Tag Archives: China

Rice Noodle Soup for Mother’s Day

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Soup and sandwiches were on the menu for Mother’s Day brunch with my family yesterday, but the soup wasn’t your typical American Sunday fare. We opted to have the Rice Noodle Soup from Simply Yunnan to celebrate the day (see recipe below).

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Rice Noodle Soup

We met at my cousin Karen’s house and celebrated with my mom and my aunt — an admirable group of mothers who have made an impact on my life for years and continue to do so as I adjust to my new life as a (step)mom. Karen did a delicious job with the Rice Noodle Soup. For the greens she used rainbow chard from our latest vegetable co-op shipment, and I brought over some cooked chicken from my freezer to contribute as our meat option.

The soup is light yet flavorful, and rice noodles are a perfect wheat-free option for those on special diets. The recipe below is featured in my cookbook, Simply Yunnan: Simple Ingredients, Simple Technique, available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle version.

I love to make the soup after I’ve cooked a whole chicken in my crock pot and have let the bones simmer overnight for a hearty, healthful broth — one chicken provides several meals worth of cooked chicken and several cups worth of broth. For more information on how to cook a whole chicken and make bone broth, check out my friend Roxie’s recipe on her blog, Crunchy in the Panhandle (the West Virginia panhandle, not the Texas one). Side note that brings the crock pot chicken back to Yunnan — Roxie first showed me how to cook a chicken this way in her kitchen in Kunming. From Kunming to West Virginia to Texas, it’s my favorite way to get the most bang for my buck when cooking a whole chicken.

I hope you enjoy a bowl of Rice Noodle Soup soon!

Rice Noodle Soup

Serves 4

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 35 minutes

12 oz. rice noodles (usually labelled as “rice stick” or “rice vermicelli”)

10 c. water

10 c. beef or chicken stock

1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and crushed with the flat side of a cleaver blade

3 whole star anise

2 whole cloves

salt to taste

1 to 1 1/2 c. cooked meat (beef or chicken, depending on which type of stock you use), thinly sliced

1 c. cabbage or spinach, cut in 2-inch pieces

2 spring onions, cut in 1-inch strips

chopped cilantro, red pepper flakes, soy sauce, vinegar for seasoning

 

In a large stock pot, bring the meat stock to a boil over medium-high heat, along with the ginger, star anise, and cloves. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the ginger, star anise, and cloves from the soup. Add the meat slices and simmer for 2 minutes. Add the cabbage or spinach and spring onions and simmer for 3 minutes.

During the final 10 minutes of cooking the soup, prepare the rice noodles. In a large pot, bring 10 c. water to a boil over medium-high heat. Add the rice noodles, reduce heat to medium, and boil the noodles for 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and allow the noodles to continue soaking in the hot water for another 4 to 5 minutes. Alternatively, prepare the noodles according to the package’s instructions. Drain the water from the noodles.

Divide the noodles evenly into 4 large soup bowls. Ladle equal amounts of soup with meat, onions, and leafy vegetables over the noodles in each bowl. Allow each person to add cilantro, red pepper flakes, soy sauce, and vinegar according to his or her own taste.

Shopping note:

This noodle soup is best prepared using a type of thin, round rice noodle usually labeled in English as “rice stick” or “rice vermicelli” and found at Asian markets or on the Asian aisle at your grocery store.

Preparation note:

Plan to make this soup when you have leftover cooked meat that you can thinly slice; choose to make the soup with beef or chicken stock according to the type of meat you have leftover.

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Dumplings for Chinese New Year

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Chinese New Year is January 23 this year, and since I’ll be in Texas doing research at that time, I decided to celebrate a little early with my friends here in Washington. We’re entering into the Year of the Dragon, the year I was born in, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a ton of food and a pot of eight treasures tea and enjoy the evening with my friends. The celebration was a bit inauthenthic in that we didn’t set off a barrage of firecrackers outside the neighbors’ doors, but hey, we’re within city limits in the U.S., what do you expect?

