Adventures in Chinese Cooking!

Learning to make spring rolls last fall at our friend's restaurant

Cooking has always played a role in my life, as my dad used to be a chef (he changed careers when I was in middle school), so for much of my childhood my sister and I participated in a lot of cooking lessons and experiments with him in our kitchen at home. We made our own pasta from scratch, learned the lingo of recipe books, and never felt intimidated by supposedly difficult dishes like creme brulee. 

In my teenage years, my interest in cooking waned, but every once in a while I did still attempt something adventurous on my own, occasionally with disastrous results (like the time I nearly started a kitchen fire making a flan). 

It was after I moved out on my own as a college student in Portland that I realized there was a major gap in my knowledge: regular, everyday food. Yes, I could make eclairs, but could I make a nice, basic casserole? I found myself eating a lot of frozen, microwaveable dishes that first year on my own, and quickly realized that I needed to fill in that knowledge gap. 

Since then I think I've improved a lot, but I'm still just an average cook overall. The thing that has changed the most though is my enjoyment of cooking - whenever someone offers to teach me these days, I always jump at the opportunity. During my time in China, I was lucky enough to have a few friends teach me some delicious local dishes, which I'll describe in this post. I can't offer the exact recipes my friends shared, just a basic description of the dish, my experience trying to make it, and a link to a similar recipe (all links are to English language recipes).

Moon Cakes

The Chinese word printed in the middle of this moon cake helpfully lets you know what filling is inside!

This was one of the first times I hung out with my friend Sophie, making moon cakes together. These are a traditional dessert eaten in China around the Mid-Autumn Festival. It's very common for people to make or order moon cakes to give to their friends, family, or coworkers as a gift. Making them can be a long process, so some people just purchase some of the ingredients ready made, while others make them from scratch. There's also a lot of variety in terms of the filling, size, shape, etc. of moon cakes. 

Freshly baked moon cakes

The kind we made have an egg yolk in the center that has been baked, so that it will be fairly hard and chewy. Surrounding the egg yolk is a mixture of sugar and peanut oil, which tastes like sweet peanut butter. On the outside is a very thin layer of dough, which is shaped using a mold and stamped with a beautiful design on top. To put the ingredients together, you begin by wrapping the peanut-y layer around the egg yolk by hand, then spreading the dough around that. The trickiest part is trying to spread out the dough evenly.

The bright orange part is the egg yolk; the smaller dark brown ball on the right is the peanut filling, and the lighter, larger balls are the finished ones covered in dough

Using a mold/stamp to shape the cakes

Ready for baking!

The moon cakes are then baked, packaged up in little plastic bags and cute boxes, and ready to be delivered to friends and family! The packaging, even for homemade moon cakes, can be impressively professional looking.

Believe it or not, these were homemade moon cakes that we were given, wrapped in these very professional boxes!

Moon Cake Recipe

Drunk Corn and BBQ-Style Eggplant

Frying up some drunk corn

These are two of my favorite dishes to order when I go out for barbecue in Nanning. Drunk Corn (jiuguiyumi / 酒鬼玉米) is corn kernels that have been covered in corn starch, deep friend, and then seasoned with salt and whatever else you like (maybe chili flakes, maybe cumin, etc.) It's not made with alchohol; it gets the name "drunk" corn or "alcoholic" corn because it's a popular snack to eat when out drinking. Some places will mix in things like green onions, diced purple onion, bell peppers, Chinese red chili peppers, or even diced carrots. Personally, I like to keep it simple with just the green onions and corn.

Boiled corn kernels, covered in corn starch and ready to be fried

Eggplant is a vegetable that I thought I hated before I came to China. Part of the reason may be that the type of eggplant typically found in China is smaller and tastes better to me than the kind usually found in the US. The other reason it's better in China (in my opinion) is the way it's prepared. At barbecue restaurants especially, you can usually order grilled or braised eggplant that is covered in fresh garlic and a sweet and savory sauce that mainly consists of soy sauce and Chinese cooking wine.

