I had plans. Big plans that involved a ton of peanut and sesame oils, chilis, mala peppercorns, and high wattage wok usage. During Golden Week, one of the 2 times a year  all of China is off from work and I'm completely free of teaching, I was going to cook up a storm.

But I'm currently down in Shanghai, in a wok-less apartment with nary a soy sauce bottle in sight. Don't get me wrong. I love being here, in this nice, renovated lane house that belongs to a friend. But he's in Canada so much that the kitchen is as empty as that of a college dorm. Upon arrival I did a quick cabinet assessment. I found a handful of spices, Bisquick, expired peanut butter, and a Sherpa guide offering delivery from 73 restaurants around town. There are, happily, chopsticks in the drawers.

I quickly jettisoned my cooking plans for the week; it made little sense to stock a pantry full of Chinese cooking oils, sauces, and dried goods just to make a few dinners. Instead, I got grain-happy at the grocery store and stocked up on chickpeas, barley, and inexpensive fresh produce. The fewer ingredients needed for a dish, the better. This teaches me to not take my pantry staples in my own apartment for granted. At least I'm forced to be more creative when planning meals.

Chickpeas don't appear often enough in my dishes. Call it laziness, or impatience. Whenever I want to whip up something simple and meatless, I usually head straight for lentils, quinoa, barley, any dry grain that doesn't take over an hour to prepare.

Yesterday, for once, I planned my dinner early. I set my dried chickpeas on the stove and went back to work for an hour. For once I had no hunger pangs to distract me or tell me to screw the long cooking times and just get dumplings next door instead.

The sauce part takes little time. Just soften the onions and carrots, stir in the curry paste and coconut milk, and add spinach towards the end. Finishing with Thai basil and a squeeze of lime juice, I had a basic, hearty, and portable bowl of curry to eat laptop-side.

I am a huge fan of cooking with whole spices. Ground cinnamon can never substitute cinnamon sticks in a braise. Ground Sichuan pepper doesn't have the same punch as whole or crushed peppercorn. And I'm prone to ignoring a recipe's call for ground cumin, when whole cumin has been the friend that never disappoints.

The fragrance of freshly toasted whole cumin can make me delirious with hunger. I know that whatever's touched with cumin will be smoky, substantial, and evocative of a far-off land blessed with pungent spices. If the food on this site seems cumin-heavy, that's because I use heaping spoonfuls and, when working off other recipes, double or triple the amounts. Is there a support group for this kind of spice addiction?

This eggplant and black bean salad is a great backdrop for another cumin invasion. The spice adds a nutty dimension to the eggplant, and highlights the saltiness of the black beans. (Salted black beans, also called fermented black beans, is usually found in the preserved goods section of a Chinese market. Rinse before use.) Try this appetizer not only with Chinese main courses but also Middle Eastern dishes.

What's your spice fetish?

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Eggplant, Cumin, and Black Bean Salad
Adapted from Chinatown by Ross Dobson

Serves 4 as an appetizer

The latest photographic tome by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid is anything but a traditional cookbook. Part travelogue, part recipe collection, and part ethnographic treatise, Beyond the Great Wall takes an indepth look at the foods of China's non-Han minorities.

As always, their photos are amazing, making me want to hop on the next plane to Kashgar, just to start. And the recipes, even with exotic-sounding names like Tajik nan and Kazakh pulao, seem surprisingly comfort-food-ish. There are also instructions for momos, those spectacular little dumplings from that famous and newsworthy province in the southwest. Most of the recipes are quite easy, thanks to the authors' substituting a few unorthodox ingredients for more familiar ones (a yak bone broth becomes oxtail broth, etc.)

I decided to begin with a ginger and carrot stir-fry from the Miao minority in Guizhou province. The important part to note is that the namesake ingredients are julienned. Mandolines would help, but if you want a rugged challenge and have strong hands, slicing everything with a cleaver also works. The original recipe also called for pork strips, but I decided to substitute with my local market's bean curd skin, which hooked me by being pre-shredded.

I was first introduced to Indian Chinese food a few years ago in Hong Kong, at a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui whose name now escapes me. My first thought was, "This is Chinese food?" My second thought was, "How ironic." The cuisine of China, brought over to India by Chinese immigrants many generations ago and given an Indian make-over, is now in the 21st century being brought to a special administrative region of China by Indian immigrants.

Chinese food developed in India the way it does around the world: by immigrants using techniques from home to cook their new world ingredients. They begin by feeding themselves, then perhaps open a restaurant to earn a living, thus adapting the food even more to suit local palettes.

Indian-Chinese cuisine incorporates not only Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and and ginger, but also cumin, turmeric, and hot chilis. Neither beef nor pork, the de facto meat of China, are used, because of India's large Hindu and Muslim populations. That leaves chicken, lamb, and vegetables as the mainstays. 

