All of Asia loves a good hot pot. The Koreans have a hot pot. The Japanese have their shabu-shabu. The Vietnamese and the Thai have their versions of hot pot. In China, it seems everyone loves a hot pot. Especially in the winter time. They say the food warms your insides on a cold winter day. In truth, I think it is the cooking that warms their outsides. You see, there is nothing more steamy and hot than a hot pot restaurant. They are like saunas, with steam condensing on the windows and the floors and the chairs and any cool surface.
Now, also consider the fact that central heating is not normally allowed in buildings in the South of China. It is an old rule, for conservation of coal and natural gas, that only buildings to the North of the HuaiHe river can be built with central heating. What this means in practice is that, from Nanjing to the South, public buildings are not much warmer than the outside air during the winter time. Train stations and government offices are only about 5 degrees warmer than the outside. Believe me, you can freeze while waiting for a train or while visiting the immigration office. Private dwellings can get around the restriction by utilizing electric heat. (Our apartment has a heat pump.) But the majority of Chinese people that I know do not have any heating system at all. As a colleague tells me, they just wear more clothes during cold weather.
So, it's not surprise, then, that hot pot is a popular meal during the winter. Hot pots waste a lot of heat energy and probably release 5or 10 pounds of steam during a typical meal. In a private apartment, a meal with a hot pot is almost as good as installing central heating for the evening. Going to a hot pot restaurant is almost like taking a trip to a tropical island. It is refuge from the cold.
Beijing is famous for hotpot restaurants of the Northern style....of Mongolia and Manchuria. Theresa and I went twice to DongLai Shun, a restaurant that advertised itself as Muslim hot pot. The style of cooking comes from, what is now, the North of Tibet and the current provinces of XinJiang and Inner Mongolia. In those areas, they eat a lot of sheep. One reason for this is the large Muslim population and their disdain for pork. Another reason comes from the sad fact that the harsh landscapes there can only support hardy animals like sheep and goats.
Most hot pot restaurants have a table for four to eight people with an electric burner in the center. The burner can be precisely controlled for the cooking in the communal hot pot. The hot pot at DongLai Shun utilizes antique technology. Each hot pot is crafted from brass and glazed with ceramic. At the center of the pot is a combustion chamber and a chimney, in which charcoal is burned. Surrounding this chamber is an outer ring, filled with water. As the charcoal burns in the central chamber, it boils the water in the surrounding ring. The hot pot experience involves lots of thin sliced meats and vegetables. You introduce these into the boiling waters to cook them. Then you pull them out and dip them in sauces of peanut or soy sauce base. Then you eat them. Then you put some more meat and vegetables in the pot. Then you pull them out and eat them. Repeat this procedure until all meat and vegetables are consumed.
The meat for hot pot is sliced thin and provided on plates for the customer to consume at whatever pace is desired. As you can see in the photos, meat has a healthy proportion of fat. The boiling waters of the hot pot render most of these fats away, enriching the broth. You drop the red and white slivers of meat into the boiling waters. Then, a minute or two later, you fish them out as brown curlicues of tender, cooked meat. You dip these pieces into your peanut sauce and then eat. Then you drop some more pieces of meat in the boiling waters to repeat the process.
At DongLai Shun, the advertised that their meat came not just from normal sheep, but rather came from Yak and Sheep of Tibet. Happy Yak, raised on the plateaus of the Amdo regions of Tibet, where the air and land are pure. I can believe this. I want to believe this. I want to believe that the meat came from happy Tibetan yak playing in the sunshine rather than some factory farmed sheep. Who knows what is the truth is in China. Better to believe what you want to believe, rather than to let your fears run away with you.
Year In Suzhou
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Friday, December 14, 2012
To Beijing
Train Number G116 |
Comfortable First-Class Seating |
Air travel has always been an option, too, but you pay more for the ticket. And the nearest airport is in Shanghai, which means you're waste at least 4 hours in travel to the airport and security checks and boarding and all that. With the train you can pretty much walk right into the station, present you ticket to the checkers, and then go straight to the platform for boarding. At the appointed time, the train arrives, it stops, you get on, and it leaves. No waiting for a runway. No air traffic control delays.
