Chinese black bean sauce 豆豉酱 (dòu chǐ jiàng)

A lumpy brown sauce made from fermented soybeans, it has a savory flavor and can be found in jars at most Asian grocery stores. When cooking with it, it is usually wise to omit salt from the recipe, because the sauce can taste very salty. It is sometimes referred to as black bean paste. You may substitute Chinese whole fermented black beans or chili bean sauce.

update!

Yes, we are still alive and cooking. We've been spending every spare minute working on finishing our book manuscript. Blogging on this site has been put on the back burner until after the blessed day when we deliver the completed manuscript and then spend a couple of days vegetating in front of our computers and catching up on all the TV and movies we've missed over the last several months while we've been in our  writing cave. Then we'll be back on the blog. 

until then,

Nate

bok choy in the white house garden

 photo credits: Associated Press, me

I opened up the Drudge Report this morning and saw this headline: FIRST LADY BACK TO GARDEN: BOK CHOY ON THE MENU...

Michelle Obama has gotten people talking about gardening which is something I really enjoy. When I was in middle school, my dad rented an industrial plow and tilled a huge area of the backyard. I think he told my mom it was going to be a small garden but he couldn't help himself once he got started. After the yard was torn up, he got his friend up the street who owned a horse barn to fertilize the whole area with horse manure that he spread from the back of a giant tractor.  A month or so later we had more cherry tomatoes than we could eat (so Mary Kate and I invented tomato fights), mammoth cucumbers, green beans, and a dozen other kinds of vegetables. As the garden grew, my dad put his biology degree to work and taught us all about the plants and bugs in the garden. I watched my mom collect the vegetables each day and make salads, vegetable spreads, pickles, and lots and lots of things with cherry tomatoes.

My only negative memory of the garden was my dad demanding that my sister and I had to weed the whole thing by hand. Everyday after school we liked to sit on the couch watching Saved By the Bell or Oprah but when we heard the engine of my dad's '87 Caddilac Deville drive up the road we raced out in the backyard and started weeding like crazy. Not surprisingly, the garden was overrun by weeds at the end of the summer.

According to the article about the new White House garden, Michelle Obama decided that the garden was not big enough so she had it enlarged. She is growing all sorts of veggies, one of them being bok choy. In my opinion, bok choy is an underused vegetable in America, maybe because people don't know how to cook it. Here's a recipe we posted for baby bok choy awhile ago.

I'm inspired by Michelle to garden this spring myself. It's difficult in New York City to find a sunny corner of your apartment to grow something, but I just moved into an apartment here in Beijing that has a sun room. The previous tenant left a bunch of pots with potting soil in them and I'm going to see what I can grow. I don't think bok choy will grow in the small pots but maybe I'll try green onions, some herbs, or garlic. It will be fun to incorporate the fresh veggies into our dishes while we're cooking for our book. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. 

Mary Kate and I are busy cooking and testing a ridiculous amount of Chinese food for our book, sometimes late into the night.

-Nate

ikea beijing, the family restaurant

One bored and lonely Sunday afternoon shortly after moving to China, I hopped on my (not so) sweet bike and rode the seven miles from my place to check out Ikea. My map was dated and I ended up getting very lost. Once you leave the city center of Beijing, you quickly enter rural factory areas where construction workers live and work. I was totally lost on a dirt road when I stopped to ask a man using a hammer to break ice on the ground where I could find Ikea. I hadn't bothered to learn the Chinese name for Ikea knowing that I would never get lost so I had to play charades. "You know, the big building that sells furniture? Household stuff?" No, he said, but as I turned away, he called after me, "Are you talking about the foreign place that sells food and coffee?" Yes! 

(the Ikea restaurant) 

Ikea Beijing was nothing like the ones I've been to in the States. The actual products and design were the same, but there had to have been thousands of people in there. Second of all, it seemed a lot more like a hangout place than an actual store. The restaurant was also a main event. It was massive and absolutely packed. I drank Glögg, a Swedish mulled wine, and ordered what I always order, Swedish meatballs. I definitely think a lot of people go there just to eat and then make there way over to the couches and beds to relax. 

Friends and family sat around and talked, played games, and took naps.

I didn't buy anything. Partly because I rode my bike and couldn't but also because the line was insane. I recommend going on a weekday. That's when I went back to buy a couch and a soup strainer and a bunch of other things that I don't need. Ikea gets me every time on that last lower level as I'm leaving and shoving everything I see in my yellow bag and telling myself this is such a good deal.

-mk

horse carts in beijing and a new fruit called xiao feng, 特小凤西瓜

Well, it's not a new fruit, just a fruit new to me. Nate and I took the subway two short stops from the Beijing city center and wandered around the streets aimlessly looking for a place for me to buy new glasses. Turns out we were in an area of the city where a lot of Uighur minority people live-- the Muslim minority group from Xinjiang, the Northwest part of China. You may have heard about Xinjiang recently in the news. We saw quite a few horse drawn carts in this area and this one was selling a fruit called te xiao feng xi gua (特小凤西瓜).

We bought one for 10 RMB (about $1.50) and ate the whole thing. I've never seen it sold anywhere else but maybe I haven't looked hard enough. It tastes like a cross between a watermelon and a honeydew melon. Has anyone seen this for sale in the States?

-mk