When I made nacatamales with my friends for Christmas Eve a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been wanting to teach them how to make dumplings. You can buy them frozen at Costco or wherever, and they’re really pretty good — but I still have a mental block that assures me anything I buy in a bag from the freezer section can’t be as good as what I make from scratch. It just can’t be. Yes, it’s time consuming and labor intensive to put together 120 dumplings for a dinner party, but what’s a little time spent in the afternoon compared to the yumminess of homemade dumplings?

Here we are, filling the wrappers. You can buy packages of the wrappers at the grocery store, usually in the section where you’ll find tofu. If I were a good little Chinese grandma (which I’m not, on several counts), I would roll out my own wrappers from flour and water. But that would be just silly.

We made dumplings with two different fillings: pork and cabbage in one, beef and carrot in the other. The filling also has all sorts of other wonderful ingredients, like garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and scallions. A small spoonful of filling is lovingly nestled in the center of each wrapper, before the edges are sealed and the tiny pocket of deliciousness is tucked in its spot in the row to await the pot, where it will fulfill its dumpling destiny.

Some of the dumplings went into a large soup pot. Once the water comes to a boil, you put several dumplings in, bring the water back to a boil, and then cool the water off again by adding a cup of cold water. You bring the water to a boil again, add more cold water, boil, add cold water, and by the third time the water comes back to a boil, they should be done. Adding cold water keeps the outside of the dumpling from cooking faster than the inside, which would result in a tough wrapper.

We also did a few dumplings in true potsticker style by pan frying them. It’s a less healthy cooking method, for sure, but who doesn’t enjoy a little oil now and then?

Thank you, Jane and Andy, for letting me take over your kitchen to make dumplings! (Jane and Andy aren’t in this photo, but this is their table and place settings with our dumpling feast.)

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Lament for a Town that No Longer Is

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Jinghong has changed. China changes quickly, so I knew to expect this when I went to visit friends in Jinghong earlier this month. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The area is less Sipsongpanna and more Xishuangbanna with each passing minute.

The Jinghong landscape now looks like any other Chinese town, with high-rise apartment buildings stretching for miles. I’ve only been gone a little less than two years — how does this happen so fast? I moved into an apartment two blocks from the Mekong River in 2006, mainly because I loved the quiet of a garden right on the riverbank where I could run and look at the water and listen to the birds and frogs in the early morning. By the time I came back from a visit to the States in 2008, the garden was gone, replaced with a new sidewalk and the shell of plans for new construction. Now, on either side of the newest bridge across the river stretch shops, restaurants, bars, and apartments. All covered in neon lights at night. The friend traveling with me commented that it reminded her of Disneyland. I was thinking Las Vegas. Either way, it is not the quiet Mekong River area I used to enjoy each morning. For that you will need to go south to Laos or Cambodia, I suppose.

Areas further from the river are just as bad. Sections of land that were once wide open fields for rice and other crops, dotted with villages of Dai wooden stilt homes, are now filled with 5-star hotels, shops, and an expo center (that is used for an event approximately once a year, thus far). Two-story shop buildings sell for $1 million US dollars. In a town where I paid about $100 monthly rent for a 3-bedroom apartment just three years ago. So far most of the new high-rise apartments are empty, though many of the units have been sold to investors from northern and eastern provinces. People who have never been to Yunnan, never visited Jinghong, have no idea what they have purchased in the form of real estate in Jinghong, and no notion of the true cost of their real estate “investment.”

Don’t get me started on the traffic problems caused by hundreds of new drivers who are used to getting around town on motorbikes and electric scooters. Car ownership is not inherently a good step forward — not when you’re talking about a small town with small roads and hundreds of thousands of people.

The clean fresh air that Yunnan is famous for is now dusty with construction and smoggy with exhaust in Jinghong. It could be any other town in China with a population of a few hundred thousand people, except for the facade of Dai architecture that the Han hope to capitalize on. Capitalize. A market freer than ever, while speech is still held captive. I scribbled this out in the Beijing airport on my way home, but was unable to post until I returned to the US, where Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube aren’t blocked.