Last year, they opened the bullet train lines from Beijing to Shanghai. Luckily, Suzhou is a big enough city to rate a major stop on the line. The new trains take only 5 hours or so for the 750 mile trip; from the brand new Suzhou North Station (built just for the bullet trains) to the Beijing South Railway Terminal. Air travel is not even worth consideration now. Travel to Beijing by train has always been more convenient. Now it is actually faster by rail than by air....if you measure from doorstep to doorstep. A second class seat costs about $85, one-way, which is comparable to the cost of a soft sleeper on the old express trains. Though reasonably low, that cost puts the bullet train out of reach for most of the poorer travellers. They still make the trip for $15 or $20 on the older trains.
When they first opened the line, the bullet trains would reach a cruising speed of 350 km/hr...almost 220 mph. That was back in the heady days when Chinese high-speed-rail seemed to be leapfrogging the Japanese Shinkansen to become the most advanced in the world. Then came a series of scandals and a horrific train collision in ZheJiang province. Public trust was reduced and, soon after, so was the speed of the trains. Normal cruising speed is now 300 km/hr (185 mph). Between Suzhou and Beijing, there are a number of stops along the way which reduce the average speed to about 240 km/hr (150 mph).
Wheat Fields |
Wheat fields dominate the landscape once you pass north of Nanjing We'd crossed over the famous rice-wheat dividing line. Rice is the staple crop for Southern China. North of the Yangtze, the growing seasons become too short. Wheat is the the staple food for the Northerners, and their cuisine is based upon breads and noodles and dumplings. As we passed in early November, the fields were showing advanced sprouts of next year's crop. The farther north we travelled, the sprouts became smaller and smaller until, finally, you could see only fields that were newly planted or waiting to be planted.
Corn Drying in the Open Air |
We saw a lot of corn too. Very little growing corn...but we saw a lot of newly harvested corn drying out in the sun. Every flat, dry surface seemed to be covered with corn. In the villages, the flat roofs of the houses were covered with drying corn. Paved parking lots and the shoulders of paved roads were covered with drying corn. In some places, it looked like they had closed entrance and exit ramps to the highways...and covered them with drying corn. I'd never realized before, but China is second only to the U.S. in corn production.
Most of the corn, I suspect, is destined to feed the pigs. Some also to feed the chickens and the ducks. It will go to produce more pork snout and pig trotters and pork belly and chicken feet and duck tongues. Corn must be critical to the food chain which supplies protein-based delicacies of Chinese cuisine..
Thursday, December 6, 2012
The Chili Cook-Off
Our Entry was "Tsing Tao Duck Chili" |
The cook-off is a chance for local folks to prepare their favorite chili recipe and compete against one another for the bragging rights of "best chili in Suzhou". There aren't any rules....anything goes. You can make your chili with beans or without; with noodles or without. The winners are chosen based on blind tasting by a panel of local judges. These judges come from traditional chili hot spots such as Florida, Finland, and Australia.
Brett and Nathalie, our Australian neighbors from the 2nd floor. |
This year's winners |
Our winning, though, was dumb luck. Our chili was good. But so were all the other entries. And there was no brilliance involved in the recipe. We used duck breast because, here in China, it is much, much cheaper than imported Australian beef. We used beer to supplement the tomato sauce because the the tomato sauce costs about $5 per can whereas the premium stout beer costs only about $1.50 per bottle. It is absolutely true that the stout beer and the duck meat add an extra "depth of flavor" to our recipe. But the fact that it tastes good is a merely an accident. We chose the beer and the duck breast because they were cheaper than the alternative ingredients.
Regardless, in the end our batch of chili turned out to be decent enough. The strange ingredients made for good conversation, too. Here, for the sake of posterity, is our recipe.
Tsing Tao Duck Chili
青岛鸭辣椒汤
12 boneless duck breasts, with skin
2 cans tomato sauce
2 bottles tsing tao stout beer
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
Assortment of peppers, diced (about 3 to 4 cups)
2 cans black beans, strained and rinsed.
4 to 5 cloves garlic, diced.
Chili powder
Cumin
Salt
Ground pepper
Ground Sichuan pepper
1 lime
Cilantro (leaves picked and prepped for garnish)
Strip duck skin away from breasts. Cut skin in to strips, about 1 cm by 3 cm. Put in pan over medium low flame and render the duck fat until skin is dark brown and crispy. Strain the melted duck fat into a glass container. Heavily salt and pepper the cracklings and refrigerate for a snack later.
