Gogovivi

90 Pounds of Apples

You might have noticed that Gogovivi has been a little quiet since we returned to the U.S. Like my family, this blog is in a period of transition. I have been thinking a lot about its future; in some ways I think it may have come to the end of its natural life with our return home. After all, I started Gogovivi as a way to keep friends and family in touch with Vivian and the rest of us when we were overseas. Now that we are home, I am not sure of its purpose.

I have also been developing the idea for a new blog that has been eating most of my blog energy.

But enough of that; on to the apples!

I will admit it; we overpicked. 90 lbs of Gravensteins was WAY over the top, but by the time I realized how far our pickings had exceeded any reasonable harvest for a family of three, I was already comitted to 90 cents per pound and too embarassed to ask if some of the apples could be sold to someone else.

We overpicked because it was such a perfectly perfect Portland day, the kind I used to dream of fondly while I was sweating in Qingdao's foggy summer, and I never wanted it to end.

We overpicked because as we roamed the orchard, I indulged in the fond memory of one of my most special days in China, the day Vivian and I went to Xiao Li's family's village home and visited an orchard on the other end of the world, overpicking again, but for different reasons.

We overpicked because we were both in such a good mood and I had such an enthusiastic helper.

We overpicked because it was the last day of the u-pick season at Jossy Farms and it seemed a shame to let the apples fall.

We overpicked because I had dreams of pies, applesauce, and apple butter.

Final result:

• 90 lbs of apples @ 85 cents per = $77 spent on apples.
• 30 lbs given away to friends
• 24 apple turnovers in freezer
• 1 fresh apple pie
• 8 apple pie fillings in freezer ready to go
• 3 quarts of sliced apples in freezer
• 4 pints of apple butter
• 16 pints of applesauce
• Two weeks to get all the apples taken care of and eliminate the clouds of fruit flies in the kitchen.

 

 

 

You Will Eat Cookies

I probably should have included instructions with the cookies I sent to school with Vivian to celebrate Valentine's Day:

1. Open the baggie
2. Use both hands to break open the fortune cookie.
3. Retrieve and read the fortune.
4. Eat the cookie.

I have always loved fortune cookies but have never seen one in China. Why not? Because they were not invented in China and they basically don't exist here (or do they?).

Like fortune cookies, Valentine's Day is a holiday of the western world that is mostly a non-event in China, although the more commercial trappings of the day have been showing up in the shops for a couple of years. Among expats, Americans are one of the few nationalities that really even bother with Valentine's Day, which makes it a fun opportunity to share a little of our unique American culture with Vivian's classmates. You see, she is the only American among 15 classmates, so she's in a truly international environment.

I made a big batch of fortune cookies yesterday using this recipe and I can report that the recipe is great, the cookies came out thin and crispy, and the omission of butter from the recipe means that there are no greasy spots on the paper fortunes tucked inside. I doubled the recipe, which I definitely recommend for first-timers, because learning the folding technique takes some trial and error. Plus you need to taste-test a few along the way...

In a seriously non-traditional twist, I decided to ice and decorate the cookies because I have a daughter who loves all things pink and sprinkly, and these are Valentine's fortune cookies, after all.

Hopefully today Vivian's American teacher will explain to the class the interesting phenomenon of the fortune cookie, the "Chinese" tradition that most Chinese (including my beloved housekeeper) have never even heard of, and how fortune cookies really have nothing to do with Valentine's Day.

 

 

Around our Thanksgiving Table

• Eight adults and ten children under the age of 8.
• Americans, Chinese, Israelis, Dutch, British, Australian

• Turkey, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, ginger carrots, spinach salad, sweet potatoes
• Pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and homemade cheescake ice cream

• Chilled Prosecco, Cabernet and Merlot
• Milk for the kids

The worst part of expat life is being so far from home for the holidays. But the best, absolute best, part of expat life is sharing our holidays and traditions with these amazing people we have grown to know and love, people who come from such different backgrounds, cultures, and parts of the world. I am so grateful for these friends and the opportunities we have had to be part of their lives. Happy Thanksgiving.

