Wherever I am these days - whether it's Beijing, San Francisco, or Tampa - I am surrounded by tangerines and clementines. (The latter is possibly better known in California as Cuties®.) These in-season cousins of the orange make excellent snacks, especially when you're trying to fight off the seasonal cold. And they're CHEAP. At a Tampa-area supermarket I found a 10-tangerines-for-$1 deal, rivaling Chinese prices.

After eating about 200 tangerines this season, I decided to make tangerine salsa for Christmas Eve hors d'oeuvres. This salsa requires few ingredients and is equally tangy, salty, sweet, and hot. I made a lot yesterday, and can serve it straight out of the fridge tomorrow with a few chips, a precious time-saver considering I have other appetizer, sides, and a big ol' turkey to contend with. 

Another way to use this salsa is to bake fish with it. I bought some tilapia fillets, rubbed them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and covered them with tangerine salsa. If you have the salsa already prepared, dinner is merely 10 minutes away.  

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Tangerine Salsa

Makes about 4 cups of salsa; feel free to halve recipe

When I lived in the US, I was addicted to hummus. I would go through a tub a week, eating it with pita, raw vegetables, and (secret's out!) even plain rice if the cupboards were empty. I would make long treks from West Harlem to Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn just for hummus and pita from Sahadi's. Not surprisingly, I went through major withdrawal while living in China. Not even the Western import stores had the mass-produced tubs I took for granted at Whole Foods or even Safeway. And since Beijing's Middle Eastern population is tiny, with the majority working at embassies, not opening restaurants, I could forget about any sort of mezze platters or shawarmas whenever the mood stuck.

So I was ecstatic to finally find tahini at Sanyuanli, the local market that rivals the import stores in diversity, without the exhorbitant prices. The guy who runs the stall sells fresh sesame oil and sesame paste, but unlike his rivals around town, was smart enough to realize realize, hey, the foreigners all want this thing called tahini. Thomas Friedman would be proud.

The only highlight of being left at home while your significant other goes to Europe is receiving food gifts when he returns.

Jacob went to a conference in Hungary a few weeks ago and traipsed around Eastern Europe afterwards. I stayed in Beijing, fuming about the ridiculous cost of a Beijing-Budapest ticket in August (and finally escaping to Hong Kong in frustration.) I was, however, ecstatic when he brought home not only chocolate and liquor, but also goose liver foie gras and fresh Hungarian truffles. 

What to do with these, what to do, I mused, while bouncing around in giddiness. (You must understand, dear reader, that while I am blessed with abundant Chinese food here, I have also been seriously deprived of decent Western cuisine.) The truffles had to be used, pronto, before they lost their fragrance. I was reminded of one day in culinary school, when the stewarding department accidentally sent up a softball-sized chunk of black French truffles instead of a few ounces; when the chef-instructor shrugged and turned a blind eye, my classmates and I feverishly shaved the entire chunk and made the most decadent polenta I am likely to ever eat in my life. Likewise, this time I also had to liberally use truffles in whatever I made.

Hiking in the U.S. usually means bringing along a bag of trail mix for hearty fuel. In China, tea eggs seem to be the substitute. Two weekends ago, I went to Badachu in the outskirts of Beijing with a group of Chinese friends. It's a scenic area with 8 different Buddhist temples and monasteries set into a mountain, and reaching them means more hiking that I had done since Colorado.

For lunch, in addition to sandwiches from home, we bought tea eggs from an snack vendor along the trail. My worries that eggs would be too heavy to eat during strenuous hiking vanished as I bounced along up, up, up the Western Hills after lunch. The next day my body would be cursing me, but the tea eggs seemed as effective as any nature store granola mix.

(And now I can't get the "Gaston Song" from Beauty and the Beast out of my head, the part about eating 5 dozen eggs every morning to become strong. Tea eggs are good, but don't eat 5 dozen in one sitting.)

In the past few years, goji berries, or 枸杞 (gouqi) in Mandarin, have become one of those new "it" foods highly touted in the media. Everyone from health gurus to fashion magazine editors raved about how gojis were rich in antioxidents, good for your eyesight, and so on. As a kid I had eaten them in herbal soups my mother made, but as a 20-something New Yorker my disinterest was purely economical: they cost upwards of $10 or $12 a bag, even on sale.

