Flying Time Intermezzo: Philadelphia

Apologies for lightposting (again)! I hope I can make it up by starting this blog post with wonderful Chinese food.



Last weekend was time for our biweekly get together, this time in Philadelphia. Our only goal for this weekend was to have good food. We succeeded with flying colors. On Saturday evening we went to Barbuzzo (no pics), where inspired Mediterranean food was prepared with balls and love. We had wonderful trout, meatballs, acorn squash and bread pudding.

Then for breakfast the next morning, we went to Chinatown, specifically Heung Fa Chun Sweet House. We asked what was good, and got a soft tofu and a noodle dish. The soft tofu dish (first pic) was out of this world!



Then it was time for some mind food, so we visited the Rodin museum.

One more food pic: we then went to Bud & Marilyn, which is advertised as retro-American. This fried chicken was another big hit.



Another biweekly get together that worked out terrifically!

One Day in Frankfurt

We are back from Tyrol --- plenty of photos will follow soon. We made a stop in Frankfurt on our way back, to apply for a US visa, and to have some big city food, which we sometimes crave. We went to two Chinese restaurants, and one very special Frankfurt one (we will post about that one later).

Shui Zhu Yu (boiled fish served in chili oil) is one of those Chinese dishes that you don't expect to get a good version of, anywhere but in China. But lo and behold, in this small restaurant in Frankfurt, we found it! Real authentic flavors, and good, very fresh boiled fish --- an absolute delight!



We also had some fried tofu, and some cabbage, which were quite good too.



Highly recommended: Restaurant Jade on Moselstraße, close to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.

Great Beijing Food

Amanda then took us to her other new favorite restaurant: Meizhou Dongpo.



And, of course, this was an excellent choice.



The main attraction was the dongporou, pictured above: perfect texture, wonderful flavors, and as an added bonus, a little spiciness.



So good in fact, that it warrants two photos.

The other dishes (dongpo sausage, soup with a special vegetable, these vegetables with some tofu, and the tofu below) were excellent as well. But the dongporou was in a league of its own.



Here is were the magic happened:

Non Beijing Foodz

Here are some foodz we ate before taking the night train back to Beijing. First of all, this wonderful lamb. Sadly enough, we were scammed and had to pay as if this were a full portion. Any fool can see that this is only a half portion, just like we ordered.



Our lunch before taking the train consisted of this sweet (and a little sour, but mostly sweet) pork...



... some special vegetables, that A really liked (it tasted like licking the trunk of a tree to me)...

... and some sizzling tofu, that the waiters were hesitant to take the cover of.

Icicles and Eggplant

After quite a nice walk in the forests in the neighborhood, we made Chinese food.



More care was used in preparing the food, than in photographing it --- it tasted quite good.

Best Dinner Redux

After a disappointing dinner of okonomiyaki, we went back to the best restaurant we found so far in Kyoto --- and had another great dinner.

Besides wonderfully fresh fish, we also had agedashi tofu:



But the fish really is the highlight of this restaurant (called Anji).



Highly recommended!

Laksa with Barbecued Chicken

The barbecued chicken gave the laksa an interesting additional flavor. Not too bad.

Eurovision Foodz

Before indulging in the ancient European tradition of listening to bad songs, badly performed by second rate artists, also known as the Eurovision Song Contest, we made a wonderful laksa!

High tech and hip as we are, we not only watched it on the intertoobz, but also simultaneously followed the twitter hash tag #eurovision. We could thus enjoy gems like: "#Eurovision And here's Italy with 'Fuck This Shit'. They could've at least done a song called 'Bunga Bunga'" and "If I wasn't depressed before, I am now. Merci France. #Eurovision".

Meanwhile, team Hilvaria Studio's has no idea how close F was to adding "eurovisie" to the list of query words of their AdWords campaign, with an advertisement "Kom morgen gezellig napraten over het songfestival in ons illegaal partycentrum."

The winner turned out to be a slight deception, which is not surprising after so much excitement. Hence a video, not of the winning song by Azerbaijan, but of Armenia's entry last year about a peach pit, which I like a lot better.

Tofu on Rice

Simple and delicious.

Ellen Cooks

Ok, actually Ellen cooking is not a very uncommon thing. Ellen and F took a Chinese cooking class with HutongCuisine! We got up early and took a cab towards the center of Beijing.



There we met up with Chunyi Zhou, the teacher, and 4 other participants of the cooking class and went shopping in the market. Chunyi explained how to distinguish between good and bad Sichuan peppers (you really only want the pods, not the seeds, and the pods should be red), what lettuce root was, that one uses pork skin to make xiaolongbao, what kind of sauce one uses for zhajiangmian, and other such trivia which made us feel that we might be able to actually make our own Chinese food.

Next we got a crash course in seasonings: what to buy and when to use what. To summarize: light soy sauce for flavor, dark soy sauce for color. Dark soy sauce only when the other foodz have strong flavors, like meat. With vegetables, fish and chicken only use light soy sauce. With stronger flavored foodz use both. I already forgot when to use vinegar, but it should be aged Shanxi vinegar, or Zhenjiang vinegar. Use yellow wine to get rid of bad flavors in meatz. Finally for cooking use peanut oil, corn oil, canola oil or sunflower oil and finish each dish with a dash of sesame oil (it seems).

We were then deemed ready to start chopping, and were then allowed inside the kitchen.



We got a demonstration of how to make dry stir fried green beans, and next could try our own hand at making them:



Our class was the "vegetarian menu", so the ground pork in every dish was optional.

Next up was tofu, of course:





Ellen made this very nice and moist jia chang doufu:



whereas F just caught abuse from the teacher for his five spices doufu when he poured on a little too much sesame oil ("it's ruined anyway, too much of everything!"):



Our teacher also demonstrated hot and sour soup and stirfry celery and lily bulb, and then it was time to call it a day. I guess we are now ready to dazzle the world with our Chinese cuisine knowledge.

Finally a picture of a beautifully sculptured arch in the courtyard where the cooking class was held.

We ate again

Don't forget to help choose A's dress for tomorrow by leaving a comment here.

This blog is about food. Here are some actual honest-to-goodness food pictures in case you forgot:

Datong Food

We went on a road trip this weekend. We found that a provincial city called Datong has restaurants that rival Beijing's restaurants.

Some nice tofu:



Some nice little leglets of lamb:



The fact that the fish in this pot still contained bones made them a little bit hard to eat, but they were very very tasty:



These tamalesesque little packets of cornmeal filled with something that seemed to be mushrooms (not sure about this) were Anke's favorite of this meal:



Besides the food, Datong actually seemed to be uglier and more polluted than Beijing. We are happy to report, however, that we found a supermarket in Datong, where the only non-Chinese beer sold is Pabst Blue Ribbon! I guess there is no accounting for taste.

On the road: Lunch

On Friday we rented a car to make our grand tour through China (ok, we barely made it out of Beijing district). We started our trip by going toward Jinshanling. On the way we had lunch at a random place that turned out to be a good choice.