Life is slowly returning to normal. With the Olympics in town, I couldn't not be surrounded by sports fever. I attended 11 events in total, mostly through friends of friends with last minute tickets. Conversations around me all centered around tickets: who has them, who's willing to sell them, and why the heck they're all "sold out" but the venues are still half empty. The past two weeks have been fun, but also exhausting...too many early morning events, crowds galore, hour-long waits for security check, bad stadium food, and late night carousing (the last, though, was no fault of the Games themselves.) 

I'm continuing with the healthy recipes to combat the massive amounts of fried food I have been eating. Last week I posted Sichuan-Style Snow Peas, a light stir-fry. Today's tomato egg drop soup is even healthier if you consider the lack of cooking oil. It's also incredibly simple, which no special technique other than the swirling in of the egg whites to create the egg strands. Just pour slowly and stir at the same time.

Related recipe:
Seaweed Egg Drop Soup

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Tomato Egg Drop Soup

Serves 4

Dried-fried green beans is one of my favorite side dishes to order in Sichuan restaurants. In contrast to crisp haricot verts or mushy microwaved diner-style beans, Sichuan-style green beans are blistered and well-cooked without being bland. With Sichuan peppercorns and dried chillis adding spice and smokiness to the flavor profile, this dish becomes positively addictive.

However, no matter how many times I tried to recreate the dish at home, I ended up either burning the green beans before they got cooked, or dumping some water in order to save the beans, the latter which defeats the purpose of dry-frying. For help, I finally emailed Kian from Red Cook. He said that his method is using a ton of oil and constantly stirring the beans to get them cooked without burning. Almost like deep-frying. No wonder the green beans in restaurants taste so good.

My good-enough-for-publishing recipe in this post can be considered vegetarian, depending on whether you consider dried shrimp meat. (Or maybe I'm just turning incredibly Chinese: "Oh, you don't eat meat? Don't worry...it's just chicken.") Some versions use minced pork in addition to dried shrimp, and some avoid both. For dried shrimp, make sure to get the kind that's bigger, pinkish, and more expensive, not the cheap itty bitty gray ones. 

When Jacob and I lived in New York, we were frequent patrons of the "$1 for 5" fried dumpling places in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Those quick meals of crisp pork dumplings satisfied both sudden hunger pangs and skinny wallets. Then we discovered the dumpling joints also had bags of frozen dumplings for sale, even cheaper at $7 for 50, and multitudes better than the factory brands at Chinese supermarkets. So every month, Jacob would ride his bike 150+ blocks down to lower Manhattan and come back with about 15 pounds of frozen dumplings in his messenger bag.

I didn't subsist completely on Chinatown dumplings, but they were definitely handy when working full-time, freelancing on the side, and too tired to cook.

Now that I'm in Beijing, southern-style dumplings are almost non-existent. Northern-style jiaozi are wrapped in a thick doughy skins, and the dinky amount of filling per dumpling usually makes me feel somewhat cheated. (Exceptions, of course, exist.) There are die-hard Beijing jiaozi afficionados out there, but I'm not one of them. I craved--no, needed--dumplings whose skins didn't overwhelm the savory morsels of meat and vegetables inside.

In the dead of summer in Sichuan province, folks regularly eat incredibly spicy, stomach-burning hot pot with the belief that sweating profusely will cool you off. It makes sense, then, that some of the world's spiciest cuisines (Mexican, Indian, Malaysian, etc.) hail from the hottest climates.

I cook and eat spicy food year-round, even if I have to pour myself an enormous iced drink and blast the fan to enjoy it. My latest dish from two nights ago is a simple but very addictive Sweet Chili-Glazed Tofu. If you're a fan of mapo tofu, like 99.5% of people who have ever eaten Sichuan food, this is another good tofu recipe to try. More tongue-tickling spicy than ma la, with a sweet kick and subtle fruity aroma from cider vinegar, this quickish stir-fry makes an easy one-bowl dinner. With lettuce wraps instead of rice, it also becomes a good backyard cookout appetizer. 

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Other spicy tofu recipes:

Mapo Tofu
Kung Pao Tofu
Hunan-style Braised Fried Tofu
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Sweet Chili-Glazed Tofu

Serves 2

I like to think of this as the Punky Brewster of fried rice dishes. While seafood and pork versions would easily get upstaged by lots of vegetables, vegetarian versions are as colorful as your market's produce section allows. Today I brought home green beans, purple cabbage, and red and yellow bell peppers to go with my blackish shiitake mushrooms. To my knowledge there are no blue vegetables in existence, or I would have gotten them too.

My recipe eschews the scramble egg that is so many other fried rices. It doesn't seem needed, with so many textures already, but you can certainly throw some in for protein. As for the vegetables, the only important factor is that they are chopped small to cook quickly. This is a good way to use up not only leftover rice, but also whatever produce is close to being tossed out. 

As for the rice, I always use cold rice for stir-frying because it has the right stiffness. But if you don't have leftovers and absolutely must make this (I'm touched), try cooking your fresh rice with a little less water. 

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More vegetarian Chinese recipes to try: