Tieyu and the Magic Powder
24/6/07 22:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
My new friend Tieyu is here on an exchange, living in student housing, away from her husband and daughter in China. When she mentioned that she's a good cook, I asked her if she'd like to come to my house and teach me a Chinese dish. I thought it might help her feel at home, and I knew I'd learn something new and interesting.
We started our culinary adventure with a trip to Fubonn. After about an hour wandering the aisles of this Asian food wonderland, me acting like a complete tourist (they have palm sugar! What's palm sugar for? Look at the size of those papayas! Rice gluten! What's that for? Do I need a wok? They have woks...), and Tieyu being very nice about it, we came home with our bounty and started preparing dinner: jiaozi (pork dumplings), cucumber salad, and mung bean porridge.
First we made our own dumpling wrappers. They start with a stiff flour-and-water dough that you pull out into a long rope and break off in little chunks. These you flatten with your palm into a sort of flying-saucer shape.

Using a short rolling stick, you thin the edges into a circle, leaving the middle slightly thicker. A dab of filling goes in the center, then you seal it in by folding and crimping the dough. Tieyu made it look so easy! Mine were all misshapen blobs, one for every dozen or so she made.

Here is Tieyu:

Our filling was ground pork with scrambled eggs, and masses of Chinese chives chopped very finely. This was seasoned with quite a lot of ginger and salt, soy sauce, sesame oil, and...magic powder.
See, Tieyu brought a little packet of brown powder with her from China, and so critical was it to the outcome of our cooking that when she initially forgot it in her apartment, she asked me to circle back for it: hua1 jiao1 mian4, also known as Szechuan pepper or Chinese prickly ash. It isn't really a pepper--not in the chile family at all--but it adds a pungency of the "numbing" variety that's very characteristic of northern Chinese cuisine. It's also got medicinal properties--among other things, it's good for digestion. How handy!
Anyway, a couple of tablespoons of this precious stuff went into the filling.
While we simmered one potful after another of our gorgeous jiaozi, Tieyu had me set a saucepan of mung beans on to boil. Then we julienned some cucumber and carrot and chopped up some transparent noodles, and dressed all this with rice vinegar, sugar and garlic.
The jiaozi were heavenly, with their slippery boiled wrappers and the burst of a dozen rich, steaming, combined flavors when you bit in. We just stood there in the kitchen eating them. A bit later my sister joined us. When we'd all eaten as many dumplings as we could, and scarfed up most of the salad, we had dessert. The mung beans had cooked and cooled, and Tieyu served them to us in little dishes, in their broth, with sugar. They were mild and green-tasting, very refreshing. Tieyu says that mung beans served this way have a cooling effect on the body.
Tieyu gave me the packet of magic powder to keep. She took a dozen dumplings home with her and there were still dozens left. I had cold mung beans for breakfast today, and re-steamed dumplings for lunch and dinner.
The real tasty leftover, however, was this dawning realization: all my life, food has been something to fear, control, limit, distrust, and obsess over. At best, in my culture, it's a hedonistic pleasure, akin to sin. It's always something you need to heal from, work off, undo, burn up. In China, apparently, food is actually viewed as medicine, and a well-prepared meal makes you better, and not just fuller or fatter.
So, thank you, Tieyu and the magic powder. I'm on the road to a whole new learning experience.
We started our culinary adventure with a trip to Fubonn. After about an hour wandering the aisles of this Asian food wonderland, me acting like a complete tourist (they have palm sugar! What's palm sugar for? Look at the size of those papayas! Rice gluten! What's that for? Do I need a wok? They have woks...), and Tieyu being very nice about it, we came home with our bounty and started preparing dinner: jiaozi (pork dumplings), cucumber salad, and mung bean porridge.
First we made our own dumpling wrappers. They start with a stiff flour-and-water dough that you pull out into a long rope and break off in little chunks. These you flatten with your palm into a sort of flying-saucer shape.

Using a short rolling stick, you thin the edges into a circle, leaving the middle slightly thicker. A dab of filling goes in the center, then you seal it in by folding and crimping the dough. Tieyu made it look so easy! Mine were all misshapen blobs, one for every dozen or so she made.

