Rebecca Henderson

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.)

My first Christmas in Washington, but not my first Christmas away from home. I’m somewhat used to being away from family at the holidays — although, do not hear me say that I don’t miss my family when I’m away at Christmas. I do. I just can’t always be there with them, and I’ve made my peace with that.

At Christmas meals on both sides of my family last year we had tamales, and I decided that I want that to be a holiday tradition. Apparently my family didn’t stick with it this year without me, but that’s ok, no worries, I can keep traditions by myself.

My friends Abner and Laura invited me to spend Christmas Eve with their families in Grandview, Washington, about 45 minutes from where I live in the Tri-Cities. Abner’s family is from Nicaragua, and they always make nacatamales for Christmas. Making the nacatamales takes most of the morning, and then they have to cook for a few hours, so there’s a lot of sitting around and talking and hanging out while you wait.

Like Mexican tamales, the key component of nacatamales is masa. But there are a lot more fresh ingredients that go into nacatamales than the Mexican tamales you may have eaten.

You don’t just make a couple of nacatamales at a time — you make a few dozen. So you have to have a big pot to cook the masa, along with onions and bacon grease and potato and garlic and a spice called achiote that the Solanos get on trips to Nicaragua.

Once the masa has thickened, the assembly line starts putting together the nacatamales. Unlike Mexican tamales wrapped in corn husks, nacatamales are wrapped in banana leaves and are a few times bigger. First, you spread a generous amount of masa on the center of the banana leaf. Then you add the rest of the goodies: pork rubbed in achiote, rice mixed with achiote, slices of potato, carrot, bell pepper, tomato, a few raisins, a green olive, and a sprig of mint.

At the end of the assembly line, you fold the banana leaf over the ingredients, and you wrap the entire thing in foil, making sure it’s sealed good enough to stay together when you boil it. In Nicaragua, where banana leaves are abundant, you wouldn’t need the foil. Banana leaves are pricey in Washington, though, so you have to make do with one layer of banana leaf and the outer foil layer.

Somehow I ended up at the end of the line and got to learn to fold the nacatamales — which was fun, but also a bit nerve-wracking because I worried that not sealing it properly would ruin the entire nacatamale. When I learned to make Chinese dumplings, I had the same concern about not sealing the dough and letting the contents escape during boiling. For dumplings, though, you’re only ruining one bite if it comes apart in the boiling water — a loosely sealed nacatamale could ruin a meal for one person. So much pressure!

We made over 40 nacatamales in all, and the Solanos will eat them for several days. The foil packets were boiled in a huge pot on a burner in the back yard.

Here’s a nacatamale on a banana leaf after they were cooked. So very yummy! Lots of fresh ingredients and good flavors all mixed together. And I love anything in a banana leaf — reminds me of Sipsongpanna.

So, my new Christmas tradition will continue next year with tamales once again, Mexican, Nicaraguan, or otherwise.

(Continued from previous…)

The one exception for me in not wanting to own stuff is where the kitchen is involved. Cooking from scratch is a big deal to me, and having my own decked-out kitchen has been the one thing I’ve truly missed in this year of spare bedrooms. I’ve cooked in every house I’ve been a guest in, but it’s different when it’s my kitchen. I like my own kitchen, like keeping fresh foods around so that I don’t have to eat out so much or make convenience food at home.

And so I carried back from China my favorite stir-fry utensils, and my first purchase here in Kennewick was a rice cooker and wok. I’ve been able to use the other pots and pans of my gracious hostess since staying in her house, but those two items were a necessity for me.

So, while the thought of needing to acquire a couch stresses me out, the idea of not having kitchen items to be able to cook with right away when I move in to my apartment at the end of the month, well that stresses me out a bit, too.

Then, last week, I was given a most beautiful surprise by friends here in Kennewick. Through Craigslist (that ever-intriguing source of serendipitous finds and questionable claims) they learned of a family who had to suddenly pack up and move to Maui. Oh, for such a fate. Anyway, because of shipping expenses, they were getting rid of a lot of their stuff. Including their entire kitchen.

My friends went to their house to see what was available and ended up bringing back complete sets of dishes, pots, pans, baking-ware, the entire silverware drawer (along with the organizer), glasses, mugs, a toaster, can opener, and other miscellaneous items I can’t remember right now. Pretty much everything you need to set up a basic kitchen.

And they gave it to me. They’re keeping it in storage for me until the end of the month, and then I’ll get to move into my apartment and start cooking right away. No $.99 menu from Taco Bell until I can stock the kitchen. I am good to go.

Isn’t that the coolest?

God knows what I need, and He knew that I needed a kitchen. Pretty exciting to see how He used some dear friends to do that for me.

