What's Cooking?

First, for my father-in-law who is quite allergic to shrimp, you might want to skip this post. To everyone else, welcome to the world of raw shrimp cooking. The grocer at our local Chinese store is very persuasive. I'm really not sure what I was thinking the other day when I went in and asked him for shrimp when I was hoping for pre-cooked, deveined, peeled. I mean, I know what kind of shrimp Chinese people like to eat. Sure enough, that's what I was offered. He made such a good sales pitch, I just couldn't say say no. Plus, I wanted to serve authentic for my guest coming that evening.

Shrimp are actually gray until they're cooked.

Yum, Yum! (Actually, I much prefer the other kind. Getting the brains out is rather messy work.)

I forgot to take a pic of the discarded shells, legs, brains, etc. You're glad, right?

A cake by any other name...

Is, of course, just as sweet! Aren't these cakes beautiful? Birthdays are always fun here!

Burritos: Asian beats Mexican!

Our house helper is amazing! I had been contemplating teaching her to make tortillas for some time so we could eat a little Mexican. Wow! She offered to make Lao Bing for me one day (an Asian-style tortilla) and I have never used my old tortilla recipe since. When we eat them with her, we stuff them with fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, bean sprouts and all manner of other delicacies. They make pretty mean Mexican style burritos, too!

Silkworms going live!

Literally folks. These are the silkworms we cooked for New Year's lunch on the barbecue right at our table. I don't usually get the warm fuzzies for animals, but I did feel kind of bad for these little guys writhing around on the burner.

Dumpling fun!

Oh, before I forget. Yesterday was my 300th post. I feel like I should celebrate or something.

Anyway, the promised scoop on a dumpling. If you're thinking chicken and dumplings made with Crisco (or Bisquick Light depending on preferred calorie intake) think again. This post is on dumplings Asian style. Traditionally, folks eat these at midnight on the lunar New Year (which we did). Practically, we eat them a lot. With every meal you eat a "main thing" which where we live is usually rice, sometimes steamed bread, sometimes dumplings (jiaozi) and could be noodles or something else.

Jiaozi are labor intensive little creatures. First, you make the skin/wrappers from a big lump of dough. You have to pinch off and roll out all the little discs.



Then, you make the filling by chopping up lots of meat and vegetables really tiny and adding oil, salt, MSG, etc.



Next, it's time for the stuffing. Your jiaozi are supposed to stand up but mine flop over.



Tada! No, I didn't make all these jiaozi. I think I only made one or two. My kids gave me the perfect excuse to watch TV and text message all night while everyone else worked.



If my American friends are now craving jiaozi, you can buy frozen dumplings in the store or fresh ones in Chinese restaurants in America for insane prices. You can also make them yourself. Homemade are best. It's great fun to have a dumpling making party with conversation and friendship, but I like taking advantage of the little store across the street that sells them insanely cheap for my daily use consumption. (Come visit if you want to do that.)

FYI: Jiaozi are one of Archie's favorite foods. They were also one of his first table foods.

Culinary delights from a 100 day party!

Some of you have asked, "What do you do at a 100 day party anyway?" Well, eating was definitely the focal point at ours. I had a buffet dinner delivered to our door cheaper than I could have cooked it in America. (A great benefit of living overseas!) Other activities including lots of chatting, purusing through photo albums, playing with kids, listening to my speech about Grace's name and the blessing she is in our lives, and watching the 100 day slide show I made (coming soon to blog world). We also had a yummy cake!

Food is very communal here. Instead of taking plates back and sitting down, guests hover over the buffet line and chat there. You can pick things off the serving plates directly with your chopsticks. (The girl in front is my Chinese teacher.)

The featured item from the restaurant is "bing" (upper right corner) which is a pretty broad term used to describe a variety of fried pancake type things. Tell you what, come over and visit and I'll buy you all the varieties of bing you want, and you'll find none is the same and none tastes like the American counterpart. In the middle corner are some fried pork pieces and in the lower right is a dish called "bountiful harvest" that has hunks of pumpkin, potato, green beans, corn and meat.

Here's some more of the spread. (There were 18 dishes in all, including two whole fish.) You can see the corn quite clearly. The dish in the middle left is a noodle made from potatoes. Yummy! The favorites were the fried pork (pictured above), the bing, and the fried, spicy green beans.

Archie's aunties were very eager to feed him, but he was more interested in looking at pictures.

What do you do at 6:30 in the morning? A breakfast story

I'd love to know what you do with your early rising toddler. (It might give me some good ideas.) But, I take mine out to breakfast several times a week followed by a trip to the park. We usually spend about 50 cents and have a great morning.

Here's one of my favorite restaurants. The brown baskets you see behind Archie are where they're steaming the pork buns.

This is my other favorite restaurant. Here's the cook making some fried long donuts. They're not sweet at all, though. It's more like fried bread.