Though I was perturbed by the blocked websites out of principle, I enjoyed the forced vacation from social media (only because it was temporary and not a regular imposition in my life) and felt like I had a more in-the-moment kind of trip since I couldn’t post and interact with people not directly in front of me. Still, at times my mind forms status updates, even when I’m not able to post them:

* 41 hours after the start of our 3.5 hour layover in Beijing, we were finally able to take off for Yunnan. Hundreds of flights cancelled due to fog, thousands of passengers stranded at the airport. You always think “It will never happen to me” — but sometimes it does.

* In my pocket are a few small green coffee beans from the trees on B Mountain – the first-fruits of the seedlings planted after the truck flipped during their transport (with me and three co-workers in it). Many emotions involved.

* The coffee roaster has made it to the cafe at last!

* Today I held a 7-week-old baby with one arm while using chopsticks to eat potstickers with the other hand. A latent talent revealed.

* I lost count of the mosquito bites I got while I was asleep each night of this trip, but the grand total of spider bites (or, more accurately, unidentified-Mekong-River-jungle-area-creature bites) while sleeping is 1.

You can build as many high-rise apartments as you want, but the jungle creatures will still find their way indoors at night.

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Trip to Yunnan

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Fall of 2006, Yunnan, China. My niece in Connecticut was 18 months old, and I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again until she was almost 3. I missed the rest of my family, too — I was feeling the strain of being away for so many months on end. Part of being a sojourner on this earth (going where God leads when He leads, because nowhere on this earth is my home so much as His kingdom is) means going long stretches separated from dear ones.

It was inconvenient timing for a trip to the U.S. — work was busy, it’s expensive to travel at the holidays, and I was tired just thinking of adding another trip to my work travel schedule. But I needed to see family, to spend time together reconnecting and being rejuvenated in the bonds of love.

Fall of 2011, Kennewick, Washington. I’ve been away from Yunnan for 18 months. I can’t bear the thought of it being two or three years since I’ve seen friends in Xishuangbanna, since I’ve walked with them on the Mountain, since I’ve sat and had a good laugh and a cry with Lydia. It’s an inconvenient time to go — work is busy, it’s expensive to travel to China, and I’m tired just thinking of adding another trip to my work travel schedule. But I need to see my Yunnan family, to spend time with them reconnecting and being rejuvenated in the bonds of love.

So I’m going to China for a two week visit. Internet monitoring and blocked websites in China being what they are, I won’t post here or on Facebook until I return the week before Christmas.

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Training in U.S. vs in China

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I’m 5 days away from my second half-marathon, and with all the hours I’ve been running lately I can’t help but think of how different it is to train for a race in the U.S. than it was to train in China.

In China, I lived in the tropics, so I had to contend with rainy season and try to work in my runs when the clouds looked just right — still didn’t stop me from getting caught in a downpour at times. Here in the Tri-Cities, we’re in the middle of a desert, and people are constantly running their sprinklers and watering the sidewalks. Depending on the temperature and time of day, I either dodge the sprinklers (55 degrees at 7am is a bit chilly to get soaked) or I run through them to cool off.

In rural China where I lived, very few people ran along the streets. In the early morning or evening, elderly folks might go out to exercise, but usually they would run backwards and/or whirl their arms like a prop plane while exercising. Sometimes soldiers would run in ranks in the street, so a lot of people associate running with the military. Because of that, along with the ubiquitous stares and shouts of “hallooooo,” I would sometimes get jokers who would yell at me like they were counting my steps, “Yi, yi, yi er yi.” Here, no one stares or shouts. I take that back — no one shouts, and if anyone stares, it’s not because I’m white.

