the winning numbers! The lottery commission knew this huge amount of winners couldn't be a group of cheaters because the winners were from all over the country. It turned out that the winners had all eaten at Chinese restaurants and played the numbers they received in their fortune cookies. In the book she travels all over the country interviewing the winners of the lottery and the Chinese-American owners of the restaurants where the cookies were served. She even goes to China to the birthplace of General Tso to find out about his chicken and digs through old court case trademark documents in California to find who invented the fortune cookie. What emerges out off all this is a comprehensive and hilarious picture of the profound effect Chinese food has had on American culture and how Chinese food has morphed into something unique and new here in the states, for example: Spicy Szechuan Alligator served at a Cajun-Chinese restaurant outside New Orleans.

The book is well researched but also very entertaining; it had me laughing out loud. Check out her video on TED where she talks about the book and her process writing it. Since its publication, Jennifer has been on the Martha Stewart show teaching Martha how to make turkey dumplings and held own against Stephen Colbert.

I finally learned where fortune cookies are from: Japan of all places, brought over from Japanese immigrants. So how did fortune cookies become "Chinese?" As Jennifer puts in a presentation (featured in the video above) "Well, we locked up all the Japanese during World War II including those that made fortune cookies. So that's about the time the Chinese moved in, kind of saw a market opportunity and took over!"

-Nate

the older the ginger, the hotter the spice & ginger milk pudding

 “The older the ginger, the hotter the spice.”

姜还是老的辣

My birthday was on Monday and when I looked in the mirror I’m pretty sure I saw my face sag a millimeter or two before my very eyes. I’m trying to look on the bright side of getting older though. The Chinese proverb “the older the ginger, the hotter the spice” comes to mind. That’s not such a bad thing and I do feel spicier these days…

I made some ginger milk pudding (姜汁撞奶, jiang ji zhuang nai) this week. It was so easy to make and a good sweet snack. Ginger juice has acids like lemon juice that will make the milk curdle. You just boil some milk, add sugar and ginger juice, and wait a few minutes for it to congeal. Oddly, Nate and I think it tastes exactly like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Fruit Loops.

I also finally found out what those aged (really old and dried) roots that are kept in huge vats at Chinese health stores (see picture here) are for. I assumed they were aged ginger, but they're ginseng. The store clerk told me to boil the ginseng in water and drink it often like tea and that it would improve my digestion and keep me from getting a cold. I was excited about trying this until I looked at the price of the shriveled up roots: $48/lbs.! So I bought about 1/48 lbs. for $1— just enough for one cup of tea. After making this at home, I would not recommend making or drinking ginseng tea made like this. Unless you can think of it like medicine and add heaps of sugar or pour in a tub of honey.

This year to celebrate I’m going to dinner with some friends tomorrow night at a restaurant in Koreatown that I’ve heard a lot about— Don’s Bogam BBQ & Wine Bar. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve still not found a Korean restaurant in new york that serves Korean food as good as you can find in China.

Here's my ginger milk pudding recipe. I made it several different ways and think I found a good balance of sweet and spice and texture with this recipe. The more ginger you put in, the thicker the pudding, but at the same time the spicier! If you can find young ginger (light colored with pink nibs) you can double the ginger juice I've added here because it's not nearly as spicy. 

-mary kate

Ginger Milk Pudding

4 oz fresh ginger root 

1 1/2  cup whole milk

2 tablespoons sugar

cheesecloth

(makes two servings)

Peel the ginger and grate it over a small bowl. Place the grated ginger in the center of a piece of cheesecloth. Gather up the edges of the cloth and squeeze the ginger over the bowl to collect 4 teaspoons of the juice.  Discard the ginger pulp and set the ginger juice aside.  

Heat up the milk in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring continuously until the milk begins to simmer. Turn off the heat and stir in the sugar. 

Put two teaspoons of ginger juice in each of the two serving bowls. Pour half of the milk into each bowl but do not stir. Wait 5 minutes, or until a spoon can rest on the surface of the pudding.  Serve warm or chilled.

fried taro dessert from snow flower and the secret fan

 

Right now I'm reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a beautiful novel by Lisa See. It's featured on Oprah's book club (which never hurts) and an international bestseller. The first few chapters follow the story of a 7 year old girl in the 1800s as she starts the Chinese footbinding process. The agony and details of which have been difficult for me to stomach. I had no idea that four toes were purposefully broken and folded back up under the foot and big toe. For the rest of the women's lives they could hardly balance to walk or even stand. They spent most of their lives sitting in a "women's room" because they couldn't do much else. During the four hundred or so years that women practiced footbinding in China, the ideal "beautiful" foot was 6 centimeters in length. I've never been so thankful for my big feet.

 Anyway! There's a part where the narrator, Lily, then just a little girl, eats her first sugary dessert. "Have you had sugar, Lily?" her friend, Snow Flower, asks. "It is the best thing in the world." 

Snow Flower goes on to talk about how Old Man Zuo makes "the best treat in the country" at his stand. Of course I wanted to eat this dessert that Snow Flower calls the best in the world. She goes into detail about how Old Man Zuo makes Fried Taro dessert and I thought I would follow the directions from the book's passage as closely as possible and see what I could come up with. Here's the passage:

"Here's what he does: He fries cubes of taro until they are soft on the inside but firm and crisp on the outside. Then he melts sugar in a big wok over a large fire... He melts it until it turns brown, then he throws the fried taro into the sugar and swirls it around until it is coated. He drops this on a plate and places it on your table, along with a bowl of cold water. You can't believe how hot the taro is with that melted sugar. It would burn a hole in your mouth if you tried to eat it like that, so you pick up a piece with your chopsticks and dip it in the water. Crack, crack, crack! That's the sound it makes as the sugar goes hard. When you bite into it, you get the crunch of the sugar shell, the crispiness of the fried taro, and then the final soft center."