 

How 'bout them apples?

I know, I know: enough about the Chinese New Year already. But just give me this last post, and I promise I will stop.

For the person who has everything, consider fruit with an auspicious New Year's wish sun-printed right onto the very skin for a unique and special New Year's gift! These apples had a stencil of sorts affixed while they were growing, and the stencil prevented the reddening of the skin under the stencil...et voila!

Or, in a perhaps more realistic scenario, given that we are in China, these apples had a bleaching agent of unknown safety applied to the skin to bleach away the pigment.

Either way, printed apples are one thing I love about living in China.

Linking up to Macro Friday and Days of Gray.

 

Winter squash ravioli, er, pasta sauce

Oh, the joy of a new cooking magazine. I picked up the January 2011 issue of Jamie Oliver's namesake magazine while in Hong Kong last month, and have already made the best meatballs ever, eggplant moussaka, and today, winter squash ravioli.

I started with a large Chinese cleaver and a small squash. Pumpkin? Butternut? Around here its just known as nangua.

The best part of the recipe was heaving that cleaver down on the nangua and lopping it in two.

I cleaved it into wedges, brushed said wedges with olive oil, and roasted in a hot oven of indeterminate temperature for a while until it was soft. My oven is of indeterminate temperature because it is not actually installed or insulated in any way, so it doesn't maintain a steady temperature. Usually I just turn it on to "high" and hope for the best. Today my method worked and the nangua cooked beautifully.

I scooped out all the wonderfully soft, fragrant, and creamy pulp, added a little butter, ground coriander, dried chiles, and grated parmesan cheese. A potato masher really did the job here; three mashes and I was done.

A brilliant and simple recipe with one problem: the recipe calls for pre-made wonton skins in lieu of fresh pasta, and the moment I filled the little raviolis, they filling began peeking out from ruptures in the skins. Apparently Jamie has not tested dumpling skins from the Qingdao Jusco supermarket before publishing this lovely recipe.

But having been trained in the culinary school of hard knocks, after compromising and improvising for five years spent living in Asia, I wasn't even fazed. Yes, the ravioli were a minor disaster, but I salvaged the whole mess by referring to the SImply Recipes recipe for Butternut Squash pasta sauce and improvising accordingly. Return spiced pumpkin pulp to stovetop. Add vegetable broth. Add cream. More cheese. Crisis averted and Friday dinner was on the table, homemade and wholesome, as planned.

I haven't pulled out my macro lens in quite a long time, but was motivated today by my friend and neighbor Christine's challenge to shoot something of beauty, one per day, for these gray days of winter. If you're overwhelmed by the gray of winter and need some photo motivation (plus the joy of reading the musings of a truly talented writer) head over to Homemade in China.

I'm also linking up today, for the first time in a long time, with Macro Friday at Blogging in Bolivia.

Around Qingdao: Green Papaya Coffee

I have long since grown tired of Starbucks Coffee. Even though I take comfort in its ubiquity and its uniformity, I have come to associate Starbucks with mediocrity: its cookie-cutter design aesthetic can be simultaneously welcoming and repellent; its coffee is unpredictable, and its food, particularly in Asia, is borderline at best. Yet I always come back, because in this part of the world, where tea is king and the market is just learning to love coffee, there aren't that many choices.

Which explains why I am so in love, these days, with Green Papaya.

Green Papaya is an independent, Korean-owned coffee shop in Hong Kong Garden that satisfies me where Starbucks fails. Of course the coffee is excellent. It is rich, complex, and smooth. You know the kind: the perfect cafe latte that comes with a pretty little fern leaf pattern in the foam.

Unlike Starbucks, Green Papaya doesn't boast a giant deli case full of semi-stale pastries and insipid sandwiches. In contrast, Green Papaya has an artfully charming, chalk-written lunch menu on its modern-minimalist walls. The menu is small but offers good quality western-style food made by hand and made to order: chicken quesadilla, a variety of sandwiches, and nachos, to name a few choices. The chicken quesadilla is particularly good.