Here is Tieyu:

Our filling was ground pork with scrambled eggs, and masses of Chinese chives chopped very finely. This was seasoned with quite a lot of ginger and salt, soy sauce, sesame oil, and...magic powder.
See, Tieyu brought a little packet of brown powder with her from China, and so critical was it to the outcome of our cooking that when she initially forgot it in her apartment, she asked me to circle back for it: hua1 jiao1 mian4, also known as Szechuan pepper or Chinese prickly ash. It isn't really a pepper--not in the chile family at all--but it adds a pungency of the "numbing" variety that's very characteristic of northern Chinese cuisine. It's also got medicinal properties--among other things, it's good for digestion. How handy!
Anyway, a couple of tablespoons of this precious stuff went into the filling.
While we simmered one potful after another of our gorgeous jiaozi, Tieyu had me set a saucepan of mung beans on to boil. Then we julienned some cucumber and carrot and chopped up some transparent noodles, and dressed all this with rice vinegar, sugar and garlic.
The jiaozi were heavenly, with their slippery boiled wrappers and the burst of a dozen rich, steaming, combined flavors when you bit in. We just stood there in the kitchen eating them. A bit later my sister joined us. When we'd all eaten as many dumplings as we could, and scarfed up most of the salad, we had dessert. The mung beans had cooked and cooled, and Tieyu served them to us in little dishes, in their broth, with sugar. They were mild and green-tasting, very refreshing. Tieyu says that mung beans served this way have a cooling effect on the body.
Tieyu gave me the packet of magic powder to keep. She took a dozen dumplings home with her and there were still dozens left. I had cold mung beans for breakfast today, and re-steamed dumplings for lunch and dinner.
The real tasty leftover, however, was this dawning realization: all my life, food has been something to fear, control, limit, distrust, and obsess over. At best, in my culture, it's a hedonistic pleasure, akin to sin. It's always something you need to heal from, work off, undo, burn up. In China, apparently, food is actually viewed as medicine, and a well-prepared meal makes you better, and not just fuller or fatter.
So, thank you, Tieyu and the magic powder. I'm on the road to a whole new learning experience.
Tags:
(no subject)
25/6/07 06:12 (UTC)Back when we used to make our own filling for dumplings, the main ingredients were pork, Chinese cabbage, and Chinese leek/chives. For bao we'd sometimes add scrambled eggs. Sometimes we'd just do plain ol' scrambled eggs and Chinese leek itself as a dish. Mmm.
These days we're too lazy to actually make dumpling from scratch. First we started buying store bought wrappers. Nowadays we just buy the frozen pre-made stuff and throw it in a pot. :-/
Dang, now I'm hungry for some dumplings.
(no subject)
25/6/07 17:55 (UTC)This hua jiao was definitely labeled "mian" and was powdery, so no problem of biting into a berry--but I understand that purists buy theirs whole and grind it in a mortar, where large bits may remain. I've also read that in Szechuan hot-pot, the whole dang pot is topped with a "thick layer" of the stuff, floating on top of the hot-pepper-oil layer! Wow.
Next stop: a cookbook (http://www.amazon.com/Land-Plenty-Treasury-Authentic-Sichuan/dp/0393051773).
(no subject)
25/6/07 08:26 (UTC)(no subject)
25/6/07 18:13 (UTC)(no subject)
25/6/07 10:51 (UTC)Truer words have not been spoken. And I exemplified it last night. I really wanted a piece of chocolate cake, so I had a piece and then felt all guilty about having it. I'm still fretting.
(no subject)
25/6/07 18:10 (UTC)In the 20-plus years since, I've given huge amounts of energy to the whole issue of food and eating. I thought I'd made great progress, but I now see that in all that time, I'd only managed to tamp down my sense of sin and shame about it, allowing myself to enjoy good food, but always on a diet in my mind.
It's really revolutionary for me to awaken to the concept that food is--or can be--and active good. It seems so obvious! But the idea was completely unavailable to me until Saturday night.
(no subject)
25/6/07 20:26 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/07 02:14 (UTC)(no subject)
25/6/07 22:29 (UTC)...now i'm really hungry!
(no subject)
26/6/07 02:14 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/07 02:19 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/07 02:21 (UTC)Did you go to the Joss Birthday Serenity showing? I totally missed it.
(no subject)
26/6/07 02:32 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/07 02:36 (UTC)(no subject)
26/6/07 03:27 (UTC)(no subject)
