Tieyu and the Magic Powder

[darkemeralds]

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.

Comments

[kernelm.livejournal.com]

Interesting. AFAIK, we don't use hua jiao yian for dumpling filling. It's more often used in batter or sometimes as something to dip fried items in. Hua jiao by itself is sometimes used to flavor stuff like meats. I hated when I would accidentally bite into one though. That and these other little peppers whose name I forget now, but they look sorta like peppercorns but they've also got that numbing thing.

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.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

You seem to have mastered the art of win-win. What a brilliant experience.

[sffan.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[silent-sensei.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful sounding meal! And the preparation! What an adventure! I am so glad you had that experience.

[vampirefan.livejournal.com]

thanks for sharing your delicious experience!

...now i'm really hungry!

[llaras.livejournal.com]

Very cool!

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

Everything you describe sounds blissful - from the shopping in that impressively enormous place, through the cooking and (especially *g*) the eating. How lovely to have someone show you how to cook Chinese food properly and I'm sure Tieyu enjoyed being the teacher and the company of you and your family.

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!"

Late to the Party

[str8ontilmornin.livejournal.com]

Seconding kispexy2. Mirror image of Carlo Petrini and the Slow Food Movement. It is no wonder with the path the majority of the country has gone down in regards to food. It does become part of us and it does matter what we feed ourselves. Now if we all had the real, true food memories and experiences of growing up in a culinary atmosphere such as that of France or Italy (I'm generalizing here) then a different but better view would be pervasive in the US and we'd all be "foodies" and there would be no need for the term. :-)

[serenity-valley.livejournal.com]

What a great experience! I see you're talking about learning bao next...if/when you do, will you invite us for dinner? Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

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.