Chinese eggplant (Photo Credit)

Barbecue style eggplant loaded with garlic and chili peppers (Photo Credit)

My friends Alisha and Wushi invited us over to dinner at their home one evening, and Wushi taught us how to make these two dishes at home. They were both surprisingly simple!

Drunk Corn Recipe - Video (up to about 1 minute, after that it's fairly different than the way it's usually prepared in Nanning) and BBQ-Style Eggplant Recipe (Vegan, using an oven) - Video.

Vietnamese Spring Rolls and Chinese Fried Spring Rolls

Fresh and healthy Vietnamese Spring Rolls

One of my favorite cooking lessons was when Anna and I went to stay for a few days with our friend Joey, a professional chef who owns her own restaurant in the Guangxi city of Chongzuo (a couple hours from Nanning). The night we arrived Joey put us to work in her kitchen, making Vietnamese and Chinese style spring rolls. Both types were wonderful in their own way! Joey's hometown is right on the border with Vietnam, and she is a fluent speaker of Vietnamese who lived in Vietnam for awhile. 

Making spring rolls at our friend's restaurant in Chongzuo, Guangxi

The Vietnamese style spring rolls were made using round sheets of rice paper (we actually visited a factory where these are produced in the Mekong Delta, when Anna and I were traveling in Vietnam. You can read about it here.) First you brush some water on the rice paper and let it soak in a bit, to make it flexible. While that's happening, you put together a little bundle of ingredients - we used rice noodles, fresh basil, shrimp, carrot and cucumber sliced in long matchsticks, and Chinese chives, a kind of green leafy plant similar to green onion but with a milder taste (sometimes called "garlic chives"). All of this was then bundled into the softened rice paper.

The Chinese style spring rolls were made using rice paper as well, stuffed with a mixture of chopped up ingredients that included mushroom, rice noodles, carrot, and cabbage. These were deep fried in a large pot until golden brown on all sides and crispy. 

Both kinds were served with chili garlic sauce and they both turned out amazing!

Vietnamese spring rolls, salad, Chinese fried spring rolls, and two types of chili sauce

Vietnamese Spring Rolls Recipe and Chinese Fried Spring Rolls Recipe, and chili garlic sauce recipe (Sichuan style), sweet chili garlic sauce recipe (may be better with spring rolls)

Chinese Sticky Rice Dumplings (Zongzi)

Bamboo leaves wrapped and tied around a sticky rice dumpling

It's a tradition to make these sticky rice snacks around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival (around May or June), although they can be made anytime. Guangxi is famous for its Dragon Boat Festival races in Guilin, and also has its own special kind of "zongzi" or sticky rice dumpling. There are many different options for shape, size, and ingredients, but I'll just describe the kind I made with my friend Sophie at her home last year. It was actually Sophie's first time making these as well, as it's an art that not many of the younger generation still practice in China (or so I've been told).

Anna trying her best to wrap zongzi

The rice should be soaked overnight, so it's a little soft but still raw. Then you put together the rice, beans (in our case we used Chinese "green peas", which I find similar to chickpeas and are actually yellow, but sweet red beans or black eyed peas can also be used), some peanuts if you like, and meat (we used pork rind, which I think is the most typical). You make a cone shape with the bamboo leaf, and stuff it with the filling, then proceed to do your best attempt at wrapping it. Once wrapped the trickiest part is tying it up with string to hold it all together. We wrapped them in a pyramid shape, which seems to be one of the most common styles, although in Guangxi a very long, rectangular shape is also common. Finally, the zongzi are placed in a rice cooker to cook or you could use boiling water. To eat, just carefully unwrap them (look out for steam) and eat the filling. Don't eat the bamboo leaf!

One more tip: if you're not into fatty meat, go for a leaner cut of pork rather than pork rind. 

Ingredients for zongzi: pork, "grean peas", rice with peanuts, plain rice

A finished dumpling being removed from the rice cooker

What the dumplings look like after being unwrapped

So tasty!

Guangxi Style Zongzi Recipe and Regional Differences of Zongzi Explained, also this video is a great tutorial on how to wrap and tie the pyramid shaped zongzi.