Cooking = Love (Day 4)

Day 4 of our vacation was spent by sleeping in, getting massages, and generally lounging around until mid-afternoon. Around 3 we headed into town to meet the person who would pick us up to go to a cooking class. She took us and a group of about 8 other people to the local market. She showed us lots of produce and explained how Chinese people generally cook it. She also kindly informed us that the market was divided up into 2 parts, and in the second part we may see cats and dogs getting their heads cut off, so we could opt out of that part if we wanted to. Most of us did, but a few brave souls went into the meat section. I’m fairly certain I would have vomited had I seen a dog getting its head chopped off. But….now I know that if a dog is meant to be eaten, they shave all its fur off. Now I’m going to be sad every time I see a shaved dog.

On to the cooking! 

 We learned how to make several things. First up were stuffed vegetables. We made a mixture of ground pork, spring onions, oyster sauce, and salt to use as the stuffing. We put this into mushroom caps, an eggplant “hamburger” haha, tofu (not even close to my fave), and then made some meatballs with the remaining meat. These were then steamed while we made everything else.

Now, on to possibly my favorite dish of all time (vegetable-wise): eggplant Yangshuo style. We used eggplant (something I never thought I would like, much less love), garlic, ginger, spring onions, chili paste, and oyster sauce to create a concoction of deliciousness such as your palate has never experienced. I’ll certainly be making this for my family when I come home for Christmas – get excited – as well as on a regular basis for the rest of forever. Yum.

It was so good that I was sad when it was gone. Did you hear me Mom? I was sad when my vegetables were gone!

Then it was on to the beer fish (locally called Pijiu Yu). Now, I’ll be entirely honest about this: I hate fish. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this dish, and I still think I would like it a ton more if it were made with chicken….but it wasn’t bad. We used catfish, tomato, green and red peppers, spring onion, garlic, ginger, salt, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and beer (dur). I wasn’t exactly a fan of the beer flavor of the sauce, so maybe I could find a substitute for it when I make this dish with chicken? Cooking gurus, help me out!

And den……chicken with cashew nuts. No words can describe how much I enjoyed this dish. I thought I knew how to make good chicken….and I still think I do! (You thought I was going to say that I was wrong about that didn’t you?! Nope, I still think I was and am a pretty good cook.) But this cashew chicken was a whole new dimension. The sauce was unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. We used chicken, roasted cashew nuts (do you know how easy it is to make your own roasted nuts?!), carrot, garlic, giner, salt, oyster sauce, soy sauce, black pepper, and greenie beanies. Throw it all together and BOOM! you have a masterpiece! And here’s what I’ve discovered is the secret to Chinese vegetables: they add them very very last and only stir-fry them for a moment – long enough to get hot, but not long enough for them to get squishy and gross. We had been keeping our fish and bok choy (I didn’t like it at all so I didn’t even bother writing about it haha…) under our wok lid. Put all 3 together, plus our steamed stuffed vegetables, and it was time for dinner!

The setting of our cooking class was rather quite picturesque. It was a very “out-of-the-way” little place and such a lovely place to sit and eat the delectable dishes we had created. 

Chelsie had a very fun and interesting cooking friend next to her. He was already in the middle of drinking a beer (who knows what number) when we arrived, and as Chelsie later informed me, was taking shots out of little airplane bottles of liquor the whole time we were cooking. He was a very silly German man. He waved his giant Chinese knife – you may know it by the name of a CLEAVER – around like it was a tea spoon and kept joking with our instructor about accidentally chopping off his fingers. At one point Chelsie asked him if she should be nervous to be standing next to him. Fortunately he wasn’t drunk enough to be a disaster, but certainly tipsy enough to be utterly hilarious. It’s fun to make friends.

 I’m fairly certain that Erica, our teacher, deserves photo cred. just for putting up with the lot of us. She was awesome. At one point, she was explaining what kind of cooking oil to use when cooking Chinese dishes. She told us not to use sesame or soybean oil because the flavor would be too strong. She said we should use peanut oil because it was the best….however due to her accent she pronounced it was “penis oil”. Every single person in the room (German, British, and American alike) wanted to laugh. Chelsie’s friend kept looking over at her as though he was going to die from holding it in…..but alas we were all polite and did not laugh at her ChEnglish. She was a fantastic teacher and I had a great time cooking again for the first time in months!