Sichuanese Dishes without Chinese Ingredients

I've been a fan of Fuschia Dunlop's since I met a couple who lived for a year or so in China. We went over their house and they made a Sichuanese hotpot for us (I think they used Dunlop p347 as a guide, but since they lived there I suppose they might've been doing their own thing,) in a beautifully crafted Chinese copper brazier. The meal was remarkable (this couple also made Ethiopian food for us, and homemade Gouda cheese... both of these were also exquisite.)



Anyway so during the Sichuanese hotpot evening, I asked the wife which Chinese cookbook she recommended, and she recommended Fuschia Dunlop, so I bought it. And I was converted to Sichuanese food, or maybe just Dunlop's food.

Many things aren't exactly fast or easy in Dunlop, but some things are. But I worked on Dunlop and I gained some skills in Chinese food. And one thing is that Chinese food is the most fun food to make of any cuisine, in my opinion.

Now I started learning to cook when I was finishing my Ph.D. at UCLA.. Actually perhaps I had tried a few dishes before that, out of the Moosewood cookbook, which I haven't used for years, if you know what I mean.... So when I decided I wanted to stop eating out all the time and start cooking, I wanted to learn from some time-tested books. And so I bought 2 books, one was Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, and the other was Marcella Hazan's The Essentials of Classic Italian Cuisine

(I'd been to Italy a number of times and remain a devotee of the country, the cuisine, the people, the architecture, the art, the history, the churches, the ruins, the gelato, the culture, the lifestyle.) Pepin was good, I used him to buy a few tools in the beginning (see my 1st post), and to learn a few basic things.

Marcella Hazan taught me to cook.

Since then I've collected a lot of cookbooks, read what's good and what's bad in cookbooks. Dunlop is a good cookbook, one of the best. Sichuanese cooking isn't hard, but you do need one skill that I didn't have as a beginner --- reading the entire recipe, preparing all the steps in advance, and being ready. You need this skill particularly when you're cooking Sichuanese, because once you're done with the prep, and your stove is on, and the oil is starting to smoke in your wok, everything happens very, very, very quickly. And that's what's fun about it.

So I made a bunch of dishes. Here's a simple, fast easy one, which isn't from Dunlop but was taught to me by the husband from the couple mentioned above.

Chinese Fried Rice

Prepare 1C rice. (I make Thai jasmine rice when I cook Chinese, it's what I find at my Chinese grocery so I suppose it's what they eat there.)

Meanwhile, chop 2 green onions, 1/2" ginger, and 2 cloves garlic. Beat 2 eggs with some salt. Now heat your wok with some peanut oil, superhot, just until it starts smoking. (If you don't have a wok, use a large pan that as much of rice can fit in as possible.) Throw the eggs in, they will fry and cook very quickly, slide them out. Heat some more oil, add ginger, then the rice. Mix and coat the rice with the oil, then cut in the egg, then toss in the green onions, and salt.

Anyway, now, my wife has barred me from making Chinese food because of the melamine thing. Now it's understandable --- but Chinese food is so much fun to make. So I'm going to go through the recipes in Dunlop and list which ones can be made with non-Chinese ingredients. Here's my list so far.

No Chinese Ingredients

• Sea Flavor Noodles p93
  
• Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers p96
  
• Mr. Lai's Sticky Rice Balls with Sesame Stuffing p97
• ZHONG dumplings! p102 (these are a culinary masterpiece)
  
• "long" wonton dumplings p104
  
• steamed pork and pumpkin dumplings
  
• steamed pork and cabbage dumplings
  

Yacai Only (Yacai is a Chinese ingredient, but it's only 1)

• Dan Dan Noodles p88,
  
• Mr. Xie Beef Dan Dan Noodles p89,
  
• Yibin Kindling Noodles p91,
  
• Spicy Noodles with Soft Tofu p92
  
• Leaf-wrapped Sticky Rice Dumplings

(I changed Dunlop's titles from using the word glutinous to using the word sticky. The etymology of the word glutinous is that it comes from the word gluten which is related to the word glue. Hence glutinous rice can be thought of as related to gluey rice --- but that's problematic for a different reason, so I went with sticky rice, which is another common translation. But sticky has a different etymology --- people used sticks to 'stick' things to other things...)

The Zen of Dishes

Cooking is well and good, but when I started out, I hated doing dishes. That was one of the big draws to eating out, in a way, was that you just go, pick something, someone brings it out prepared, you eat and pay and that's it. No dishes. When you eat at home, though, there's a big pile of dishes. The pile is so big, sometimes it's hard to know how it got that big. What to do?

Well there's a few things. Mostly one has to look at dishes from a philosophical perspective. When they're there and you have to do them, and you'd rather do something else, they don't just go away. In fact, for me, when they're sitting there, they cause more trouble than washing them. I hate having dirty dishes sitting in the sink.

I read Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain a few years back



it's a blast --- anyone who likes cooking should read it. He talks about a restaurant where the head chef came by where a junior chef was cooking and the station was not immaculate. The head chef pressed his palm into the crumbs or whatever was on the station, then held his palm up to the junior chef and said ``this is your mind.'' Which sums it up exactly. Another quote that comes to me is Glenn Gould, who said that you don't play the piano with your fingers, you play it with your mind..

So anyway, how clean my kitchen is reflects how my mind is working. If there's something messy there, then as I cook, I don't have time to think about what's different about this mess in a split second when I need to move something, and what ends up happening is that the small mess causes a bigger mess and more work. Whereas if I clean up whatever it is right away, the kitchen is ready for whatever might come up, everything is where it needs to be if I need something immediately. It's a tool thats ready to go. Rather than mess-ups cascading on each other, I can save something in an instant.

But enough about saving things. It always has to happen, but we strive to read the recipe beforehand and know what's coming and what to expect. So dishes.

Now there's a professor down the hall from me who studies Eastern Philosophy --- I teach math. I asked him once why it's important to teach math to students. He said the only thing that matters, for example when a student is doing a calculus problem, is the moment when the student is absorbed in the math, when they are living math for a minute or for half an hour. In that half-hour, their mind is in a single state. There's no stress, there's no worries, there's flow. It's a rare thing and a pleasurable thing.

When I do dishes, there's a flow. It doesn't have to be a new, fascinating dish, a new ingredient, an amazing novel, a great movie, a beautiful piece of music. Now when I started doing dishes, it was cumbersome, messy. It took a few weeks before I did dishes without thinking about this new cumbersome chore. Now I just do them. It's part of my life.

Overall, I think cooking and doing dishes is faster than going out. I cook better than stuff I can afford to buy (I had an awful hotdog recently.) And it's not unpleasant once I started doing it regularly.