Chinese Buffet Strategy at Chow King in Marietta, Georgia by Ruth Paget

Chinese Buffet Strategy at Chow King in Marietta, Georgia by Ruth Paget 

There is so much food available at Chinese buffets on the East Coast like Chow King in Marietta, Georgia that you need a strategy to navigate them, especially as they now have pan-Asian offerings like Vietnamese phô soup, Japanese hibachi grilled food, and sushi in addition to piles of Chinese fried and stir-fried food. 

People from the West Coast should know that before going wild on all the sushi that the white they see in the maki rolled sushi is not octopus, but Philadelphia Cream Cheese. I like sushi and cream cheese, but not together. I ate what I took, but will pass the next time I see them. 

For the buffet offerings, I have taken my cue from Chinese senior citizens about what to eat. Most buffets have mounds of seafood refried rice and lo mein egg noodles that I always head for. The seafood rice is made with seafood broth, which gives it a bright orange color. It is then refried with egg, peas, and carrots. I fill half my plate with this item. 

The other half of my plate I fill with lo mein egg noodles that have been stir-fried in peanut oil with soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sesame oil added at the end. 

On top of the rice and lo mein noodles, I fill ¾ of the plate with stir-fried broccoli, mushrooms, and carrots flavored with nuoc nam or nam pla salty fish sauces from Vietnam and Thailand. The remaining ¼ of my plate, I fill with tangy orange chicken, which I consider dessert. 

I do two rounds of this combination and then eat chocolate pudding for dessert. 

Almost all Chinese buffets have these delicious items like the ones at Chow King in Marietta, Georgia by joint base Clay-Dobbins Air Force Base. Chow King has five large rooms, plenty of parking, and air conditioning, which add to the reasons for trying Chinese food. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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5-Spice Powder Shrimp Stir-Fry at Golden Star Chinese Restaurant in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget

5-Spice Shrimp Stir-Fry at Golden Star Chinese Restaurant in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget

I ordered shrimp vegetable stir-fry from Golden Star Chinese Restaurant in Salinas, California and knew from the wonderful aroma that the restaurant used 5-spice powder to make this dish. Golden Star combines 5-spice powder shrimp with thin, bite-size pieces of broccoli, cabbage, carrots, zucchini, and mushrooms to make this delicious “food as medicine” stir-fry. 

5-spice powder appeals to the following Chinese flavor profile: 

-sweet 

-bitter 

-sour 

-salty 

-savory 

The typical 5-spice powder blend is made with the following ingredients. Several of these ingredients contain strong antioxidants that help remove free radicals that can cause cancer from the body:

-star anise 

-cloves 

-Chinese cinnamon 

-Sichuan pepper

 -fennel seed 

These flavors blend with the usual Chinese seasonings of fresh garlic and fresh ginger that go in with the peanut oil to start a stir-fry. The shrimp is then added and cooked a few minutes and followed by the vegetables. The hot oil draws out moisture from the shrimp and vegetables. The moisture is hot and is perfect to cook seasonings without burning them. 

At this point, many Chinese restaurants will add in a mixture of cornstarch and water to give the food a glowing sheen. Golden Star does not appear to do this, which I do not mind. The vegetables in the shrimp vegetable stir-fry I ate were bright and tender as they were. 

The nutrient powerhouse in this dish at Golden Star was the broccoli with Vitamin C (an antioxidant), potassium, and vitamin B6 (nutrition information from the USDA – US Department of Agriculture website).

Cabbage has large amounts of vitamin C as well (nutrition information from the USDA – US Department of Agriculture website). Carrots contain large amounts of vitamin A (from the WebMD.com website). Mushrooms contain antioxidants (from the Medical News Today website). 

What is nice about this highly nutritious 5-spice powder shrimp vegetable stir-fry is that it is very flavorful without being spicy hot. The Sichuan peppercorns in the 5-spice powder made the dish refreshing without the numbing heat that they are famous for. 

People trying Chinese food for the first time might enjoy this shrimp vegetable stir-fry at Golden Star Chinese Restaurant in Salinas, California on South Main Street. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Tea Lunch at Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget

Tea Lunch at Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget  

I first learned about tea lunch with bite-size dim sum dumplings made with seafood, pork, and vegetables in Hong Kong as a teenager before going on a 3-week study tour in the People’s Republic of China with the Detroit Youth Tour to China in 1979.

I loved it that the waiters in Hong Kong all spoke English and could tell me what the dim sum in the steam carts they rolled among the tables were. They also showed me how the billing worked by placing a red ink round mark on the bill with the number of dim sum taken of each kind. At the end of the meal, they would total up everything along with the tea and you would pay at the table. That was a first-class introduction to tea lunch with dim sum dumplings in Hong Kong. 

Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California continues this type of positive intercultural food experience. The menu has a photo of each dim sum, which is sold 4 to a basket along with a description of what the dim sum is in English. The dim sum arrive in a waiter robot powered by a waiter in so-close-to-Silicon-Valley Salinas. 

My daughter Florence Paget and I shared the following dim sum and jasmine tea: 

-shrimp dumplings steamed in rice flour pastry shells that looked like small, squinched, clutch coin purses. The gooey rice flour pastry makes the shrimp inside retain its salty, sweet flavor, but the texture of the steamed pastry shell might put off people trying dim sum for the first time. 

-deep-fried shrimp balls 

-pork dumplings coated in creamy and spicy hot peanut and red pepper sauce from Sichuan 

-Chinese donuts that resemble long Mexican churro donuts. The donuts come with a super sweet dipping sauce. 

The dumplings at Dim Sum Inn are not bite-size like the ones in Hong Kong. It takes about two bites to eat the dumplings in this great deal restaurant in Salinas, California that has: 

-a large parking lot 

-a large banquet room 

-easy to understand menus with photos 

-vegetarian dim sum and lunch items 

-easy access from Highway 101 and Highway 68 

Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California merits a detour as the Michelin guidebooks say. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Vegetarian Singapore Rice Noodles at Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget

Vegetarian Singapore Noodles at Dim Sum Inn in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget 

I chose to order vegetarian Singapore rice noodles at Dim Sum Inn on North Main Street in Salinas, California to try a Hong Kong classic dish that probably refers to a light lunch you can eat in Singapore’s heat using exotic curry powder from India. (Singapore is not in China though most of its inhabitants have Chinese ancestry.) 

Singapore rice noodles usually come with meat or shrimp, but I chose a lacto-ovo vegetarian version that came with scrambled eggs stir-fried into the mix.

I consulted www.recipetineats.com for a Singapore rice noodles recipe. According to this site, to stir-fry Singapore rice noodles, you heat sesame and peanut oil and add fresh ginger, fresh garlic, green onions, hot red chiile peppers, curry powder, and white pepper to the hot oil. 

Once the oil is thoroughly impregnated with those flavors, you add bite-size pieces of the following vegetables:

-baby bok choy (similar to cabbage, but bulb shaped) 

-broccoli 

-celery 

-carrots 

-green peppers 

-green beans 

Once those vegetables are blazing hot you add in the eggs to stir-fry scramble them. The rice noodles come last to be stir-fried. Rice noodles just need to be hydrated in warm water and drained before adding them to the stir-fry. 

This fragrant dish arrived hot on a waiter robot for a Silicon Valley touch at the table. The robot is operated by a waiter, which liberates the waiter’s arms to safely bring additional dishes. 

The Singapore rice noodles are a lunch special at Dim Sum Inn, which come with egg flower soup or hot and sour soup. I drank a strongly perfumed jasmine tea with my meal for the perfect afternoon lunch. 

Dim Sum Inn serves dim sum tea lunch daily in addition to lunch specials except Tuesdays when the restaurant is closed. Dim Sum Inn is in a large shopping center opposite Northridge Mall with lots of parking. The restaurant also has a large banquet room and an equally large menu for planning banquets and dim lunches for private parties in a friendly atmosphere. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Nutritious Chinese Vegetables by Ruth Paget

Nutritious Chinese Vegetables by Ruth Paget 

The appearance of more and more Chinese vegetables in supermarkets prompted me to purchase The Chinese Kitchen Garden: Growing Techniques and Family Recipes from a Classic Cuisine by Wendy Kiang-Spray. 

This cookbook lists 38 Chinese vegetables with photos, nutrients, best growing conditions, and a recipe for each vegetable. Three stand-out recipes for their ease of preparation and important nutrients follow: 

1-Chinese Garlic Chives 

These are eaten as vegetables in Chinese cuisine and not just as flavorings according to Kiang-Spray. The author writes that garlic chives have the following nutrients and properties:  

-fiber 

-vitamins A and C 

-folates 

-beta-carotene 

-anti-bacterial properties 

-anti-fungal properties 

Kiang-Spray provides a quick recipe to make the best use of plentiful garlic chives – stir-fried flowered chives with roast duck. (You could easily substitute roast chicken in this recipe.) 

The recipe calls for one roasted duck breast, oil, hoisin, chives, and ginger. You cut the duck breast into 2-inch sections and then cut these sections into thin julienne strips. Next you heat oil in a wok to stir fry the duck and chives. It takes 6 minutes to cooks this dish after minimal preparation work. Serve this economical dish with steamed rice. 

