Chinese Soups – A Tiny Sampling Of A Vast Menu

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Beijing, Breakfast, China, Chinese, Eggs, Meat, Sichuan, Soup, Vegetables

Soups, or tang, play a huge role in the Chinese menu – they are served at breakfast and every other meal. Typically, there is a whole soup section on even a small street eatery’s menu, and contrary to the concept of a soup as a starter, it is treated as a main dish and comes in a huge bowl that will serve 2 to 3 people, if not more.

Ingredients and the level of spiciness vary widely between each soup, although there appear to be some favorites. I’ll present a brief sampling that contains most of the soups I had while in China:

1) A dish you will find almost anywhere (including Chinese textbooks!) and that is a traditional, homey meal all across China, is xi hong shi ji dan, or tomato & egg soup. Some are essentially egg drop soup with cubes of tomatoes, others have whole omelets in broth, and yet others are almost more of a tomato bisque with some egg swirled in.

Here’s a version I had in Beijing, which started my love affair with this dish:

In Chengdu, I got the slightly bizarre omelett-in-soup variety:

In Leshan in Sichuan province, I got a much more tomato-soup like version:

2) In Chengdu, I had a lovely soup consisting of broth with baby bok choy leaves – sounds plain, but really wasn’t! Plus, I did the Chinese thing and added some dark rice vinegar 🙂

3) Also in Chengdu, we had a lovely pork and mushroom soup that was earthy and flavorful:

4) In Beijing, in a tiny restaurant near Beihai Park, we got what I think is pretty much hot and sour soup with pork, as one knows it from Chinese restaurants around here:

5) In Emeishan, we had another batch of kelp soup, or hai dai tang, similar to a breakfast dish we had in Wenchuan. This was slippery to eat with chopsticks, and only for those that like chewy seaweed, but I loved it:

6) And finally, from Tangshan, a dish called yun nan guo qiao mi xian, or “noodles that cross the bridge”. This is a specialty containing extremely long rice flour noodles with meat of seafood balls (my version had shrimp balls) as well as some vegetables in a mild, clear broth that can be spiced up with pepper-oil. This is super filling, super cheap, and delicious dish!

So, as a bottom line, tang, or soup, is always a great, warming, filling option you’ll find anywhere, it’s low in calories, healthy, and flavorful, and you can hardly go wrong (Well, except maybe that omelet-soup…). Since you most likely will face many a menu that has no English whatsoever (or random English, with dishes translated as “not food”!), finding the character for tang can be an easy way to point and always get something good, with a surprise element.

What are some of your favorite soups? Are soups strictly a winter food for you? I didn’t expect I’d love hot soups in the heat of China, but it was actually really refreshing and helped me adjust.

The Noodle Loft In Beijing

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China, Chinese, Food, Fruit, Meat, Noodle Loft, Noodles, Restaurant, Review, Soup, Sweets, Vegetables

On our final night in Beijing, we went to the Noodle Loft, a wonderful, stylish and definitely pricy restaurant focused entirely on many types of noodle, especially Shaanxi-Province-style noodles. Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations show visited the restaurant, which is how we’d found out about it.

The interior is very sleek and modern, with a nice color palette supported by chrome and elegantly clad waiters:

The menu was huge, and we decided to start with a napa cabbage soup before the noodle courses:

The broth was light and vinegary, perfect as a starter.

Now to tackle the many noodle options! Noodle Loft offers knife-cut noodles that are thick and chewy in texture, sort of like udon, “cat’s ears” noodles which are small, shaped like cat ears and reminiscent of gnocchi in texture, hand-pulled noodles, and “noodles made with one single chopstick,” which are extremely long.

My friend went with a buckwheat version of the cat’s ears noodles (a Shaanxi specialty) stir fried with vegetables and sauce. These had  lovely bite to them and were quite different from any other Chinese noodle dish I’ve seen.

My wife opted for the hand-pulled noodles with a spicy beef dipping sauce. These noodles tasted essentially like udon, but weren’t eaten in a soup:

Personally, I ordered vegetable noodles made with a single chopstick, which were green from the vegetables and so long, I felt like I gave half my plate away when I let the others at the table taste one noodle! I chose a typical Shaanxi-style dipping sauce consisting of a lot of vinegar with some dried spices. These noodles were wonderful, filling and just luxurious to bite into!

