First Night: Dinner in Daxing

We left off, a few posting back, with my first meal upon reaching the Daxing region of China’s capital, Bejing. If you remember the plate, it will filled with dumplings, delicious noodles wrapped around chopped leafy greens. In case you wondered who was making the dumplings, chef allowed me into the kitchen to help, and though he looks a bit hesitant in this foto, and I look a bit over-eager, in fact, he said: “Very Good!”. And he ate my dumpling right up! There were dumplings everywhere, steamed dumplings and fried dumplings, sweet fat boiled dough filled with bean paste and paper thin noodles wrapped around seafood or meat, there were dumplings in soup and dumplings that were filled WITH soup, dumplings with sauce and dumplings awash in red chile oil. there were bao and jiaozi, tang yuan, xiao longao, wuntun, siu mai and dumplings I had no idea what their names were. 

The  dumplings in this picture to the left are not, as they appear to be, small hamburgers, but a tender version of a small english muffin-like dumpling,  split into two and filled with a savoury meat mixture, salty, spicy, with a hit of cumin. Its said that the dish was dreamt up by the Empress Cixi, literally: a dish that came to her in a dream and the next day she had her chefs whip up her vision. To be honest, they are available in many places, some better than others, some mediocre, and some fantastic. There were dumplings and also bread doughs steamed so that they were somewhere between a bread and dumpling: steamed cornbread was one of my favourites.

there were noodles rolled around a mixture of meats and greens, then pan browned, to the left–these were delectable– and to the right: puffy bread dough filled with meats or vegetables then steamed; these steamed/baked dumplings, bao, were filled with a much wider array of mixtures than I’ve found abroad: kung pao chicken filled bao were wonderful!

Another was a strange chewy dough, tang yuan, made of ground rice; to be honest, chewy doesn’t even come close to describing it: the dumpling slithers around your mouth, you think that maybe you will be chewing it forever, that maybe you will chew it for the rest of your life and onto the next one, too, but suddenly you’ve managed to swallow it and in that compelling way that many unusual foods have, you feel like: yes, i’m ready for another one! The tang yuan I was fond of were stuffed with black sesame seed and served with a sweet syrup; i was told that it could be eaten as a savoury dumpling, too, with either a bean paste and/or pork filling instead of sweet sesame.

And, because I don’t want you thinking I ate a very unbalanced meal of dumplings dumplings and more dumplings, there were greens! seafood! tofu salad! and my favourite, cucumber salad: garlicky, spicy, halfway on the road to being a pickle. Cucumber salad is a very good reason to go to Beijing, I say flippantly,  in case the Great Wall, Forbidden City and amazing ancient/modern culture isn’t enough. Cucumber salad: always a good reason to travel the world if you love cucumbers as much as I do.

Besides the chryanthemum leaf salad and the garlicky cucumbers, I was also very fond of shoestrings of tofu, tossed in sesame oil dressing.