Whatever Shall I Eat?

Ah, China. Home to some of the most delicious food on earth. In my five weeks weeks here, I have had delicious noodles, buns, dumplings, vegetables, fresh fruit, fish, soup, scallion pancakes et cetera, et cetera, ditto, ditto, and so on and so forth. There are several nice restaurants and hole-in-the-wall places within a ten minute walk of my apartment. Now, when I was in Beijing, I didn't have the ability to do much cooking, as my room didn't have any kitchen equipment. I ate a lot of instant soup noodles and oatmeal. Here, in my apartment in Guangzhou, I have a kitchen, and I feel rather obligated by both frugality and my general nature to cook for myself.

My Apartment Building

This presents two problems. Problem one: I do not have an oven in my kitchen, and I'm suddenly realizing that some 75% of what I know how to cook involves the oven. Problem two: grocery shopping is a whole new ball game in China. In walking distance, I have a little grocery, a Circle K convenience store, and a fresh market. The Circle K is great for a cold beverage or a quick snack. The little grocery is, at first, comfortingly familiar to a foreigner, although perhaps oddly organized. You enter through a small section of toiletries and household goods. In the back, there is a dairy and frozen goods section, then a small fruit, vegetable, and meat section, then two large bins of bulk rice. There's an aisle of noodles and instant soup, an aisle of vinegar, soy sauce, seasonings, corn starch, etc, and aisle of cookies, crackers, and other nibbles, an aisle of cooking oil, rice, and canned and preserved goods, an aisle of shelf-stable soy milk, and an aisle of bottled water and other bottled beverages. Up front by the registers are displays of specialty goods, candy and gum. Beyond the registers is a little Tupperware vendor and a vendor by the front door sells nuts and dried fruit. All in all, it sells most everything you need to cook Chinese food. If, on the other hand, you are trying to cook Western food, you are SOL. Flour? No. Tomato-based products? No. Cheese? No. Any of the lovely meal-in-a-box, hamburger-helper-type products which take up aisles and aisles of space in an American grocery store? No. Alas, I am sadly uninspired by the selection. Beyond stir-fried veggies over rice, I don't know what to make. I am painfully aware that I need to (re)learn how to cook.

Now, if I go further afield to the larger malls, I can find larger grocery stores with "international" sections. There, I can pay a relatively obscene amount of money for a can of Hunts spaghetti sauce, a can of (Italian) chickpeas, Swiss Miss hot chocolate powder, or Land o Lake's Monteray Jack cheese (oh, what I wouldn't pay for some Sharp Cheddar). But still, the part of me which yearns for a sack of potatoes and a pound of hamburger remains unsatisfied.

Perhaps the most fun way to shop is to go to the fresh market. The fresh market is a tightly packed space of vendors selling piles of fresh vegetables of every variety: onions, celery, bok choy, cucumbers, eggplant, scallions, mushrooms, carrots, peas, beans, and a heck of a lot of things I don't recognize. There's fresh ginger and garlic, and eggs (you buy them by weight), fresh and preserved. Along the right hand wall are the fish vendors. They have fresh, frozen, and still living offerings [including a tank of frogs. Hmm]. Towards the front, near the exit, you have the meat vendors. These make the squeamish American in me want to run for the hills. Now, visualize the meat section of an American store. Everything brightly light and gleaming, no smell unless it's one of disinfectant,  all the meat wrapped in plastic and neatly separated in refrigerated cases. Even at something like a farmer's market, or a butcher shop, the meat will be refrigerated or somehow kept cold.
 Here, the vendors have their offerings piled before them, same as the vegetable dealers. Some cuts are hanging along hooks. Shoppers peruse the selection, picking up cuts, examining them, putting them back down. Vendors hold things out to entice. When people are paying, they sometimes throw the money onto the pile of meat. Nothing is refrigerated (including the whole market, which means the temperature of the space is likely somewhere in the eighties, or high seventies at best). Honestly? My reaction is probably irrational. Clearly, the Chinese shoppers are not being stricken en mass by salmonella and e coli. But I can't know the handling history of the meat. I don't know how long it's been there. I don't know how long ago it was slaughtered. I don't know how many people have touched it, or what other contaminates might have contacted it. In short: there are days I'm happy I live with a vegan and can use that as an excuse for being a chicken.
 
I will save the story of my restaurant adventures for another post. Just to tease you: I've already found a wonderful vegetarian Buddhist place, to-die-for Indonesian, decent Turkish, mouth-watering Middle Eastern (falafel! hummus! lamb shawarma! pita!), my favorite hot and sour potato dish that I discovered in Beijing, delicious Xinjiang style noodles, and a baozi vendor who makes a ridiculously cheap and delicious scallion pancake. Now, if I could only find some baked beans and a blueberry pie, I'd be in culinary heaven.