Other differences might actually be more related to doing a different job and having a different schedule. I’m still contending with working around a travel schedule while trying to keep to a training schedule, though. In China, I would have to count various activities as cross training when I was out of pocket and couldn’t sneak in my long runs — like hiking in the jungle in Laos or biking several miles to villages. For this race, my cross training has included hiking in Idaho and carrying my 50+ pound niece uphill on my back in downtown Seattle (I’m nominating myself for Aunt of the Year for that one).

I’ll leave you with a blurb I came across in an old blog post about a race sponsored by Mountain Cafe a couple of years back, a 10k that our language helper Adam joined us for. Another difference between running in rural China and America — not everyone can just go out and buy new shoes to train for a race, and when it comes down to it, it’s the runner, not the gear, that makes the difference.

“Adam made a good showing by getting second place among the men, despite having shoe issues before the race. He didn’t have shoes appropriate for running, so a teammate gave him a pair of his runners that were a couple of sizes too big. Obviously, those weren’t ideal, so another teammate let him try a pair of hers that ended up being a half size too small. I gave him a pair of mine to test out before the race, and Goldilocks/Adam decided that pair fit him just right.

On race day, I didn’t come close to finishing in the top three among the women, but my shoes placed second among the men. (For the record, I wear a size 8, which is average for an American woman. Apparently, it’s also average for village men in SE Asia.)”

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My Only Sports Blog

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I can give you a 99.9% guarantee that this is the only post about sports you’ll ever read on my blog.  Wait, let me rephrase that.  In the past I have posted on my blog about running (here and here), but I have never written or posted anything about watching sports, specific sporting events, specific athletes or teams or coaches.  The 99.9% guarantee applies to all sports except my own personal involvement in running.

So this is it, get ready, here’s my sports blog.

That was me you might have heard yesterday screaming in my car as I drove up I-35 from one appointment to the next, when Landon Donovan scored for USA against Algeria, helping our team win the group and advance in the World Cup.  I was listening on the radio in my car.  This is not an ordinary event for me, listening to games on the car radio.  I just don’t do that.

I also don’t normally care about college football.  But after traveling for a couple of weeks in Laos this past Christmas with a friend from Alabama, for whom the BCS championship game between Alabama and Texas was a really, really big deal, I found myself up early in the morning on the day of the game, glued to my computer screen, fighting my slow internet connection in China and compulsively hitting the “refresh” button to get the latest details.  I don’t like UT.  And I didn’t particularly care if they won or lost.  But I wanted to know what happened.

Nor have I ever really cared about college basketball.  Two years ago a friend invited me to fill out an online bracket before the NCAA men’s tournament, and I picked all Big 12 teams or schools I attended as far as I could—Baylor and UT-Arlington both were in that tournament, how could I not be true to my school on my bracket?  I really didn’t care if I lost the bracket.  This year, though, it was different.  This year Baylor made it to the Elite Eight and played Duke at 5:00 in the morning, China time.  On the morning I was leaving China for the States.  I actually got up to watch a basketball game at 5:00 in the morning, knowing that I had three flights and a day and a half of travel ahead of me.

Baylor lost, and I got over it.  I am definitely not one to pin my mood on whether a team wins or loses.  The facts, however, are undeniable.  I have now on three occasions in recent history tuned in via internet or radio to follow a game.  And not for social reasons—no one else was present on any of these occasions.

I don’t know what has become of me.  I don’t know how long this will last.  My guess is it will last at least until the World Cup ends on July 11.  After that, who knows.

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Over and Out

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Immigration officials on the Lao border stamped my passport with one last re-entry to China, and I’m down to about four weeks before heading to Texas. I don’t want to have a public countdown of the days, either here on my blog or on Facebook—nor do I feel compelled to bore you over the next four weeks with reports like “Today I gave away my couch.”

So I’m signing off this China blog. I’ve posted all my thoughts on leaving that are worth posting, and I don’t want to wear out my welcome in your newsfeed. I’m grateful to all of you who have supported and encouraged me over the years by regularly checking and commenting on my website, first with my photos and my amateur stab at podcasting, and later with this blog. It’s been a great outlet for me to share about life and work, and I hope it’s been a help to you, too.