Here are more cooks stuffing the steamed buns.

A close up of the buns:

Ummm. I guess this restaurant might be considered a little messy by some. You can see where they're preparing porridge, boiled eggs and a bunch of other stuff right by the tables. The best thing they're preparing: fresh soy bean milk. I LOVE it! There's another popular drink/soup that I believe could literally be translated "tofu brains." I'm less fond of it.

Here's a case of vegetable side dishes. On top are some "sugar pancakes" They're ok, but I'll take my fried bread and steamed buns any day.

Cooking local style and more

After living overseas for nearly two years, I've FINALLY learned to cook a little like the locals. I've found the key to making my food vaguely resemble what we eat in restaurants and what our friends cook is to use more oil than you could imagine possible and dump in the salt. I'm kind of ashamed to say I haven't learned to cook more, but I guess I'll take progress anywhere I can get it.

The dish on the right is a stalky green vegetable fried with pork pieces and the dish on the right is stir fried egg and tomato. These are both dishes so easy anyone should be able to cook them! I can also make a yummy noodle dish if I cheat a little and buy half-prepared sauce :)

I took Archie to play at a nearby college the other day. I thought he looked cute standing by the fence.

One of our friends mom's came over to visit the other day. It was a nearly constant photo shoot for Archie, but he enjoyed the attention :)

Pizza Party Fun!

I feel like I've come a long way since opening my East Asia Pizza Kitchen one wintry February day. (And Archie has also developed quite a love for the stuff.) I have now hosted two pizza parties, which were fun for all. I am getting good at delegating pizza and pasta making tasks ranging from chopping veggies to frying veggies to rolling out dough to that not-so-fun task of dish washing.

Party #1

Party #2
A small sampling of the food we ate at Party #2. We all used chopsticks to eat the pasta (not pictured). Yes, those are deviled eggs. Who says you can't eat deviled eggs with pizza? One of these pizzas was topped with strawberries by request of the attendees. Yes, it was my first time eating strawberry pizza, but it was pretty good - especially for a Hawaiian pizza lover like me.

East Asia Pizza Kitchen!

Maybe I can open a restaurant. You've heard of California Pizza Kitchen, right? Yum...makes me hungry just thinking about it. Until tonight, the only way to get pizza of decent quality was to hop in the bus and travel all the way downtown to Pizza Hut. However, the generosity of some friends has revolutionized our future culinary experiences. One donated a Great Value pizza crust mix. Another donated some REAL pepperonis from America. I headed to the import store today to buy some shredded cheese, and I whipped up some pizza sauce from a can of tomato paste (about $0.14 USD) and some spices. The verdict: I can make pizza myself! Actually, I wasn't that thrilled with the crust so I've already been searching for some homemade crust recipes for next time. (It will be a bit of a bummer when the pepperoni runs out, though.) Can you guess what the next staple in the DeJ household will be?


Crazy baby! He passed up pizza for...

Homemade chicken salad rice. When you come over to visit, I'll let you choose between the two. Which will it be? Haha!

Oh, I had to take a break from posting vacation pics for some "normal life" stuff. I'll be back soon with Korea Day #2! Stay tuned!

Seoul Korea, Day 1

We had a fantastic time on our first trip to Seoul! This is largely thanks to our friends Eli, Sang Ju and their daughter Selah who let us stay with them and were wonderful tour guides! (Hunter and I were actually starting to experience some culture shock upon arrival because we found ourselves in a country with which we are unfamiliar and do not speak the language.) I have so many wonderful pictures I didn't know where to start so I decided to start with Day 1. (This is Day 1 of 2 in case you're wondering.)

After a brief nap to catch up on some sleep we missed during our all night plane ride from Thailand, they took us out for a great Korean lunch!

Here's a close-up of the food we ate. It features a pumpkin soup appetizer, seaweed for wrapping rice, a tofu soup (black bowl), delicious roasted beef, flat pieces of fish (on plate by beef), a large yummy pancake (not yet on table), smaller fish and vegetable pancakes (in front of beef) and many accompanying sauces and dishes including Korea's famous kim-chi. (Koreans eat kim-chi, which is generally a fermented, spicy cabbage or radish with every meal as far as I can tell.) Hunter and I think Koreans might hold the world record for dirtying the most dishes during a single meal. It's worth it, though!

Archie was ready to chow down!

Carefully note the table arrangements. Koreans like to sit on the floor while they eat around a coffee-height table. (Actually, due to the babies, after posing at this table we headed to a more Western style one so we could contain our kiddos in high chairs.)

This is one of the first streets I walked down. Isn't it pretty with all the flags?

This is a lovely lake in the middle of the city. Unfortunately, the day was a little overcast so the picture is a little dark.
When we got off the airport shuttle, we arrived at Hotel Lotte, where Eli met us in his car and drove us to his house. Here's the Lotte raccoon!