You'll love the coffee, and the kids will love the fresh-baked cookies and ice creams, both made in-house.

And the kids will get a good giggle over the clever and cheeky restroom door.

Green Papaya is located in the Hong Kong Garden area on ZhongZhou Er Lu, just around the corner from the "dodgy DVD" shop and Xin Kuai grocery.

13 things for which I am grateful

My underappreciated husband

My overappreciated daughter

friends and neighbors

abundance

good table manners

anticipation

fun

the adult's table

the kid's table (idea from SimplifiedBee via Pinterest)

kids

help with the dishes

naughty children, giant messes, and teachable moments

  wise monkeys

Thirteen things I am grateful for, brought to you by Thursday 13.

 

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving

I'm a lull and I'm not sure why. Just a few weeks ago I was blogging almost every day, and suddenly, for the past week or so, I feel quiet. Although I am busy in real life, it seems like I suddenly have nothing to say.

Not really nothing, just maybe nothing you would find interesting.

Its the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I am getting ready for the holiday. Mostly, I am thinking and planning and desperately waiting for my pears to ripen.

I need ripe pears so that I can make Roasted Pears with Blue Cheese for Thanksgiving dinner. Its harder to get these pears ripe than you would think. First, the Chinese prefer to eat pears hard, so I am not sure they do the cooling step that is apparently needed to allow pears to ripen. Second, its mighty hard to find a brown paper bag around here. I had to settle for a used gift bag. If I get desperate, I could always get a takeaway order from McDonalds, because I think they use paper bags. But that seems pretty desperate, going to McD's just to get a paper bag. I see no other reason to go there, except to get ice cream.

Once my pears are ripe, I am going to fix the rest of Thanksgiving dinner, too.

• Roasted turkey and gravy. And I plan to give thanks for my oven, an appliance I will never take for granted again now that I have lived in a place where they are a luxury.
• My mom's traditional southern cornbread dressing.
• Sweet potatoes with pecans and goat cheese.
• This yummy snack mix
• bourbon chocolate pecan pie for the grown ups
• butterscotch pudding for the kids
• And maybe some veg.

In other news, yesterday I made chocolate peanut butter buckeyes. I have been obsessing over the recipe since the day it was posted on my favorite food blog, and since I have been sorely deprived of Reses Peanut Butter Cups since living in Asia (I have never seen one here or in Korea), I decided I needed these. Nay, I deserved them. They taste fantastic, although they are not quite as perfect as a Peanut Butter Cup.

I love Thanksgiving, and although I am not religious, I do indulge in a lot of thankful reflection around this time of year. This year especially, I am really looking forward to photographing the day, and was delighted to find this Thanksgiving Photography Checklist for free download at write.click.scrapbook. I'm not a scrapbooker, but I do like to document events - special and everyday - in photographs. This list is just what I need to jump-start the day in photos.

Don't forget this week's The View from Here photo challenge! The theme is "In the Kitchen." Would it be tacky of me to enter my own photo challenge? Because I know I am going to get a lot of keepers from Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, I am linking up with bloggers far and wide in Sweet Shot Tuesday, Communal Global, and Simple as That. Click on over to share the view.

 

 

Around Qingdao: Lao Zhuan Cun Sichuan restaurant

I confess that sometimes it happens: I haven't planned ahead, its 5:00, and I have a family to feed. When the stars converge and we're not the only family on the block who is in bad need of a good dinner, quick, we head to our favorite Qingdao restuarant: Lao Zhuan Cun on Minjiang Lu. The food is already among the best around, but a recent interior remodel has made the whole experience just that much nicer. Especially the going to the loo part.