2-Snow Peas and Sugar Snaps 

Kiang-Spray lists the following nutrients and properties in snow peas and sugar snaps:  

-protein 

-fiber 

-vitamins C and K 

-folates 

-iron 

-antioxidants 

-anti-inflammatory properties 

Kiang-Spray provides another easy recipe full of nutrition called chow fun, which is made with 4 cups of vegetables, soy sauce, shaoxing wine, oyster sauce, peanut oil, and noodles. 

To make chow fun, cut the noodles into ¾-inch strips. Stir fry the noodles in a wok and set aside. Add more oil to the wok and the 4 cups of sugar snaps and other hard vegetables. Cook the vegetables until tender and serve over the noodles. 

3-Bitter Melon 

Kiang-Spray lists the following properties in bitter melons: 

-anti-viral properties 

-antioxidants 

The recipe the author provides features just the peeled skin of the bitter melon along with garlic, tofu, and fermented black beans. These ingredients are stir-fried together and served with steamed rice. The tofu is marinated beforehand in shaoxing rice wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, white pepper, and salt. 

The complete recipes for these three dishes are in the cookbook along with others for the 38 Chinese vegetables that Kiang-Spray writes about. Each vegetable entry has a photo, growing notes, nutrients, and cultural background for some entries. 

Gardeners might be interested in learning how to design a Chinese garden, grow vegetables using raised beds and container gardens, and Chinese gardening tools. Kiang-Spray also discusses compost and how it helps soil for growing produce. 

I like the easy recipes in The Chinese Kitchen Garden: Growing Techniques and Family Recipes from a Classic Cuisine by Wendy Kiang-Spray as well as the information about how to grow a vegetable garden in a variety of soils and climactic conditions. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Chinese Hot Pot Meals by Ruth Paget

Chinese Hot Pot Meals by Ruth Paget 

Jeff Mao writes that his family looks forward to weekly hot pot dinners like Americans do barbecue in The Essential Chinese Hot Pot Cookbook: Everything You Need to Enjoy and Entertain at Home. 

Mao writes that hot pot cooking is usually done with two broths at the dining table with sauce and beverage tables set around the dining room table. You use spider strainers to dunk thinly sliced meats, greens, seafood, mushroom, noodles, and store-bought dumplings and fish balls in the broth to cook before dipping the food item in sauce to eat says Mao in his mini lesson on hot pot etiquette.

Mao continues to write that hot pot meals usually feature two cooking broths – one spicy and one mild. These broths can simmer in a cooking pot with compartments that look like the yin and yang symbol (photo in book). 

Mao has 20 different recipes for broths, but the lists the following as the most popular: 

1-Ma La Broth 

The most popular nation-wide broth is from Chongqing in Central Sichuan Province of China. Ma La is a numbing hot and fiery red broth. This broth also contains ginger, fermented black beans, and scallions in the recipe Mao provides. 

2-Mandarin Duck Broth 

This broth is vegan and uses no duck. It is the usual accompanying broth to go with Ma La Broth. It is made with shiitake mushrooms, garlic, scallions, ginger, dried Chinese dates, dried goji beans, sugar, and salt Mao writes. 

3-Tomato Broth 

This is another mild and vegan broth. 

4-Mandarin Lamb Broth 

This broth is mild and is popular in Northern and Western China. 

5-Yunnan Mushroom Broth 

This is another mild broth with an earthy flavor Mao writes. 

Mao lists 20 broths that come from around China. Two of these regional broths that appear easy and delicious include: 

-Heilongjiang Broth 

This broth comes from China’s northeast bordering Inner Mongolia and Russia. It is made with garlic, chives, scallions, ginger, dried shrimp, and goji berries. 

-Hainan Chicken Broth 

This broth comes from China’s southernmost point on the Island of Hainan. It is made with chicken, coconut water, coconut flakes, ginger, and scallions. Mao notes that the heat in the broths comes from dried chili peppers. 

If numbing heat does not appeal to you, remove some of the dried chili peppers. 

Mao provides recipes for 20 hot pot combination meals using basic broths along with vegetables only or with seafood and meat. An added plus is Mao’s recipe for making homemade Lo Mein noodles that only take 45 minutes to make with most of the time resting. 

Finally, among Mao’s homemade sauces are some that you could use on American grilled foods as well:  

-ginger-scallion oil 

-Sichuan-chili oil 

-chili-lime sauce 

There is something for beginners to advanced cooks in The Essential Chinese Hot Pot: Everything You Need to Enjoy and Entertain at Home by Jeff Mao that makes it worth the purchase if you like Chinese food and would like a glimpse into Chinese home life.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Chinese Food in Smyrna, Georgia by Ruth Paget

Chinese Food in Smyrna, Georgia by Ruth Paget 

When my husband Laurent and I go to Atlanta (Georgia), we love searching out neighborhood Chinese restaurants for plump, briny shrimp dishes. 