Now for dessert, Noodle Loft offers a variety of Western-style cakes (cheesecake, chocolate torte, etc), which my friend and wife went for. I on the other hand was determined to have a Chinese dessert on our last night in China, which left many obscure herbal jelly options (one had the character for turtle in the name…), as well as cooked birdsnests (outrageously expensive delicacy). I had initially settled for double-boiled hashima served in a papaya cup, because I love papaya:

The menu depicted it like this:

I figured hashima might be some fruit mash, or glutinous rice meal, but became slightly nervous. My friend’s smart phone and Google rescued me, as we quickly found out that hashima are frog fallopian tubes. Yes. Frog fallopian tubes. They are supposed to cure anything from a headache to tuberculosis in Chinese medicine, and they are a popular dessert.

Let’s just say I quickly regrouped and went with steamed Chinese yam, or hui shan yao, the air root of a climbing vine, with a sea-buckthorn, or sha ji, berry sauce.

I can’t even begin to describe how delicious this warm dessert was! The yam was buttery soft and sweet, melting in your mouth, and its starchiness was wonderfully contrasted bu the almost gelee-like consistency of the sweet but refreshing buckthorn sauce. I was already very full, but couldn’t stand the thought of leaving a single bite behind. I would do anything to get my hands on the ingredients and a recipe!

Bottom line? While somewhat difficult to find, Noodle Loft is definitely worth the trip. The noodles are amazing, and a special treat you won’t find many places outside Shaanxi province, and all other dishes we tasted were simply wonderful as well. On the downside it is certainly pricey, and we had some misunderstandings with the wait staff despite my Chinese-speaking friend doing the ordering. Meat in the sauces/noodle dishes is very sparsely used, so don’t expect Italian meatball sized amounts! I would say it’s a great treat for a special night – 4/5 from me.

A Traditional Beijing-Style Dumpling Restaurant

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Beijing, China, Chinese, Dumplings, Food, Meat, Vegetables

While we were in Beijing, my friend showed us a traditional Beijing dumpling restaurant right around the corner from her work. Of course we went along happily!
The restaurant consisted of several completely separate rooms along a corridor, each of which was slightly different, but all felt kind of cozy with tons of plants, traditional clay figurines and muted lighting (sorry for the low quality pictures!). Many of the waitresses had traditional, complex braided hairdos that added to the flair of things.

We ordered a variety of dishes to share, starting with asparagus and chicken in a brown sauce that opened my eyes to the world of green asparagus. You see, in Germany we usually eat the white kind, and I had been suspicious of the green version. Now I’m a dedicated fan!

We also had a dish of baby bok choy and mushrooms that I loved so much, I tried to recreate it at home for a lunch staple, and I’ll post the recipe soon! Mildly savory and buttery soft bok choy with earthy mushrooms and ginger. Delicious!

And of course the dumplings. We each chose a filling, of which there was an entire separate menu with about 15 pages. Any meat, seafood, vegetable, sauce and combination thereof were available!
Beijing-style dumplings are boiled, not steamed or fried, and come with died wrappers (white, orange, green and purple). Unfortunately the colors don’t correspond to the fillings, and all three orders came in a colorful mixture, so that it was a take-a-bite-and-see experience. I think we each got at least one of each, and I liked them all very much. My wife had beef ones that were great, mine were a mixture of vegetables and mushrooms, and my friend had another meat-vegetable mix.

Going to a dumpling restaurant is a great, interactive meal if you have a small group of people, and all the dishes were absolutely delicious. Two thumbs up! On top, in pretty much any Chinese restaurant you’ll get a huge selection of vegetables that easily make your dinner much healthier than what you’d ever get overseas as Chinese cooking!

Do you like dumplings? What variety is your favorite kind? Have you been successful at keeping them from falling apart when making them yourself, unlike me?

Chinese Street Food & Snacks – A (Small) Sampling

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China, Chinese, Food, Ice cream, Meat, red beans, Sichuan, Snacks, street food

When in China, most likely you’ll be on foot or on a bicycle (at your own risk!) when not in a taxi. There’ll be lots and lots of walking, and you’ll see snacks everywhere. Who could resist? Here’s a list that merely scratches the surface of the matter, but with options that are healthy and delicious and a little more exciting than simply stocking up on fresh fruit and sugar-free chewing gum (though the gum variety is worth checking out!).