Of course, here in China you can get the exact same goji berries for 6 or 7 renminbi a bag, if you don't mind the less fancy packaging. (Which makes me wonder why I'm not stocking up to sell for a killer profit back home.) Also called wolfberries, gojis are said to have Tibetan and Himilayan origin, but most sold nowadays come from other parts of China.

Gojis taste like a cross between a raisin and a date. I don't like to eat them on their own, since they are a bit dry. But I do like a spoonful in green or black tea with honey. (Note: Whenever you consume goji berries you should first rinse them in water to rid them of any chemicals they may have.) They're also great to bake with; the berries' natural sweetness makes them great for muffins, scones, and especially cookies.

Along with lucky red envelopes, I received a gift for Lunar New Year that I could use immediately in the kitchen: a package of water chestnut flour.

Water chestnut cake (ma tei gow in Cantonese) is another snack, along with turnip cake, that is eaten all year round but especially during Chinese New Year. It's also much easier to make. While the main ingredient, water chestnut flour, may not be a staple on Western grocery store shelves, it is readily available in large Chinatown markets. When I lived in Boston we had a few varieties to choose from. The best kind has a coarse pebbly texture, as opposed to finer dust.

I love how the translucency makes the cake look like marble. I also love tasting the crunchy chestnuts with the jelly texture of the steamed cake.

From a Chinese-American kid's perspective, Chinese New Year is a holiday as cool as, or even better than, Christmas. You get lots of red envelopes full of money, big boxes and tins of candy, and big meals for at least 3 to 5 days straight. You don't have to pretend to like any of the re-gifts or fruitcake you receive. And if your mother has free time, which she somehow always finds during the New Year, she'll whip up batches of snacks for you to eat and to give to relatives.

One of these snacks, eaten all year round but especially during the New Year, is turnip cake. It symbolizes prosperity and growing fortunes, but a kid's main concern is how good something tastes. (Even many years later, turnip cake is one of the first foods I associate with Chinese New Year.) Although this is a staple on dim sum menus, no restaurant turnip cake compares to the homemade version, which bares the aroma of just-cooked mushrooms and pork even days after it's made.

Back in the good ol' US of A, I used to make candied nuts for snacks or holiday treats using the standard American oven. You know, the kind that comes in every house from coast to coast, from California McMansions to tiny tenement apartments in the Lower East Side. (The one in my LES tenement was always on the fritz, but that's a tangent for another time.)

In China, home ovens are almost impossible to find outside of the newest and priciest pads. So while Western recipes for candied walnuts and pecans tend to say bake in the oven, Chinese recipes call for deep-frying. I had never fried walnuts before but decided to try today. My wok is still pretty new, and even though it has already been seasoned, deep-frying is good for getting more oil into the metal.

I had originally planned to save these walnuts for an after-dinner snack, when I settle into the couch and tune in to China's version of HGTV. So putting them within easy reach of Jacob and me was a bad idea. The walnuts are almost all gone and we haven't even begun to make dinner.

Candied Walnuts without an Oven
Adapted from Mrs. Chiang's Szechuan Cookbook and 101 Cookbooks

2 cups shelled walnuts
1 1/2 cups (300 g) granulated white sugar
3 to 4 cups peanut or canola oil for deep frying

Special equipment: 1. Deep fryer, wok, or heavy stockpot. 2. Slotted spoon or metal strainer

Wontons, if made well, live up to their Cantonese name, which means "swallowing clouds." Whenever I have wonton soup, it's an exercise in self-control to not eat all the wontons first. These little parcels of pork in wrapper steal the show, even if vegetables and noodles are present.

Wonton soup is available at just about any homestyle Cantonese restaurant, both in China and abroad. Making them at home is another story. Home cooks who didn't grow up making wontons find the folding intimidating (but this is true with all sorts of dumplings.) Many also think making wontons at home is a hassle, especially when going down to the local noodle shop is such a breeze.

I've found that by making big batches of wontons, I can freeze them and take them out for a rainy day. The Cantonese mainly put wontons in soup, and that's the context in which I knew them for most of my growing-up years in China. Then after moving to the US, I discovered the greasy guilty pleasure of American Chinese food, and subsequently the deep-fried wonton. Wonton soup may be awkward to eat if you're out with friends, or throwing a party, but munching on a big basket of fried wontons is as much fun as sharing popcorn shrimp or french fries.