Dice the lean duck breast into cubes of 1cm or less. Season with salt and pepper
Into a big chili-cooking pot: Add some duck fat and fry a handful of duck meat over high heat until browned, then remove meat to a glass bowl. Work in small batches and add more duck fat as needed. The goal is to find that ideal quantity so that that meat browns and does not boil in own juices.
When all meat has been browned, sweat the onions and the peppers in pot until tender. Then add back the meat. Add diced garlic and a teaspoon of Sichuan pepper. Cook for a couple of minutes until the garlic starts to give up its scent. Then add the black beans and the two cans of tomato sauce. Then add the beer, using it to rinse the remaining tomato sauce from the cans.
Heat to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer. Add three tablespoons of chili powder, two tablespoons of cumin, and two teaspoons of ground black pepper. Simmer for an hour or more until liquids are reduced and consistency begins to change from “soupy”to the thicker chili consistency.
Add the juice of one lime and stir well. Taste and then adjust the seasonings with salt, pepper, Sichuan pepper, cumin, and chili powder. Continue to simmer for at least 15 minutes or more. Add water if too thick.
Serve. Garnish with fresh cilantro and/or sour cream.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Lingyin Temple and the Buddhas of Feilaifeng
One of the most famous spots along the West Lake, in Hangzhou, is the LingYin Temple and the adjacent FeiLaiFeng grottoes. In this little travelogue, we'll start with the grottoes....since that is where our little EAS tour group started.
Just outside the temple there is a knob of limestone that rises several hundred feet over its surroundings. Neither height nor location makes it remarkable. The West Lake is surrounded by hills, many of them much larger. But this particular hill has hundreds of Buddhist images carved into its exposed limestone. That is what makes it famous; and it is famous throughout all of China as one of the treasures of Hangzhou.
The rocky knob is called FeiLaiFeng. The three Chinese characters in its name represent "to fly", "to come", and "rocky peak". The travel websites translate this into English in different ways. Some call it "the peak flow from afar" and some the "peak peak that flew hither" and some "the mountain come flying". It seems that everything about China is ambiguous.
FeiLaiFeng is carved with over 300 images related to Buddhism. Some are small. Some big. Some are crude. Others approach the complexity of a Renaissance masterpiece. The peak is riddled with caves and wormhole passages. Inside, in near total darkness, there are also carvings.
The stone carvings on FeiLaiFeng date back to 1100 years ago. Though the rock was there before the founding of temple, the carving of the rock came several hundred years after. The style, I am told, is true to the origins of Buddhism in India and Tibet. In fact, the local legends all say that entire rocky knob was originally located in India but flew itself to Hangzhou. (Which explains why it is called "the mountain come flying".) The artwork certainly looks to me like it could be Indian. The tour guide assured us, though, that it is classically Chinese.
A friend from India told me that it is easy to distinguish between Indian and Chinese religious art. In India, he said, the Buddhas all have Indian faces. In China, they all have Chinese faces. Below the neck, they are pretty much indistinguishable. But the face will always give it away.
Just past the Buddhas of FeiLaiFeng is the LingYin Temple. This temple is easily the largest temple complex that we've seen in China. The main buildings are positioned on a line the runs up the side of a hill. Each has an entry in a front and an exit in the back leading to a courtyard and then the entry of the next. As you move from building to building you climb further up the hill. It's similar, in that way, to some of the temples we saw in Kyoto, Japan.
These buildings have names such as Hall of the Heavenly King, Hall from the Fantastic Hero, Hall of the Buddha of Medicine, and Grand Hall of the Great Sage. Each houses a major shrine in the form of a great statue at its center. On the side walls are tens, if not hundreds, of smaller statues and shrines.
The ritual for the observant usually starts outside, in the front of the temple, with the burning of paper offerings, candles, and incense sticks (known as joss sticks). The paper offerings usually go straight into a cauldron. The candles and joss sticks are usually held in front of the body in raised, clasped hands as the initial prayers are made. Then they are placed into a rack of some type or into the cauldron where they continue to smoulder for long after.
The next step is to enter through the front door of the hall and to kowtow in front of the main shrine. (English is full or words "borrowed" from other languages. Kowtow is one of the very few words that English has borrowed from Chinese.) They kneel upon mats and perform three of these prostrations. Then they continue to pray or they move on surrounding walls to make appeals to the Bodhisattvas and lesser beings. My understanding is that when Buddhists pray, they are normally asking for assistance with something. Each of these deities, I am told, has an area of specialization. Prayers and offerings are directed at specific shrines based on this.