What did we eat for dinner that night? Pizza at home from a local pizza parlor! I had forgotten how good carry-out pizza tastes!

Culinary Delights: Feasting Arabic Style

You didn't just miss a major event in the lives of the DeJs. We haven't moved across the world, but we did discover a pretty good Arabic restaurant in our city.

Unfortunately, there wasn't any real Arabic writing on the sign.

We enjoyed our dinner better because we were eating it with friends!

Lamb pieces, hummus, pita bread, chicken pieces, samosa, and french fries. (Are french fries really traditional Arabic food?)

Archie had fun posing in the little Arabic style house that was decorating the restaurant.

Donkey is Delicious

The correct answer to the Donkey Poll: "I ate one of his cousins." Your answer guesses were evenly split between Archie enjoyed petting the featured donkey and the correct answer.

What does donkey taste like? I had cold sliced donkey, which tasted about like roast beef in the USA. It was ok, but I think I would have preferred it hot. No worries, I'll have more opportunities to try other styles of donkey. The restaurant has a whole donkey section on their menu. However, I should add that donkey has not displaced dog as my favorite meat (or at least favorite unique meat)!

I'll close with a famous saying and let you draw your own conclusions: "Heaven has dragon meat and the Earth has donkey meat!"

Poll Results: Culinary Delights Part II

And the answer is: DOG MEAT AND CREAM CHEESE



What did you say?
43% A Beijing Roast Duck and Sliced Cheese (While I do like it, you have to go to a fairly nice restaurant to get Beijing Roast Duck, and it's not served with sliced cheese.)
14%PB&J (I was just kidding. Peanut butter is not a delicacy here. We have Skippy brand with the label in characters!)
29%Dog Meat and cream cheese - GOOD GUESSING
7%Fresh fish I watched them kill although that would be an option here.
7%Chicken feet and mayo (This is likely but not the right answer. Chicken feet are extremely popular here. They like them many different ways including fresh and pickled. The chicken feet and chicken head are the most expensive parts at the grocery store. Did you know America exports a lot of chicken feet overseas? The good news for me: breast meat is cheap because it's "boring")

We went with some friends to a local dog meat restaurant. We ordered dog soup, fried dog with peppers and steamed dog. The steamed dog was my favorite although it was all good. Dog meat actually tastes quite a bit like dark turkey meat. The flavor is great! The cream cheese on my leftover sandwich was an "American" innovation because I like cream cheese and I had just made my monthly trip to a store that has imports so I could buy some.

The dog soup is in the bowl with the liquid and the fried dog with peppers are on the white plate towards the back. Below is a close up of the steamed dog. YUM!!!

Assimilation

One of our favorite things about living overseas, is experiencing the cultural differences. (This is true most of the time anyway; sometimes if we come at them from the wrong perspective, we can get a little annoyed.) Most parents here believe that diapers (no matter how frequently changed) are bad for a baby's bottom. Therefore, the kids run around in split pants and do their business wherever they happen to be. I think Archie got our hardwood floors wet twice during the shoot. Although he was embarrassed at first and wouldn't look at the camera :) he turned around and smiled for me after awhile.
When Archie is not posing for pictures, he enjoys such activities as playing with his Olympic Mascot doll, Fuwa Nini.

If you haven't voted in the Culinary Delights poll yet, you only have a few more days. I'll post the correct answer June 30.

Culinary Delights: Part II

OK, here we are! Stop 2 on our Culinary Delights tour. (Check out Stop 1 here.) What's for lunch? Take the poll below. Next week, I'll post the correct answer. (I'll try to post some cute pictures of Archie in the meantime.)

What kind of sandwich am I eating?
	Beijing roast duck with sliced cheese
	Peanut butter and jelly (a real luxury here)
	Dog meat and cream cheese
	Fresh fish that I watched them kill
	Chicken feet and mayo
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Culinary Delights: Part I

One thing I love about living in Asia: the food! Prepare your palate because I will be leading us through a series on the culinary delights available here. Because some of the variety proves a bit shocking for the typical Western taste bud, I thought I'd start with something fairly tame: fruit! I love the varieties of fruit around here, and most of it is SO cheap compared to America. (Of course, in the tropical climate of my favorite place to vacation - Thailand - it's better, more varied and cheaper still!)

Shots from our local market where I buy fruits and veggies on the top floor. I think the fruit vendor was kind of honored when I told her I wanted to take pictures of her fruit to share with my friends and family in America. On the far left are delicious mangoes and a little to the right are some leeches wrapped in plastic. Archie loves the Elizabeth Melon in the basket at the top.

This is a mountain bamboo fruit. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with bamboo, though. It's really sweet and really good. The white part is for eating, the rest is skin and shell.

This gui yuan is a winter fruit. In my hand is from left to right is the fruit meat, the seed and the skin. It tastes like a grape only sweeter. Although it's trouble separating the fruit from the skin and seed, it's worth it!