Did I mention the food is amazing? The menu (which is the thickness and dimension of a Vogue magazine, by the way), is only in Chinese, but with the pictures and a few Chinese food vocabulary skills (meat no meat? Chicken pork beef lamb? Spicy no spicy?) we get by pretty easily. The food is not exactly healthy, being drenched as it is in oil and butter, but it is undeniably habit-forming.

We start the meal with "hen kuai" orders of fried rice and sesame noodles for the little beasts. If you get these for the kids, be sure to insist on the "bu la," or non-spicy version, or your kids will be making faces and crying.

After the noodles, things start getting good. Good as in, spicy so spicy, make your lips tingle Sichuan spicy. First the Qingdao spicy clams, which you have to unearth from under a mountain of dried red and fresh green hot chiles. To cool the heat, sneak bites of buttery, crispy shuai bing in between mouthfuls, and throw in some garlicy green beans, too. If the clams aren't hot enough, move on to the infernal soupy bliss of pork and bok choy in a Sichuan peppercorn and chile broth. Nothing better to douse that flame with than ice-cold Qingdao beer! 

Clockwise from top right: Spicy Qingdao clams, ice-cold Qingdao beer, mega-spicy pork and bok choy, and butterrific "shuai bing" bread with fried garlic beans in the background.

Next up, the main event at this restaurant. This dish is so famous among foreigners that it gives the restuarant its common name, "The Sichuan Lamb Place." Now, I don't know if this lamb is proper Sichuan style or not. I have heard that its more Uighur style. Origin aside, it is incredible. It is a big cut of seasoned lamb roasted on the bone under fires so hot that it leaves the outsides crispy and the insides falling off the bone. The outside bits are a little too spicy for the children, but the inner parts are just right.

Tip: order ahead and get this lamb to go, shred it off the bone, and pair it with pita bread and a tzatziki-style sauce. Or hop to the other end of the home global fusion spectrum and pair it with tortillas, avocado, and fresh salsa. Either way, incredible and easy!

We order enough food for a small village. With so much food, the table was mostly quiet, the adults busy eating and sweating from so many chiles, and the children busy playing iPod games or being spoon fed by their patient mums.

How many Aussie mums do you know that are able to spoon-feel their baby with chopsticks?

Wonder what to do for dessert in a place like this? Battered and fried apples in a molten toffee sauce. Who would have guessed you are in China?

Needless to say, a restaurant with food like this is very popular and busy. If you come without planning ahead (like we always seem to do), be prepared to wait for a table. But if you're more strategic about it, with a quick phone call the morning ahead, you can get a private room and a cigarette smoke-free experience.

The bill for our entire table full of food, plus an ample supply of cold beer was under 350 RMB, or just about $50 USD. Not bad for four hungry adults and three kids.

Lao Zhuan Cun: 150 Minjiang Lu, Qingdao. 8577-2776.

In Praise of Popcorn Balls

About popcorn balls: to me, they seem a fragment of a bygone era, when kids out for trick-or-treating would sometimes get homemade treats thrown into the bag. That's the era (remember it?) before apples became weapons and razor blades were for shaving. I'm not sure I ever fully lived in that era, or whether I am wishfully constructing memories, but I definitely remember getting a popcorn ball in my Halloween loot from time to time.

China isn't big into Halloween, so there is little opportunity for the kids to trick-or-treat. This Halloween was shaping up to be a pretty quiet holiday when we got word that some of the international parents in our apartment complex were putting together a Halloween Fair. I wanted to participate but wasn't terribly inspired when I remembered popcorn balls. Every kid loves popcorn balls, and for most of the young-uns here, it was possible that they had never indulged before.

So I got busy popping, melting and mixing, and Vivian and Jia Heng got busy making the balls. At first they were pretty serious about shaping the balls. Jia Heng seemed to not know that they were edible but the moment he tasted the goo, he gave up any pretense of making balls and devoted 100% of his attention to eating. Vivi pronounced them "Stickyriffic!"

 









Linking up to share my day with Communal Global, and I am happily linking up with Sweet Shot Tuesdays for the first time!