Our tour guide assured us that there was some kind of fee for the monks' assistance. Though they live a life of poverty and denial, they still have to put food in their bellies and keep the temple in good repair. All organized religions face the same challenges, I suppose.
Just outside the temple there is a knob of limestone that rises several hundred feet over its surroundings. Neither height nor location makes it remarkable. The West Lake is surrounded by hills, many of them much larger. But this particular hill has hundreds of Buddhist images carved into its exposed limestone. That is what makes it famous; and it is famous throughout all of China as one of the treasures of Hangzhou.
The rocky knob is called FeiLaiFeng. The three Chinese characters in its name represent "to fly", "to come", and "rocky peak". The travel websites translate this into English in different ways. Some call it "the peak flow from afar" and some the "peak peak that flew hither" and some "the mountain come flying". It seems that everything about China is ambiguous.
FeiLaiFeng is carved with over 300 images related to Buddhism. Some are small. Some big. Some are crude. Others approach the complexity of a Renaissance masterpiece. The peak is riddled with caves and wormhole passages. Inside, in near total darkness, there are also carvings.
The stone carvings on FeiLaiFeng date back to 1100 years ago. Though the rock was there before the founding of temple, the carving of the rock came several hundred years after. The style, I am told, is true to the origins of Buddhism in India and Tibet. In fact, the local legends all say that entire rocky knob was originally located in India but flew itself to Hangzhou. (Which explains why it is called "the mountain come flying".) The artwork certainly looks to me like it could be Indian. The tour guide assured us, though, that it is classically Chinese.
A friend from India told me that it is easy to distinguish between Indian and Chinese religious art. In India, he said, the Buddhas all have Indian faces. In China, they all have Chinese faces. Below the neck, they are pretty much indistinguishable. But the face will always give it away.
Just past the Buddhas of FeiLaiFeng is the LingYin Temple. This temple is easily the largest temple complex that we've seen in China. The main buildings are positioned on a line the runs up the side of a hill. Each has an entry in a front and an exit in the back leading to a courtyard and then the entry of the next. As you move from building to building you climb further up the hill. It's similar, in that way, to some of the temples we saw in Kyoto, Japan.
These buildings have names such as Hall of the Heavenly King, Hall from the Fantastic Hero, Hall of the Buddha of Medicine, and Grand Hall of the Great Sage. Each houses a major shrine in the form of a great statue at its center. On the side walls are tens, if not hundreds, of smaller statues and shrines.
The ritual for the observant usually starts outside, in the front of the temple, with the burning of paper offerings, candles, and incense sticks (known as joss sticks). The paper offerings usually go straight into a cauldron. The candles and joss sticks are usually held in front of the body in raised, clasped hands as the initial prayers are made. Then they are placed into a rack of some type or into the cauldron where they continue to smoulder for long after.
The next step is to enter through the front door of the hall and to kowtow in front of the main shrine. (English is full or words "borrowed" from other languages. Kowtow is one of the very few words that English has borrowed from Chinese.) They kneel upon mats and perform three of these prostrations. Then they continue to pray or they move on surrounding walls to make appeals to the Bodhisattvas and lesser beings. My understanding is that when Buddhists pray, they are normally asking for assistance with something. Each of these deities, I am told, has an area of specialization. Prayers and offerings are directed at specific shrines based on this.
Health, Wealth, and Long Life. These are the top three themes for which people are praying. Wealth for the young and/or poor. Health for the sick. Long life for the old. One can pray for these things to be granted to oneself, or pray for them to be granted to a relative or friend. Folks pray for other things, too; love, marriage, children, revenge, etc... I'd guess that each has a special patron.
The photo above shows the monks of the temple monastery. Like monks of any religion, these folks spend a lot of time in prayer and study of their own choosing. In this case, they have been engaged by a patron to offer additional prayers to help the patron's cause. The ritual was much more elaborate and coordinated than normal prayers. But beyond that, I couldn't tell what was actually going on. Our tour guide assured us that there was some kind of fee for the monks' assistance. Though they live a life of poverty and denial, they still have to put food in their bellies and keep the temple in good repair. All organized religions face the same challenges, I suppose.
