Kakadu

A wine dinner with friends, what's a better way to spend the evening I ask you?!  The Australian wine club (hmmm or was it the Australian club I wonder) had a lovely little dinner at Kakadu Restaurant with 3 wines, 3 courses and a yummy dessert.

Robyn and Rob on the left and Fiona and Matt on the right! And it seems I may be their token American friend.  OK, just kidding they have one other American friend! Both ladies are great and I enjoy their company immensely.  Echo Hill was the winery of the night.  We began with a Chardonnay and a pea soup with a large roasted scallop in the center.

The scallop was nice but the soup a bit bland for me.  I added what I thought was a nice swoosh of salt but it ended up being pepper, which was a good thing, as had that amount of salt fallen into my soup it would have been overdone! 

Next up a Shiraz and duck burritos - alright it was really called Roast Duck Crepes, far more elegant then my description.  Fortunately no matter what you call them, they were delicious.  But as a Hungarian is there any duck or pork dish that I don't like? 

 Here are my three wines and a water......as it was a Wednesday night I really had to take it easy on the wine part of the wine dinner.

 Third Course, another type of Shiraz with Lamb shanks and a cheesy polenta on the bottom, fantastic!

 Very clever dessert, a chocolate lava cake baked inside a coffee cup.

A wonderful evening!

Thanksgiving Tea at the Joint Insititute

 Preparing for the feast!

 This is Mr. Wu who promised to cook a turkey!

What a nice invitation to the faculty and staff - we were to come to the student center to enjoy some turkey, pie, cakes and snacks.

Of course it was Chinese style.  No pie, no snacks, no turkey.  But beautiful confections and chocolates as well as tea and soda were presented.

And a nice holiday "Chinese Turkey" a.k.a Ham. No condiments just a plate of ham.  I'm not complaining, pork is pork, what's not to love?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sunday morning on the street where I live....

I woke early, dressed and headed to my favorite breakfast street vendor - the guy who sells Jiang Bing - this translates to a what like to think is a Chinese breakfast burrito.  I have posted about these great foods http://surpriseshanghai.blogspot.com/2010/12/chinese-breakfast-burritos-again.html, here.  After a great breakfast I walked around the block and encountered these ladies, dancing their little hearts out!

The street was full of them, maybe 100? Maybe more.  You cannot see their faces but they are all over the age of 50.  Clearly retired.  I watched them and thought, are they practicing for some event?  Remember the 1,000+ beautiful 18 year old Chinese girls who performed in the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony?  I thought hmmmm, is there some other event coming up? Targeted to the seniors?

There was music playing on loud speakers and they were waving their fans and dancing around in a very organized fashion.  Clearly they had been rehearsing.

After about 15 minutes I decided to continue my walk and I found this sign.  I also began thinking, didn't I see this last year?  And the year before?  I was beginning to put it all together, this is an annual or perhaps even biannual event.  The Ladies Dancing in the Street Event. They even have an official sign, so it must be good and I assume sanctioned by the government.

Every Friday you can visit the Muslim Market

Excited about the prospect of going to the weekly Muslim market I headed out on my next marvelous adventure.  I imagined a wonderful street blocked off for several hours, 10a -2p to be exact, and lots of great things to eat and buy.   I had heard lovely things about the market from friends but perhaps I didn't listen carefully to the details as I was so enchanted with the idea of seeing something new and eating lamb prepared lots of interesting ways.

The market is set on a busy street on the sidewalk. It is about 400 feet long and is comprised of about 95% food items.  Raw meats and cooked.  As you can see below, a nice rack of hanging raw meat is for sale as cars, trucks and bikes go racing by.

Here is an interesting and totally unexpected 'tower of offal'. Yes, offal, I think it is the insides of  lamb but who knows could be beef definitely not pork.  See how nicely the links of  mystery meat sausage stack up on top of pure fat and the lovely large brown kidney perched delicately on the top.  And next to it a sort of meatloaf of mixed meats.  Various parts of this tower are sliced and then sauteed with rice and served for lunch.  Next please.

Beautiful nuts and dried fruits were available for sale and admittedly they looked tempting enough to buy. I didn't.  They had lovely raisins and dried cherry tomatoes.  I have had dried tomatoes in Singapore when visiting our friend Daniel and his wife last November.  They were served as pre-dinner nibbles with nuts and chips.  I think they are more of a dessert snack as they are very sweet, like candy, and very delicious.

The nut sellers were in traditional Uighur costume. The Uighur people come from the southwest of China and it is said that they are related to the Hungarians.  Too bad they don't cook food as nicely as the Hungarians.

Here is a HUGE block of sweets.  It's nuts and dried fruits pressed together with honey and sugar. It's $10.00 a pound and a small slice weighs about a pound as it is quite dense.  When you look at it you see a lot of walnuts, when you bite into it you taste a lot of peanuts.  Yes, I bought what I was hoping to be a small bit and ended up with a pound.   The walnuts were so tempting.  I do not like peanut butter and I do not really enjoy peanuts, although with a lot of salt I like peanuts.  Anyway, a big bust but I am glad I tried it.