One of my favorite snacks I had while walking in the streets of Chengdu, where small fry kitchens and food carts abound:

This was a sweet cake made by preparing a paste from glutinous rice meal and water and steaming it wrapped in a corn husk, similar to a tamale. The cake was moist and while it was sweet, it didn’t just coat your mouth in sugar stickiness. Wonderful! 🙂

When we were in Leshan, a city in Sichuan that hosts a 70 meter high buddha carved into a mountain covered in temples, we made the mistake of thinking of the trip as a road stop along the way and lugged our luggage up and down the mountain for 2 hours in the boiling sun. To cool down, we went for ice cream. Ice cream comes in odd varieties in China (for example corn ice cream in the shape of corn on the cob), but a traditional, locally made variety looks kind of like a white popsicle:

Unfortunately, nowhere on the wrapper does it list the flavor, and I have been racking my brain ever since what that flavor was. Mildly sweet, not at all overpowering, it was great and refreshing. The best I can come up with is a subtle resemblance to coconut, but I don’t think that was it. If anyone knows, *please* let me know! This is a wonderful snack on one of the many hot Chinese summer days for relatively few calories compared to milk- or cream-based ice cream.

Staying in Sichuan, we decided to hike up Mount Emei, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China. Let me tell you, an 11 hour hike covering 14 miles, steeply uphill on stairs, not paths, to reach the summit at 10,100 feet, left me in dire need of protein to refuel. I opted for beef jerky.

Little did I suspect that even beef jerky comes in the Sichuan variety. They must have just rubbed this stuff in Sichuan pepper paste! Well, I was very alert after, and it was actually very tasty, even though my water consumption went way up afterwards. Jerky is a staple in convenience stores and snack shacks or carts in rural areas, so be on the look out for it if you need a protein kick and are tired of eggs. Not low in fat or salt, but not too bad.

And the final snack I found at a little street kitchen in the hutongs of Beijing. I *adored* this:

What you see here a paper thin meringue-like containers shaped as a triangle. The filling is your choice:

I went with red bean paste, because I love all things red bean. Not too sweet, perfectly balanced and light, this is a fairly low calorie snack with protein and sweetness! Of course, if you opt for a cream-base filling, that doesn’t hold true. And as an added bonus, they come in the most adorable little paper bag:

What are some of your favorite snacks? Do you eat snacks on a regular basis, or try to avoid them? Anything you found while traveling that you wish you could get back home?

Eating Out On Niu Jie – In the Muslim Quarter Of Beijing

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China, Chinese, Chinese muslim cuisine, Fish & Seafood, Food, halal, Meat, Restaurant, Vegetables

Niu Jie, which translates as Ox Street, lies at the center of Beijing’s Muslim quarter, which houses several mosques and a multitude of restaurants offering Beijing-style Muslim cuisine, also known as qingzhencai or huizucai. (The oldest mosque in Beijing is the Green Mosque and dates back to the 10th century!)

Muslim cuisine in China can be separated into Southern and a Northern, or Beijing, schools, both of which employ halal methods of slaughtering, but differ in the use of proteins. Northern Muslim cuisine focuses mainly on beef, while Southern proteins are usually mutton or lamb, along with duck, shrimp and geese. Islamic restaurants can easily be identified by Arabic writing.

While in Beijing, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit one of the many huizucai restaurants, which offered a mixture of Southern and Northern-style dishes:

True to Beijing-style restaurants, rice has to be ordered separately and comes in tiny bowls, and might actually be offensive because it implies there wasn’t enough other food, or that you didn’t enjoy it. Westerners like us of course get cut some slack there. We enjoyed a variety of dishes, and couldn’t pass up one made with mutton:

The mutton was crispy and came in a mildly spicy brown sauce, but, being mutton, wasn’t the easiest to bite through while being held with chopsticks.

This was probably my favorite dish, though it was closely rivaled by sweet and spicy eggplant that I failed to picture before we devoured most of it. Shrimp, cucumber and red peppers in a light, somewhat sweet sauce. I don’t usually like warm cucumber, but this was wonderful!

And finally, a Beijing-style beef dish. This came with tons of fat on the meat and swimming on the sauce, which wasn’t wonderful to me. However, the Chinese often leave on significant amounts of fat and enjoy it very much, and you can even specifically order “fatty beef”. Most likely it’s an acquired taste.

Overall it was a very interesting experience, and while I loved two of the dishes, two others didn’t really win me over. I’d definitely recommend the experience to visitors, as well as a trip to the Green Mosque!

Do you eat halal food, or follow other specific preparations? How easy/hard is it for you to travel or eat out? Have you discovered other cuisines that offer interesting additions to your standard fare?