In the photo of our group above, at center, is an elderly pilgrim come from Tibet. Some folks in our group struck up a conversation with her and her family. She stood out from the crowd because of her costume, which is in the Tibetan tradition. Tibet was, and still is, one of the centers of Buddhist culture. The Lingyin temple is of a type of Buddhism which seems to have a Tibetan pedigree. The power of Lingyin temple to draw pilgrims from afar is an example of its fame and reputation.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Dragon Well Tea
Tea Bushes |
One of the most famous, if not the most famous, teas in China comes Hangzhou.....from the hills surrounding the West Lake. LongJingCha, it is called. It is a green tea. Translated, it is known as Dragon Well tea to English speakers. In the old days, the best of this tea was reserved for the emperors. Today, much of the high quality stuff is still reserved for government use. Good quality LongJing tea can be expensive. The highest quality can be obscenely expensive. For that reason, Dragon Well Tea is also one of the most counterfeited items in the country.
Gathering Tea Leaves |
More gathering of tea leaves |
The secret of good green tea, we learned, is in the roasting of the leaves. The roasting of the leaves assures quick drying, but more importantly it denatures the natural enzymes in the leaves. If you just pick the leaves and allow them to dry in the air, then the colors will darken and the flavor will become less flowery and more earthy. This is how the dark teas (like the stuff in the tea bag) are made. If you roast the fresh picked leaves quickly and carefully, then it stops the oxidation processes dead in their tracks. The leaves dry, but they retain their green color and their herb-like scents.
Pan roasting the leaves - the essential step |
So, at first this whole tea plantation thing seemed a bit touristy and hokey. In time, though, it was explained that this really WAS a working tea plantation, and not some Disneyland stagecraft. The guides and the pan roasters really WERE tea growers and not people play acting the role. The land, like all the land in China, is owned by the government. The government grants the use of the land to the farmer. It's like sharecropping. Sharecropping has never been a particularly lucrative occupation.
This particular farm family makes most of their income by producing tea. The whole tourist thing is just a way to bring in a little cash on the side. It also gives them a chance to sell their product directly to the consumer. What farmer wouldn't want to cut out the middlemen? And what Chinese consumer wouldn't want to avoid counterfeiters by buying direct from the farm? They sold three grades of tea. The best grade went for about $50 per 100 grams, if I remember correctly. By that math, the ten pound sack pictured below is worth a fair bit of money.
Finished product. |
The local people are passionate about their tea. As passionate as the French are about their wines. Some of my colleagues swear that Hangzhou's LongJing tea is the best. Others swear by Suzhou's BiLuoChun. It's like Bordeaux or Burgundy. Democrat or Republican. White Sox or Cubs. You develop an allegiance for one or the other and that allegiance lasts for your entire life.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
上有天堂, 下有苏杭
One of many bridges at West Lake (XiHu) |
shàng yǒu tiān tángLike all Chinese poetry, there are multiple ways to interpret. Here is one:
xià yǒu sū háng
There is Heaven above.Right now, we live in Suzhou. In October, Theresa and I took a trip to Hangzhou with the EAS group. (EAS is the Expats Association of Suzhou. We've taken trips with them before, and they are always excellent.) About 30-plus-or-minus folks went on this two day trip to see the other side of paradise.
There are Suzhou and Hangzhou below.
A lotus pond on West Lake |
A view from the lake on a stormy day |
Suzhou is respected by the Chinese. Hangzhou is beloved.
Hangzhou is beloved because the entire city is as one, big, classical Chinese garden. XiHu, or the West Lake, is the water element of the garden. Surrounding XiHu are the knobby mountains of ZheJiang province. They serve as the stone. The remaining classical elements - the plants and structures - abound on the shores of XiHu. You can walk for miles along the shores of XiHu and enjoy the site of pagodas and trees reflecting in the waters. In Hangzhou, nothing is hidden behind walls. In Hangzhou, everyplace is within the garden.
Wind surfers in foreground. Leifeng Pagoda in background. |
Hangzhou is also only about two hours away from Shanghai. This is both a boon and a curse. For the people of Shanghai, it is a boon to have a nearby place where they can escape the crowded, concrete sterility of their all-too-modern city. For Hangzhou, though, it is a curse to have living nearby 20 million people who, on any given week-end, might all decide to drop in for a quick dose of "back-to-nature". The week-end that we visited, the traffic around XiHu was horrific.