27/6/07 07:51 (UTC)What you say about the Western attitude to food is very true. Particularly for women. Of course, we're not helped by the way our food is processed to hell, with all manner of nasties and anti- health-giving additives being slipped into it. So much better to make food from scratch. I have a cookbook by a US guy ... Andrew Weil? ... who claims that real ingredients prepared with love can't help but do a person good. I want to believe that. Just as I want to believe Husband's colleague who, finishing a bottle of very good wine on his own, declared "I can feel this doing me good!"
(no subject)
27/6/07 13:24 (UTC)I think there's a lot in what Andrew Weil says (didn't know he had a cookbook). The combination of "real ingredients" and love is powerful. Would prisoners receiving heartless and hateful portions of organic farm food benefit? Sure. Would children receiving crappy toxic junk food from a loving mother be diminished by the food? Probably. But in both cases, I'd like to believe, the powerful good offsets the bad.
(no subject)
27/6/07 16:50 (UTC)This is the one I have but I see he's produced others. I saw him on Oprah years ago and really took to him. Seems very down-to-earth and not at all waffly.
Late to the Party
28/6/07 04:43 (UTC)Re: Late to the Party
28/6/07 20:11 (UTC)That said, there's a scene in "Big Night" that demonstrates how "slow food" needn't be elaborate, or painstaking, or expensive. You probably know the one--the indelible "scrambled egg" scene, in which one of the characters wakes up in the kitchen after the titular big night, lights the flame under a small skillet, pours in a few drops of olive oil, breaks an egg, scrambles it quickly, tips it onto a plate, and eats it with a hunk of Italian style bread--all in a single take, from a single angle, in total silence.
You could show that scene to junior high kids and say, "Let's taste the difference between free-range eggs and regular ones. Let's see if we can tell the difference between olive oil and melted Crisco. Let's see if sea salt is any different from Morton's iodized. And can you tell the difference between Wonder "bread" and this ciabatta?
What an educational starting point that would be!
Re: Late to the Party
30/6/07 20:22 (UTC)Seeing/tasting the differences would be helpful in building a new appreciation for real food. So would seeing and actually occupying the space where food is grown or raised. Most would make a turn towards sustainability and more humane treatment, etc.
Re: Late to the Party
1/7/07 01:27 (UTC)I'm trying to remember if I've ever been on a farm. I've been in orchards and vineyards, and people's vegetable gardens, and once as a little kid I went to Alpenrose Dairy. I've walked alongside acres of ripe barley in England and past flocks of domestic geese in France, and I have a vivid childhood memory of freshly machete'd raw sugar cane in a field in Hawaii. It doesn't add up to a full appreciation of the world of agriculture, but each experience was memorable and life-enhancing.
This is a very though-provoking topic! Have you ever seen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Fearnley-Whittingstall)? Not a name that instantly conjures up great cuisine, being so veddy veddy British and all, but he is a great exponent of sustainable, local, traditional and excellent eating, and his "River Cottage" cooking shows on British television are both entertaining and inspiring. I suspect you would enjoy them.
Re: Late to the Party
5/7/07 15:22 (UTC)Thanks for the info. Definitely someone I should know more about. Wonder if I can Netflix some eps.... will check on that.
Re: Late to the Party
5/7/07 16:44 (UTC)Re: Late to the Party
6/7/07 15:04 (UTC)Re: Late to the Party
28/6/07 20:30 (UTC)Re: Late to the Party
30/6/07 21:33 (UTC)Re: Late to the Party
1/7/07 00:53 (UTC)(no subject)
28/6/07 05:07 (UTC)What you say about food is so true. One thing about being married to a chef, you really do start to see food in a whole new light. In fact, I talked about that about a month or so ago in this post (the whole post is about food; the point about own food philosophy is what ties it all together at the end).
Your entry jogged my memory about a book I heard about on NPR not too long ago called The Last Chinese Chef" that sounds intriguing and also ties into the belief that the food we eat has healing properties. I remember the author (who also wrote Lost in Translation) talking about what a radical impact the Chinese philosophy of food had on her own way of eating, and how it moved her to write the book.
(no subject)
28/6/07 20:27 (UTC)You should have seen me yesterday on my lunch hour, drooling over the Shun Asian-style carbon-steel knives at Williams-Sonoma!
My new cookbooks should arrive in a few days, and I'd love to invite you to partake of a taste-test. Not only would that be fun and wonderful, but it would bring that all-important conviviality to my house that