My findings and subsequent Fried Taro dessert recipe: 

I got taro (a potato-like root) at a market in Chinatown. An Asian food market is probably your best bet for finding taro. For tips on selecting taro, read this taro post.

As soon as I read this passage I thought fried taro dessert sounded a lot like a northern Chinese dish Nate often makes called Fried Candied Apples. He fries apple wedges with a flour-based batter coated on the outside, then dips them in hot caramelized sugar. They are so hot when they come out, you have to dip them in cold water before eating. This apple dessert is all over China. It's yummy and kind of fun to make and eat. I thought that this Fried Taro dessert might benefit from adding a batter (no offense to Old Man Zuo). I was wrong. I fried it with and without and without is better. Something about adding a batter to the starchy taro felt heavy. It's kind of like fried oreos -- why? -- oreos were doing just fine before people started frying them. 

 Note: The picture above is of the battered taro version. If you cook our recipe below, yours will look slightly different without the batter coating.

Fried Taro Dessert

1 lbs. taro, peeled and cubed about 1/2 inches

oil for deep-frying 

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp. sesame oil

1 tbs. lard or shortening

Soak taro cubes in a bowl of ice water for 15 minutes (necessary to get the starch out). Drain the taro and pat dry. Heat 2 inches of the oil in a wok over high heat until it is very hot.  Add about 10 taro cubes to the oil and fry for 2-3 minutes or until golden brown. Remove the cubes with a strainer and place on paper towels to drain.  Fry the remaining taro cubes in this way.

Discard the oil from the wok and put in the sugar, sesame oil, and shortening.  Stir the sugar continuously for about 2 minutes or until the sugar caramelizes and turns a light brown then remove the wok from the heat. Use chopsticks to dip each fried taro cube in the caramelized sugar.  Place the coated taro cubes on a plate and serve with a small bowl of ice water. Before eating, instruct your guests to use their chopsticks to dunk the taro in the ice water so that the sugar hardens and cools before eating.

-mary kate

macanese almond cookies (xing ren bing)

Last night I went to see the free outdoor movie in Bryant Park. HBO screens classic movies on a huge outdoor screen in the park on Monday nights. It's one of my favorite things to do during the summer in New York. Last night the movie was Harold and Maude. My friends and I spread out on a big blanket on the grass below the skyscrapers along with thousands of other people. (Here's a picture I snapped last night.) Somebody brought wine that we drank from classy paper cups and I brought Macanese Almond Cookies, 杏仁餅 (xing ren bing), for everybody to eat while we watched Maude seduce Harold. Maude is 80 years old and Harold is 18 and the whole thing is kind of creepy-- Harold pretends to kill himself 10 different ways-- but it's a comedy and definitely funnier when you're watching it with thousands of other laughing people. We didn't get to the park early enough to get a spot close to the screen and I could hardly hear the dialogue from the speakers but I found the Harold and Maude movie script online on my iPhone and I read along with the movie. 

I first ate Macanese Almond Cookies on a trip to Macao. Macao is group of Chinese islands with amazing food about 45 minutes off the coast of Hong Kong by ferry. Macao was settled by Portuguese pirates in the 1500s and the food on the islands is a mixture of mediterranean and Chinese cooking-- imagine Chinese fried rice with olives and Portuguese sausage!  Unlike other places in China, restaurants in Macao serve quite a few desserts and there are even European-like cafe's that sell pastries with coffee. These Macanese Almond Cookies are popular with tourists from Hong Kong to bring back as gifts for friends. They are sweet, dry, and grainy (similar to Pecan Sandies or Italian Butter Cookies) and they are made in beautiful wooden moulds that shape the cookie into small jewel-like shapes. I think they are best eaten with tea or wine. 

 When I made these cookies yesterday, I didn't have a traditional wooden mould to shape the cookies (and I doubt you will either) so I used a small paper cup with the top cut off to be about 1/2" deep.  They don't look as ornate as the cookies sold in Macao but they still look and taste pretty great. If you're in New York City from June until August, I definitely recommend checking a movie screening in Bryant Park (Macanese Almond Cookies optional).

-Nate

Macanese Almond Cookies

 2 cups mung bean flour

1 cup powdered sugar 

1/2 cup ground almonds (about 3/4 cup peeled almonds ground in a food processor)

2/3 cup shortening 

1 tsp almond extract

2 tbs water

1/4 cups almonds roughly chopped

1 small paper cup (base of the paper cup should be about a 2" diameter)

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.  Use a sharp knife or a pair of scissors to cut the top portion of the paper cup off, leaving only a 1/2" deep cookie mould. Discard the paper scraps.  

In a large mixing bowl mix together the flour, sugar, and ground almonds. Using your hands, mix in the shortening until the dough looks like sand.  Add the water and almond extract and continue mixing with your hands until thoroughly mixed. 

Place about 5 chopped almond pieces into the paper cup mould.  Over the mixing bowl, press a handful of the dough into mould and use your fingers to pack the dough into the mould and then level it off.   Place the mould upside-down on an ungreased cookie sheet and slowly remove the mould.  Repeat this process with the remaining dough.  Bake the cookies for 25 mins and then let them cool for 30 minutes before eating.