Finding Food and Cooking in China

Jackie was a little under the weather on Friday, so I set the menu for Friday through Monday and went shopping with the boys...

Jackie has done a good job of explaining most of the shopping experiences, that is, from a person who normally shops.

I decided that I was going to have some real American food this weekend. You know, the kind of stuff you can easily get at home. So, here was the menu:
Friday evening: BBQ Pork Roast
Baked Potatoes
Corn
Saturday Lunch: Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo
Saturday Dinner: Eat out
Sunday Lunch: Steak with french fries and salad
Sunday Dinner: Usual McDonalds after Church
Monday Lunch: Sandwiches

By Friday evening, Jackie did the cooking as I was too tired to go at it in the kitchen. On Saturday, however, I took over the culinary duties.

Buying the ingredients for the Alfredo was a challenge. The noodles were in the import section and were in Italian. The butter, cream, and cheese were in the imported dairy section and were in French. Luckily enough for me, the Italian for Fettuccine is spelled a lot like it is in English, and cream was close enough that I could ask the driver to confirm what I had via Chinese.

The Fettuccine was the best I've had in a long long while. I doctored the recipe a bit, which always seems to help. I'll say it was even better than what my mother would make, and that was rather good stuff. The disappointment (as always) was the chicken. Very tough.

Sunday lunch just happened. Let me say that I don't know if we will be eating steak again very soon in China. Just way too expensive to have something that more resembled the really bad steak they serve in school. I forgot what they called that junk, but they had to cover it in an equally bad gravy so that you could choke it down...

What was very good were the homemade french fries. Not as good as Granny Davis's but close. Now I’ve just got to learn how to make hush puppies. (If any of my relatives have the starting recipe, please send it over to me.) Once we’ve got french fries and hush puppies, all we need is some fish!

Buying the potatoes was the more memorable part. (I was expecting the fight to get my veggies weighed and priced.) There were all sorts of vegetables. Some I recognized, others I did not. But, I could not find the potatoes. After 3 laps, I found them.

They were not in a bulk bin, not in bags, nor in boxes. No, they were sold in pairs, and each pair was individually wrapped on a plastic tray... I usually don't shop in the USA, but I do see the stuff when it comes home, and I've never seen potatoes packaged this way.

So, I figure I need 6 potatoes. As I'm looking through them, a Chinese man and his daughter stop and start commenting on me looking at the potatoes. As I start to pile them into the bag I had, they became animated and actually started laughing.

I thought, well, I don't stand at the mass rice bin and laugh at you all buying it 5 to 10 pounds at a time! Guess the Shanghaiese don’t consider the lowly tuber to be a staple.

Here is the survival point for anyone who is thinking about an ex-pat assignment: take along the cookbook "Joy of Cooking". Space is always limited, and this is an excellent reference book as you will need to improvise and change out ingredients based upon what you can find. If you are a budding chef back home, this is probably the one you should start with.

The weekend has been nice. We got to go to the pool yesterday a bit before we walked down the street to get dinner. This is the end of the calm before the storm... Danny starts school tomorrow, I start language lessons tomorrow, and the business activity is about to go into overdrive. Got a few major projects that I am either working on or stewarding, and my time is about to be filled to the max.