If you’re ever in town, come by for dinner. Let me know ahead of time whether you prefer Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian, or Mexican — my fresh pico de gallo is pretty amazing, if I do say so.

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”

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“

A while back I was asked about recipes for local dishes from where I live, and I’ve thought about putting some together in a little cookbook—but many of the ingredients would be difficult to find in the States.  I decided to post the recipe for Lydia’s steamed fish.  If you can get the ingredients, it’s a worthy dish to try at home!

For this dish, Lydia brought home two live fish, so that we could learn how to clean and prepare them from the very start.  I asked her to teach me how to do it, but found out later that she had actually never cleaned a fish on her own until this day, so we learned together.  The fish accidentally died in the bucket, which turned out to be a good thing because neither of us wanted to have to kill the fish.

So—we bought two tilapia, and we each took one and cleaned the scales off and took the insides out.  We left the heads in tact, though, because local people consider those quite tasty.  After they were completely cleaned, we cut them into large chunks, bones and all, and placed them in a large bowl.

We then prepared all the seasonings:

2 Tbsp of ginger in julienne slices

diced chili peppers for as hot as you want the fish (Lydia used 5 small chilies)

3/4 tsp ground numbing spice

2 Tbsp whole coriander seeds

1 1/2 tsp salt

a handful of cilantro torn into pieces

another handful of an herb called “Wa people cilantro”

a handful of green onions cut into strips

2 Tbsp of oil

So after the pieces of fish were in the bowl, we added the ginger, numbing spice, coriander seeds, chili peppers, and salt, and we mixed it up to coat the fish well.

Then we placed the fish pieces in a ceramic plate or bowl and drizzled the oil on top, and then we put the herbs and onions on the very top of that.  We then made a steamer by placing chopsticks in a pan so that they would hold the plate up off the bottom of the pan.  We filled the bottom of the pan with water, put the lid on, and steamed the fish for 13-15 minutes until it was done.  (If you have a steamer pan without holes in the bottom, that would work too.  We just had to engineer the chopsticks and plate because my steamer pan has holes and all the juices and seasonings would drip out.)

The finished product tasted really great, and it’s pretty healthy.  We ate it with stir-fried corn and peas, a local fern stir-fried, and spicy cold rice noodles.

你们慢慢吃！

So far I haven’t encountered any problems using a meat cleaver to carve intricate patterns in fruit.  No—I managed to hurt myself doing something as mundane as peeling potatoes for our Fourth of July dinner.  I discovered the hard way that a potato peeler will also peel the nail right off your finger.

There was much wincing and cringing in sympathy among the other kitchen workers when it happened.  I was deemed a fainting risk, and after my hand was unceremoniously rinsed of blood and potato dirt, I was ushered into the seating area and made to lie down with my hand elevated.  The only band-aid we could find was too big and had to be cut down to the right size, so that none of the adhesive stuck to the wound—a trial-and-error process that was more painful than my initial injury.

Immediately after it happened, my local friends in the kitchen began showing me scars on their fingers and describing their own past injuries.  “Don’t worry—in a month or so, your nail will grow back.”  It was little consolation—all I could think at the time was, “This is what happens to torture victims—they have their nails pulled off.”

For the rest of the day, I wasn’t allowed to touch any knives or do anything that would get my finger wet, which really limits the amount of work you can do in a kitchen.  We decided as a group to use this unpleasant incident as a learning experience:  small knives are just as dangerous as big ones, and it’s better to have a decent first-aid kit prepared beforehand than after.  Live and learn.  Glad to be of assistance in figuring that out.

The manager of our coffee bar, a good national friend, spent a month in the provincial capital earlier this year in barista training.  Included in the course was a section on carving fruits and vegetables into garnishes.  So as he’s teaching us at the café how to make specialty coffees, he’s also trying to teach us the occasional garnish in our down time as well.  Flowers out of cherry tomatoes.  Pinwheels out of carrots.  Leaves out of apple wedges.  All made, not with a small paring knife, but with a meat cleaver.

In these early days of planning the menu and defining our style at the café, I try to limit the number of times per week (or day!) that I say to my Chinese coworkers, “I’ve never seen that in a coffee shop before…that’s not how we do it.”  But really, I have never been in a coffee bar and been served my latte with fruit garnishes on the side.

How do we find a balance between what is expected of a coffee-drinking experience locally, and what is considered beyond the normal experience for our Western customers?

Fruit garnishes, I’ve decided, is a battle I’m not going to fight.  (Weird-tasting tropical fruit syrups or raw eggs in coffee—that’s a battle I have fought.  And won.)  Making flowers out of apple peels may be extraneous to espresso, but the truth is I enjoy using my hands to make something delicate and lovely.  And if I ever need to, I could use my new knife skills to get a job on a cruise ship or in a Japanese restaurant.