From April until some time in the summer I’ll mostly be in Texas, with visits to family and friends in North Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Oklahoma, and elsewhere along the way. I’ve worked on most of the book research with Lydia in hours here and there over the past few months and will continue to develop the project as I visit folks in the spring—but writing in earnest will begin this summer. My current plan, God willing, is to spend a year with friends in Alaska and Washington. We’ll see how it all unfolds.

I hope to resume blogging once I get semi-settled somewhere this summer. But for now, find me by e-mail or Facebook. Zai jian.

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Reflecting on “If”

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Final entry in the series…

We will be a blessing to them, they will be a blessing to us—that’s what serving others looks like, and everybody involved feels great in the end. Or at least that’s what I thought on my first visit to China, over ten years ago now. And ideally, it’s still how I would like the world to work, though I see now that the reality of serving others is not that simplistic.

During that long ago trip, I went with a group to volunteer in an orphanage for the morning. I anticipated holding babies, feeding them, playing with them, caring for them, showing them love. And I was in the middle of doing all that when one of the older boys from the orphanage came to where I stood along the row of cribs and pulled on my sleeve. I finished feeding the baby in front of me and followed him down the hall to a narrow room with one child-sized bed in it. Seated there on the floor, tied with a piece of twine to the leg of the bed, was a toddler.

Shaking off my shock, I went to the little boy and stooped down to him. The twine was wrapped tightly around his waist, his arms and legs left free to move. I couldn’t untie the knot and needed to go find a pair of scissors. I said as much to the little guy in English, not knowing any Chinese at the time. But as I stood to leave the room, panic flashed across his face, and he grabbed at my feet, clenching my shoelaces, sobbing. He didn’t know that I had just said to him, “I will be right back”—all he knew was he didn’t want to be left alone.

I sank to the floor and cradled his head and arms across my lap. Motioning with improvised sign language, I sent the older boy for help. While we waited for him to return, I stroked the little one’s head, speaking comfort to him in a language he didn’t understand. He clung to my legs and shuddered as he cried.

The older boy came back with help, and the twine was soon cut loose from the toddler’s waist. After he was freed, I reached out to pick him up and hug him close—but instead of climbing into my arms, he pushed me away, refusing to let me hold him. Then he was whisked off, and I didn’t see him again.

I was crushed. That’s not what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to let me hold him and love him, and both of us would feel better. Why would he push me away? The first verse of a sad song that has played itself for years, always with the same refrain.

People desperately need help, and we desperately want to give them the love that we have experienced. Having known that love so deeply ourselves, we struggle to understand how, sometimes, people can look straight in the face of goodness, acknowledge that Jesus is good—and still not want anything to do with Him or us.

Amy Carmichael’s booklet If is a series of meditations on “Calvary love” written for her coworkers in India. I pull it out and reread it from time to time, and one verse has stood out in recent days as I think back on several people in particular from my years in China.

If in dealing with one who does not respond,
I weary of the strain, and slip from under the burden,
then I know nothing of Calvary love.

May my love and service for others always be fueled by a love for Christ, by an understanding deep within me of what He did on the cross. Then, at the end of the day, whether those around me respond with loving acceptance in return, or whether they shrug me off indifferently, still I will know I have loved well and done what is pleasing to God.

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A Few Cooking Resources

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As a follow-up to the story I posted yesterday about learning to cook while in China, I thought I should mention a few of my more commonly used resources. I found myself wanting to mention them in the previous post, but decided not to interrupt the flow of the story by including too many details.

For breads and cakes, I have worn out my Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook. I learned a while back that if you can start to get a feel for the right proportions of dry and wet ingredients in a recipe, you can adapt it to your own flavor preferences, and this standard cookbook has some solid, basic recipes that I’ve tweaked over and over again to make breads and cakes with my own flair. Betty Crocker is also where I tend to turn for basic information about meat and vegetable preparation—it’s just a solid resource book.

