Cooking with Chinese Characteristics

Last night a few of my students came over to my apartment to cook dinner. They were looking forward to each making a traditional Chinese dish and I had promised two American dishes to make up a sort of strange potluck. They brought over a ton of ingredients and then proceeded to ask me all of the English names for things. Anyone who has lived with me knows I am not a very avid cook, so when they pointed to some weird green vegetable I deferred to a Chinese-English dictionary. I learned they were making má là dòufu (spicy tofu), jīdàn hé xīhóngshì tāng (egg and tomato soup), jīdàn hé cōnghuā (scrambled eggs and scallions), and zhān jiǎozi (sticky dumplings).

The first order of business was to get my stove to work. I have never used it, mainly because it scares me to death. It is so old fashioned that there is no automatic ignition. Instead, you have to turn the gas on and then stick your hand dangerously close to the burner with a lighter until flames shoot up and/or your kitchen explodes in a ball of fire. Luckily, one of my students had experience with this at home and could do it without killing us all.

Lighting the stove

They quickly got to work: frying tomatoes, whisking eggs, chopping scallions (the green vegetable I could not identify), and mixing flour and sugar into dough. Hilarity ensued when they forced me to try and whisk eggs with chopsticks and I failed miserably. More hilarity ensued when in turn I forced them to try and whisk eggs with a fork. To me, cooking with chopsticks looks so inefficient, but they made it seem easy and ignored the spoons, forks, and knives I had laid out. As the cooking progressed, any idea that Chinese food might be healthy for me was quickly shot to hell as I observed how much oil they used in everything. And I thought American's loved fried food...

Carlon demonstrates whisking

And then forces me to try

Alice frying the eggs

while Jennifer chops tomatoes

and then fries them too

At this point, you may be wondering what I could possibly be making with the limited Western ingredients over here. Well, I was making spaghetti with marinara sauce and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Two of my culinary specialties, and sources of incredible wonder to my Chinese students who had never tried either. And let me tell you, they absolutely loved PB&J. It was by far the hit of the night, and they could not stop talking about it. One girl even called her mom to tell her about it right in the middle of the meal. It just goes to show that sometimes less is more. Too bad I only have a limited amount of peanut butter and am loathe to share it again.

Enjoying their PB&J sandwiches

Posing with the spicy tofu

Our completed dinner

Ready to eat!

When we finished dinner, I was a little disappointed because the sticky dumplings that the dough had been made for never appeared. It was not until clean-up that I was told sticky dumplings are not in fact dumplings as I was imagining, but instead a type of dessert. This dessert was extremely complicated to make because it involved sparring with an incredibly hot pan full of oil. Dozens of dough-balls were thrown in the pot at once and each could only be left in for a certain amount of time without overcooking them, so they were stirred and picked out quickly while trying to avoid getting scalded by flying drops of oil. But boy was it worth it. Sticky dumplings essentially tasted like fresh mini-donuts slathered in tons of sugar. We ate more dumplings than dinner, and by the end the girls pretty much had to roll out the door back to their dormitories. We have lots of flour and sugar left over, so since it has already been established I will not be lighting the stove and attempting to fight oil by myself, I'm looking forward to another round of stick dumpling cooking with them in the future!

Carefully adding the dumplings to the boiling oil, using the pan's lid as a shield

Sticky dumplings!