Beijing Hot Pot

 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.

To Beijing

Train Number G116

Theresa and I had been over a year-and-a-half in China, and still not gone to Beijing yet.  So, a few weeks ago we finally got motivated to make the trip.  We'd been purposely waiting until the late autumn, as that is supposed to be one of the best times for weather.  Since our time in Suzhou is drawing short, we needed to go this autumn, as we will not be here for the next one.

Comfortable First-Class Seating

The best way to get to Beijing from here has always been by train.  Until last year, that meant taking a soft sleeper berth in an express train for the overnight trip.  There are also hard sleepers and seats available at lower cost, for those travelling on a budget.  For those travelling with almost no budget, there are options for standing room and/or slower trains. (The express train, which stops only at major cities,  takes 10 to 14 hours.  The slow trains, which stop at every village along the way, take almost a full 24 hours.)

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

Travelling by day on the bullet train, rather than overnight on the sleeper trains, affords a great opportunity to see the countryside.  The train route runs through the breadbasket of China; first through the Yangtze River flood plains and then into the vast North China Plain.   For most of the journey, the view is of wide, open spaces of farmland.  Every few minutes we'd pass through a small farming village. Every hour or so we'd stop at larger city.  Seeing so much open farmland, it is hard to picture that this train route passes through one of the most densely populated regions on the globe.

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.. 

The Chili Cook-Off

Our Entry was "Tsing Tao Duck Chili"

 On October 20th, Zapata's TexMex Restaurant hosted their 4th annual chili cook-off.  We'd missed out on years 1 through 3 of the cook-off.  We almost missed out on year number 4, this year.  We only learned about it about ten days before-hand, during one of our regular Thursday night visits to Zapata's for Quiz Night.  They were encouraging folks to sign-up, as the number of participants this year was running a bit under what was seen in the past.

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, there were eight teams.  All of the chilies were different, but also all were very good.   In the end, the competition was very tight.  There were only about 5 points separating last place from first.  Only a point or two between second place and first.  So the science of statistics would say that there was no meaningful difference between any of the entries.  Which is another way of saying that the only way to win would be through dumb luck.

This year's winners

Well, Theresa and I were lucky enough to take first place.  Our recipe was called "Tsing Tao Duck Chili".  This is because the recipe used duck meat and couple of bottles of Tsing Tao stout beer.  I would like to claim that the recipe is a brilliant fusion of traditional chili and carefully calculated oriental elements.   I'd like to claim that the decision to use duck breast and beer was a clever tactic.  That  it was insightful to use of strong-flavored meat to balance the strong flavors of chili seasoning.   And that the use of stout beer was a flash of creativity to add a depth of flavor that cannot be achieved with tomato sauce alone.

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.

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.

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.