This fellow was making small pockets of bread stuffed with lamb and cooked in a hot stone oven.  Now THAT looked good.

Fresh and hot!

And tasty!!

I did not try these,  lamb on a stick, as each stick is liberally laced with fat and it's very rich and greasy when cooked. I know this as I have eaten these before in another part of town. Do they really like the taste of the fat, perhaps more then the meat? I don't know.  They are good, I just didn't have the taste for it this morning.

Here is where you get dessert, shaved ice from the block, and sweet condensed milk and coconut on top. The preparation is a bit 18th century for me.

Lovely fried rice with carrots and lamb.

Another Offal Tower. It's very popular.

Steamed instead of baked, bread with lamb inside.

More grilled meats.

An interesting morning, I think I will go back when I have another hankering for some lamb!

Across the longest trans-oceanic bridge in the world!! Or.. Liz's Ningbo Furniture Trip.

I took this trip in March but neglected to post the details for all you hungry readers.

From Wikipedia :   At 35.673 km (22 mi) in length, Hangzhou Bay Bridge is the longest trans -oceanic bridge in the world, but it does not have the longest cable-stayed main span. It is also second in the world in overall length, with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the United States being 2.8  kilometers (1.9 miles) longer. Construction of the bridge was completed on June 14, 2007, and an opening ceremony was held on June 26, 2007 to great domestic media fanfare. But the bridge was not opened to public use until May 1, 2008 after a considerable period of testing and evaluation. The bridge shortened the highway travel distance between Ningbo and Shanghai from 400 km (249 mi) to 280 km (174 mi) and reduced travel time from 4 to 2.5 hours. Cost to build the bridge 11.8 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion).

Here is a map depicting the bridge.  You can imagine what the route use to be, quite circuitous.

It took us 2 hours to hit the outskirts of Ningbo where the furniture district is located. My friend Kate and I made the journey and we were advised to bring our own lunch and snacks as there wasn't any place to grab a bite.  We did find this one rest stop on the highway about 20 minutes from Ningbo.

Jason, our driver, waving below, he just loves going on these trips to see the new bridges or towns.  He is an enthusiatic adventurer.

And you could get a snack if you wanted........

We passed on the snacks and headed to the furniture factory. 

Some interesting outbuildings framed the court yard.

This is a small temple.

We browsed all 4 floors and it was a fairly dirty experience.  The prices were fair, but not super cheap.  $60 for a small wooden chair, $92 for a small bedside table, $190 for a small chest of drawers.  I know it may sound like a good deal to you but, since there is no guarantee as to what the furniture is made of and no guarantee as to whether it will last more then a few years due to potentially poor workmanship, poor materials, hazardous materials, if made of wood, wood could have bugs in it.  Once it gets to the states the  dry air could crack it open, etc, etc. The list goes on.  I know about these situations as I have friends who bought "good" furniture (at another shop), brought it back to the states and then the wooden top cracked open or separated from the base. The list goes on. 

We did not buy anything and I am pretty sure I will not be going back. I am however glad we did the trip. I had not seen my gal pal in ages so it was nice  to spend one on one time in the car happily chatting away the time.

A couple more food scares...yikes

Bullfrogs tested for cholera

BULLFROGS sold at Shanghai's biggest aquatic market were proved to be safe, the Shanghai Center of Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday.

Health authorities in neighboring Suzhou claimed they found some bullfrogs from Shanghai contained bacteria that can cause cholera.

Bull frog stew is very popular here so this could potentially be a big problem.
Watermelons

The latest shocker is exploding watermelons - they blow up because farmers spray too much growth-promoting chemicals. They're eager to get big melons to market early.

2011-6-13 Health tonic ban

2011-6-10
2 new lean pork drugs (this is poison) detected in checks

Waste Oil

THE Shanghai Food and Drug Administration yesterday issued a rule requiring local eateries not to use cooking oil for more than three days if they can't control the oil quality.

 A testing method for eateries using kitchen waste oil is expected to be launched in August.

The new steamer and steamed buns.

Yesterday I was doing a bit of grocery shopping at the local Carrefour and found myself wandering around in the kitchen tools department.  Carrefour is just like Walmart, 2 huge floors, one dedicated to food and the other to housewares, clothing, and other sundry things. 

I have been toying with the idea of buying a steamer pot with 2 or 3 tiers.  Currently I use this small steamer basket to steam veggies.

Which has been a faithful servant to me for 21 years, yes I bought that little steamer in 1990 when I moved into my first apartment in Danbury, CT!  But I think I have graduated to something more substantial, something that has "power".  Yes, could it be.... a power'ful' steamer!  So I came across this lovely 3 tiered steamer for the low sale price of 119RMB or $18.30.