The North-East shore. No Trees or hills. Mostly apartments to house the six million residents. |
Hangzhou is good Fengshui |
Scenes through a circular window |
Bridges and Lilly Pads |
Ok, can't think of a good ending. That's partly because we have a few more stories to tell. Watch for a couple of more postings related to our Hangzhou trip.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. It's not much of a holiday here in China. Many of the local folks are aware of this American tradition. Gan En Jie, they call it. If you plug the Chinese characters into a translation website, these characters 感恩节 translate roughly into "sense of kindness holiday". I think that is nice.
For our Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Zapata's, where they put out a spread that would bring a tear to any American's eye. Turkey (both roasted and smoked), potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, brussel sprouts, and salad. Follow that with dessert of pumpkin and/or pecan pie. Not as good as grandma's, but a darned fine substitute if you're 8000 miles away from home.
By the way, from my unscientific sampling I would have to conclude that very few Chinese people have ever eaten turkey. And those that have eaten, for the most part, don't like it. "Like eating cardboard" is how one person described it. So it goes. The sociologists call this "cultural distance". We have our turkey. They have their duck.
"Huo Ji" is what they call the turkey here. Literally translated, this means "fire chicken". Lord only knows where this comes from.
Still though, it is amazing that almost all the Chinese I know are aware of our holiday of Thanksgiving and our tradition of eating turkey. In the reverse, I would guess that far fewer Americans are aware of the mid-autumn festival and fewer still aware of the tradition of eating moon cakes. For that matter, at lunch today a colleague explained to me the traditions of the Spring Festival. (Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, has a lot in common with our Thanksgiving in that it is a time for family get-togethers and huge meals. No football on TV here, though.) Anyway, the tradition in the hometown of my colleague is to cook a large fish - head and tail still attached - for the family dinner on New Year's Eve. But no one is allowed to eat the fish. It has to stay on the table untouched. (If you sneak a bite, then it is bad luck for the family for the whole year.). The fish cannot be eaten until the new year comes. So it is carefully set aside and then served again for consumption the next day. It seems strange to me, but I guess it is no stranger than fighting over a turkey's wishbone.
Though not Thanksgiving, today here is a bit of an auspicious day. In the Shanghai Daily it tells us that:
For our Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Zapata's, where they put out a spread that would bring a tear to any American's eye. Turkey (both roasted and smoked), potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, brussel sprouts, and salad. Follow that with dessert of pumpkin and/or pecan pie. Not as good as grandma's, but a darned fine substitute if you're 8000 miles away from home.
By the way, from my unscientific sampling I would have to conclude that very few Chinese people have ever eaten turkey. And those that have eaten, for the most part, don't like it. "Like eating cardboard" is how one person described it. So it goes. The sociologists call this "cultural distance". We have our turkey. They have their duck.
"Huo Ji" is what they call the turkey here. Literally translated, this means "fire chicken". Lord only knows where this comes from.
Still though, it is amazing that almost all the Chinese I know are aware of our holiday of Thanksgiving and our tradition of eating turkey. In the reverse, I would guess that far fewer Americans are aware of the mid-autumn festival and fewer still aware of the tradition of eating moon cakes. For that matter, at lunch today a colleague explained to me the traditions of the Spring Festival. (Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, has a lot in common with our Thanksgiving in that it is a time for family get-togethers and huge meals. No football on TV here, though.) Anyway, the tradition in the hometown of my colleague is to cook a large fish - head and tail still attached - for the family dinner on New Year's Eve. But no one is allowed to eat the fish. It has to stay on the table untouched. (If you sneak a bite, then it is bad luck for the family for the whole year.). The fish cannot be eaten until the new year comes. So it is carefully set aside and then served again for consumption the next day. It seems strange to me, but I guess it is no stranger than fighting over a turkey's wishbone.
Though not Thanksgiving, today here is a bit of an auspicious day. In the Shanghai Daily it tells us that:
Today is xiaoxue, or light snow, on the Chinese lunar calendar. That marks the time when many traditional families in China start to make preserved ham and pork sausage as the weather should be cold and dry.Pig or turkey notwithstanding, it is the time of year to celebrate the bounty of the harvest and to fill one's belly in preparation for the hard days of the coming winter. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Happy XiaoXueJie as well. Count your blessings, and know that we certainly count you amongst ours.
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