Dim And Den Sum – The Original Cleveland Food Truck

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Asian, Food, food truck, Meat, Review

The first ever food truck to hit the streets of (Greater) Cleveland was Dim and Den Sum, run by chef Chris Hodge. That name seem familiar? That would be because his second food truck is none other than the Hodge Podge Truck of The Great Food Truck Race of Food Network fame. Dim and Den Sum launched in may 2010 and was an instant success, paving the road for some of the other trucks I’ve already reviewed.

And as mentioned before, my wife’s work does a great job recruiting food trucks, and so we managed to catch Dim and Den Sum right before they shut down for the cruel Cleveland Winter.

Dim and Den Sum offers an eclectic menu of interesting choices with an Asian twist that usually is announced ahead of time online, on Twitter and on Facebook. My wife chose pork pot stickers that were so tasty, they were gone before I had a chance to take a picture. However, they were also a bit steeply priced. I, on the other hand, settled on the PBLT sandwich:

Pulled pork, bacon (missing in this photo, sorry!), lettuce and tomato with a Sriracha aioli that had a pleasant kick. (Though my wife points out that that’s spinach, not lettuce…) The sandwich was huge, and in those bites where all flavor components came together it was delicious. Unfortunately the pulled pork was heaped on so generously that you had to separate the halves of bread, and only one side had the aioli, so the other side came off a bit bland.

The food was great, and would have deserved a pretty high rating, but unfortunately I witnessed a rather unfriendly rebuff to a customer ahead of me in line, and bad service has always been a pet peeve of mine. The other people manning the truck were very friendly though.

Bottom line? Well, it’s the original Cleveland food truck, don’t miss it! Great Dim with really interesting Sum, but due to the service issue mentioned above I’ll rate the experience a 3.75/5. Nevertheless, I’ll definitely give it another try come Spring!

Stuffed Peppers With A Puerto Rican Twist

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CSA, Food, Local, Meat, Puerto Rican, Recipe, Sofrito, Stuffed Peppers, Vegetables, Zucchini

So last week I posted about sofrito, the mother of all sauces in Puerto Rico. Now, let’s use this stuff in a less traditional way!

My CSA share included red bell peppers and zucchini, and so stuffed peppers were in order. But rather than do a typical version, I tried using sofrito to flavor the stuffing, and loved the end result. So here goes:

Ingredients:
– 2 red bell peppers
– 4 oz ground lean beef, turkey, or soy crumbles
– 1 medium roma tomato
– 2 slices cheddar or cheese substitute
– 1 medium zucchini
– 1/2 cup sofrito

Steps:
1. Carefully cut out tops of peppers and remove seeds

2. Blanch peppers in boiling water for 15 minutes, make sure peppers are covered. Also preheat oven to 375F

3. Meanwhile, spray a large pan, brown the meat and chop tomato and zucchini. Add zucchini, tomato and sofrito to the meat and cook at medium heat for 5 minutes

4. Place the boiled peppers in a sprayed, oven-safe dish and spoon stuffing mixture in

5. Top with cheese-slices and pop into the oven for 20 minutes.

6. Enjoy without burning your mouth!

Substituting in soy crumbles and cheese substitute, combined with the fresh vegetables makes this a very low calorie (and even vegan!) dish with an international twist.

What ways have you found to spice up traditional comfort foods or update old recipes to rekindle your enthusiasm?

The Nosh Box – A Comfort Food Truck!

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Cleveland, Confort Food, Food, food truck, Meat, Nosh Box, street food, United States, Vegetables

That’s right, Cleveland has still more food trucks to offer. Today: the Nosh Box, a truck serving mid-Western comfort nosh with a Tex-Mex twist to hungry Greater Clevelanders.

 

The Nosh Box is owned by Sandy and chef Kelly Waddell, who post the day’s menu and location the night before or morning off on Facebook and Twitter. Unlike some of the more exotic menus I’ve highlighted before, the Nosh Box is all about those indulgent comforting items:

 

They’re most famous for their Clevelander – fried bologna on Texas toast with all the fixin’s and the legendary Double Wide – Texas Toast topped with two kinds of cheese, bacon andmac’n cheese! Not necessarily a truck to recommend to dieters and health food lovers, but great for that indulgence we all need sometimes. Or as the Nosh Box chef put it: “Someone asked my if I had a lean body type. 🙂 I told them yes I do, I lean on anyone that gets in my way !”.

For my first nosh experience, I had a naan-bread pizza topped with fresh marinara, parmesan and mozzarella, onions, tomatoes and mixed greens:

 

It was

One of the greatest things about this truck is their special deal: bring back a reusable container and get a free drink! Now that’s a wonderful and generous offer to reduce waste.