 But wait there is a story behind this shopping experience, isn't there always? As I was perusing the steamers I noticed a large sign hanging in the aisle of the store indicated that one of the steamers cost 119 RMB. I found said steamer but noticed the shelf tag indicated it was 139 RMB. I double checked the bar code on the hanging sign and selected the box with the matching code on the shelf.  It was exactly the model I wanted!  And on sale! Woo hoo!

After doing a bit more shopping, getting laundry detergent, imported milk at $13.00 a gallon thank you very much. And other stuffs, I headed toward check out.  I intended to keep a sharp eye on the clerk as she rang up my items so that she entered the correct sale price.  Naturally, I loaded the steamer first on to the check out belt, huh? And she scanned it without me seeing what the price as I had been loading all my other goods on the belt.  Fortunately, after I paid, I stood at the end of the lane reading my receipt and what a surprise, she charged me the 139 RMB.  No problem, as one of the managers had been standing at the check out counter, staring at me, the foreigner with the blond hair and strange round eyes.  So I told her in my poor Chinese and my excellent sign language, that the receipt was incorrect and that the steamer should be 119 RMB not 139 RMB.  She pulled out her walkie talkie and SCREAMED into it for a price check.  That my friends is understood in any language!  After about 3 minutes she received a call back saying the shelf tag reads 139RMB.  So I indicated by waving my hands and then taking her hand in mine that we should go downstairs and have a look.  I didn't know how to say - the hanging sign in the aisle says 119 RMB - in Chinese. 

We went together and I pointed out the sign to her, told her that the bar code matches, and showed her on the receipt and she said - ok, lets get a refund.  Then she said something so fast that all I understood was that I would be getting 5 RMB back.  Which made no sense to me as the difference should be 20 RMB.  So I looked at her strangely and repeated back to her what I thought she said,  "only 5 RMB"? And she said no, no 100 RMB.  What?? WOW!! Apparently if you catch them in a mistake you get 100 RMB as a compensation.  So after some paper work - 2 different sets, I was handed 100RMB or $15.00. 

100 RMB sounds so much better doesn't it?

So this new lovely steamer now cost me 19 RMB or $2.92! Check it out!

Nice, huh!?  As I was excited to try out my new steamer I bought a load of steamed stuffed bread.  I have been eyeing this bread for about 2 1/2 years and have been sort of afraid to buy it and give it a try.  The mystery stuffing always made me uneasy whenever I was considering to buy it, so I never did. But with new steamer in hand and thoughts of using it immediately what better way then with some new and potentially interesting foods.

Five packages of steamed buns, each with a different filling.  How do I know they have different fillings?  Each bun is shaped differently.  In the back of the picture you will notice the buns are shaped like large leaves, to the left, a closed bun, to the right a bun with a hole on the top and something brown poking out. Forward left, what looks like a half moon  and in the front, again, a bun with a hole but it had an orange carrot slice peeking out. Each package cost 3 RMB or .46 cents.  The buns are about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, quite large. One would be plenty for lunch.  So, an investment of $2.30 for 10 buns.

I arrived home, totally excited to try the new foods and my new steamer.  After putting away the groceries I opened the box with the steamer and promptly dropped the lid on the floor breaking, yes, breaking part of the plastic handle. I was just too excited and not careful.  Geez.  I did manage to screw the remaining piece of the handle back on, a little loose but still functioning.  I know exactly where to buy a new top and I bet you that it will cost 100 RMB! I'll keep you posted.

I washed the steamer, loaded it with water and then loaded in the buns.

Unfortunately, the buns were a bit tall for the center part of the steamer, but the top part was deeper so I crowded them all in.

Steam gently for 15 minutes and then unload, cut open and discover the surprise inside.

In the back of the picture, the round bun with the open hole that had something brown peeking out was a sweet bean paste.  If you like sweet bean paste then it's pretty good.  I don't.

Left side was the closed top bun and was my favorite, can you guess, yup, pork bun. Not enough pork, but yummy.  It's a bit hard to see, but next to the pork bun, right side, the one that was shaped like a leaf, was a slightly spicy pickled vegetable and a type of collard green.  First bite was unusual but then I took second bite and thought, not bad.  I like the bit of heat and the bit of pickling or vinegar flavor.  I would not pick it again, but if I were hungry and someone handed me one I would eat it.  As you can see in the front left of the photo, it is a carrot and cabbage bun, a little greasy but a nice flavor.  After I bit into that one, I thought, this may be my favorite. And last, to the front right, half moon shaped,  was a green veg, tiny chopped fried bean curd(that has no flavor, it's fried protein) and a teeny tiny amount of pork.  I dislike the green veg that they put inside, it is quite strong in flavor. Missable.

And so the story ends.   I probably would not buy any of them again as it was too much bread to being with and truly none were delicious, it was just an interesting experiment.