A few years back, a roommate introduced me to More-with-Less Cookbook, by Doris Janzen Longacre. For someone living overseas, this book is a must. So many simple, yet delicious recipes. I love that the recipes don’t start with a can of cream of mushroom soup or a block of Velveeta or any number of other American recipe staples that I can’t get here (and really shouldn’t be eating on a regular basis in America, anyway).

My favorite online resource is allrecipes.com, in large part because of its ingredients search function. I can search for recipes that include ingredients that I have on hand, as well as excluding ingredients that aren’t available to me—a big deal if I’m trying to find a recipe that, say, uses cocoa powder instead of baking chocolate. And, again, if you get a feel for how to use the right proportions, this site is a good place to read through several similar recipes for ideas and then strike out on your own.

Several people have asked me over the years about writing up some local recipes, and I just haven’t had time to do it in addition to my other work (with the exception of a blog entry I posted last year of Lydia’s mom’s steamed fish). Chinese cookbooks abound, if you’re in the mood for Cantonese or Sichuan or some of the more popular cuisines. But recipes from Yunnan are a bit more hard to come by, so I was quite excited when a friend gave me a recently published cookbook called A Taste of Shan by Page Bingham, with recipes from the Shan State in northern Myanmar, just across the border from where I live. The Shan of Myanmar have ethnic (and therefore, culinary) ties with the Dai of China, so this book will be a treasure to me in days to come, when I need to whip up something to remind me of southern Yunnan.

(Thanks, Emily, for More-with-Less, and thank you, Erin, for A Taste of Shan.)

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”What to do with our talents”

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Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

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In college, I cooked with a coffee maker. I cooked a lot of coffee, but I also cooked a lot of hot water for instant oatmeal and ramen noodles in my dorm room. On days when I was feeling exceptionally adventurous on a culinary level, I might make Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the kitchen on our hall.

To me, the epitome of being a grown-up was cooking. So when I moved from the dorm to an apartment for my last semester at school, I made the grown-up purchase of a rice cooker that would also steam vegetables. I couldn’t have known at the time that those were the forerunner of many meals to come for me—I was just thrilled to fix dinners that required something slightly more involved than dissolving packets in boiling water.

My first few years in China were marked by suitcases and care packages full of cake mixes and Martha White muffins. Man, I love Martha White. Just add milk and you’ve got muffins in 20 minutes. Eventually I realized that I could bake a much greater variety of breads and cakes, as well as never run out of ingredients, if I went local. Flour, sugar, yeast, baking powder, salt, butter–all of these can be purchased locally, so why not begin experimenting with baking from scratch? My first attempts weren’t very successful (i.e. appetizing) because Kunming and Lincang are both at high altitude, but by the time I got to low-lying Jinghong I could make a batch of muffins using only local ingredients and fresh fruit in just a few minutes more than it would take to mix up a package of Martha White.

In due time, entrees followed. With a crock pot and a wok, a world of endless possibilities opened up right there in my kitchen. I began using fresh ingredients to make spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup, chicken curry, and other standards that now populate my repertoire, including my own fried rice that I find tastier (and less oily) than a lot of what I can buy on the street.

My proudest achievement, I must say, has been to make enchiladas completely from scratch, including rolling out the tortillas, peeling and boiling tomatoes for the sauce, cooking and shredding the chicken. It’s an all-day affair, and I’ve only done it a handful of times, but it is worth it. Totally worth it.

When I look back at my progression in China from a box of mac and cheese mixed with a can of Rotel mailed from home to chicken enchiladas with my own tomato sauce, I can do so with a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to learn these skills. Preparing a meal and serving it to guests brings me satisfaction, and I’m not sure I would have discovered this unless I’d come to a place where the convenience of mixes and packages was removed from me to a great extent. Though I may not cook completely from scratch as much back in the States as I do here, at least now I have the confidence to try new meals when the fancy strikes.

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”A Few Cooking Resources“

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