Bottom Line:

Thanks to Kelly and Sandy for serving in freezing temperatures!

Donghuamen Night Market in Beijing – Curiosities on a Stick

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Beijing, China, Chinese, curiosities, Fish & Seafood, Food, Fruit, Meat, Snacks

Yes. That would be me eating fried snake on a stick.

Probably the most memorable novel food experience on our China trip was the Donghuamen night market that pops up every night on Donghuamen Street in one of the luxury shopping areas of Beijing, China. The market serves pretty much anything you wouldn’t normally think to eat on a stick. Don’t believe me? Take a look: This stand had English labels, but you could mostly tell what things were. And if in doubt, vendors waving sticks at you and yelling “Testicles!! Lady, testicles!!!” at you enticingly is a good indication of what might await you. There were indeed testicles (from cocks and bulls, I believe), and also snakes, eels, whole baby sharks, centipedes, silk worms, honeybee cocoons, sea stars, sea horses, sea urchins, various squids and other cephalopods, stinky tofu (essentially tofu gone bad, and believe me, your nose will tell you if you’re even getting close!) and plenty of other things.

As a customer, you select as many of these items as you want and the vendors will dip them into an intensely flavored spice rub and either fry (most common) or grill (much rarer) them for you. While it’s certainly a lot to process for your brain, everything tastes pretty much just like that incredibly overpowering spice mixture, though things like silk worms and scorpions might add a textural component to the experience. It’s neither too diet-friendly nor too tasty, if you ask me, and not even because I don’t enjoy snake/squid/what-have-you, but simply because that spice rub was probably 95% salt and 5% hot spices. Nevertheless, it’s something any curious foodie should try at least once when in Beijing!

Now, once the foodie quota is met, you can distract yourself with steamed or fried bao zi (stuffed buns) served with a variety of dipping sauces:

And for a sweet finish, there are fruit, also served on a skewer, though not fried or rubbed in salt:

The Donghuamen night market has been around since the early 1980s and is a popular draw for Chinese and foreigners alike, though the Chinese tend to seem more enthusiastic about the offered wares in general. Do expect to be aggressively advertised to by testicle-sellers if you are foreign, and maybe be advised that “bu yao!” means “I don’t want it!”. Other than that, it’s certainly a memorable experience to try out one night in Beijing, and will provide you with glorious photos to show whenever people ask about your trip.

MotorMouth Food Truck – Globally Inspired Gourmet Dishes On The Road

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Cleveland, Fish & Seafood, Food, food truck, Local, Meat, MotorMouth, street food, United States, Vegetables

My love affair with Cleveland’s food trucks is intensifying, and so I bring you yet another gem on wheels: the MotorMouth Food Truck, another less-than-a-year-old truck serving (Greater) Cleveland. Their menu and location gets posted the night before or early in the morning on Facebook and Twitter.

This truck, owned by Chef Rusty James Phillips, serves globally inspired gourmet dishes, and when they say gourmet, they sure mean it. Just have a look at their menu when I visited!

I mean, come on? Roasted duck tacos? Butter-poached cod? Normally way above my price range for a casual under the week lunch. I was very, very torn on what to order, but finally settled on the butter-poached cod, served with tamarind-spiked black beans and yellow rice:

The cod was buttery, flakey, melting in your mouth, but what really made this dish was the contrasting side – Spanish style yellow rice with black beans, onions, red peppers and a very healthy kick of tamarind. Incredibly flavorful and spicy, I probably could have eaten 3 to 4 servings, easy. One of the best rice dishes I’ve had in a long, long time. Absolutely excellent.

Of course I couldn’t resist dessert. Enter their famous Mexican brownie:

This pretty much blew my mind. Not at all your typically intensely sweet brownie, it reminded me of chocolatey gingerbread, probably due to the spices. These treats were made by Becky’s Pantry with Abuelita chocolate (unsweetened Mexican chocolate, quite different from what we’re used to here) and smoked chilli powder and topped of with toasted slivered almonds. Very, very intriguing, and a huge serving to boot.

MotorMouth tries to buy as many of their ingredients from local farms, and always has a vegetarian option available.

Bottom line? Generous portion sizes, very fair prices, and out-of-the-ordinary gourmet foods with unusual ingredients prepared by a very nice team. 5/5 from me, with brownie (haha) points for enduring the rain to serve hungry mouths like mine. I hope I get a chance at those duck tacos soon!

Thanks to the MotorMouth Food Truck team for serving University Circle folks!

Which menu item would tempt you? What not so common dishes would you love to see at prices like these?