One of the best meals we have eaten in Atlanta was at the The Peking Garden, which was built to look like a Chinese house with red doors in Smyrna, Georgia. 

The Peking Garden is unassuming outside, but has some nice artwork inside - a bubbling and spotlessly clean aquarium by the entryway is a 5-foot porcelain vase, a wall-size bas relief sculpture painting of diners at a garden tea pavilion, paintings of feather-rich birds turning their heads sitting on top of bushes with flowers, and curling dragon sculptures rippling across the walls. I like Chinese art, so the effect of all the art on me was to make me serene and happy. 

Many East Coast city people seek out high quality Chinese food. When we ate at Peking Garden, there were Latino families, Chinese families, African-American couples, policemen, and Laurent and me in the restaurant for a late Sunday lunch. I felt like a cross-section of Atlanta’s population was out for a delicious and pleasurable meal. 

The Chinese are experts at cooking seafood and do wonders with Georgia’s incomparable plump shrimp. We chose a simple dish that really lets the shrimp shine – kung pao shrimp. Laurent chose the mild sauce for his order, and I ordered a spicy sauce for mine. 

Kung pao shrimp’s main ingredients are shrimp, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, carrots, and peanuts. The sauce is what really makes this dish delicious. It is made with dark and light soy sauces, fresh ginger, Sichuan peppers (numbing yet delicious), vinegar, water, and a little sugar. 

Kung pao shrimp fills you up when you eat it with an order of white rice for each person. It also clears your sinuses, so brink some tissue with you. 

The kung pao shrimp was about $13 for each order. I think that price is very fair for the delicious and healthy meal we ate. 

Peking Garden Restaurant 

2526 S. Cobb Drive SE 

Smyrna, Georgia 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Yunnan China's Food as Medicine by Ruth Paget

Yunnan China’s Food as Medicine by Ruth Paget 

The people of Yunnan China are reputed to be very healthy and long- lived writes Georgia Freedman in Cooking South of the Clouds: Recipes and Stories from China’s Yunnan Province. 

This southwestern Chinese province extends from snowy, southern Tibet in the north to tropical borders in the south with Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. 

There are 24 minority groups in this province with distinct cooking styles that make use of some common ingredients including: 

-mushrooms (there are 800 varieties in this region) 

-Yunnan ham (this is similar to Spanish Serrano ham) 

-pickled vegetables (especially pickled mustard greens, which Freedman provides a recipe for) 

-spicy chili peppers -garlic 

-Yak meat (beef is a substitute) 

The following five dishes give a flavor for the types of recipes in Cooking South of the Clouds:

*mushrooms stir-fried with Thai chilies and garlic cloves that is seasoned with soy sauce 

*fried rice with ham, potato cubes, and peas 

*stir-fried beef with pickled mushroom greens and garlic chives 

*fried beef with fresh lettuce (the beef here is served on a bed of lettuce leaves with chopped spring onions on top. Raw vegetables are usually found in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine not what you typically associate with Chinese food.) 

*dried Mushroom Salad – dried mushrooms are rehydrated and drained and then seasoned with vinegar, light soy sauce, and chopped coriander. 

The complete recipes are in Cooking South of the Clouds: Recipes and Stories from China’s Yunnan Province by Georgia Freedman. 

People who like spicy foods might enjoy trying these recipes from one of China’s lesser-known provinces.  

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Chicago Dim Sum by Ruth Paget

Chicago Dim Sum by Ruth Paget 

Eating Chinese dim sum was one of the money hacks I used to lead an urbane existence in Chicago on a budget as a young woman. 

On Sunday mornings, my husband Laurent and I would leave our apartment in Marina City and walk up Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place Shopping Center. Our destination was Rizzoli Bookstore. At Rizzoli’s we would buy Le Monde and Financial Times newspapers. I would sometimes buy art books or novels by Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie. 

We would check out upcoming movies on the way out and walk down to the Chinese restaurant with dim sum tea lunch, which is what I think is the Shanghai Terrace of the Peninsula Hotel now. I liked the circular booths in the restaurant. 

We ordered fragrant jasmine tea to start as waitresses wheeled carts of steaming dim sum by our table. We pointed at many of them, and waitresses noted our choices with a Chinese stamp and wrote how many we chose. 

There is a very good book for ordering dim sum called Dim Sum Field Guide by Carolyn Phillips. Her book is not a cookbook, but has line drawings of various dim sum, dim sum tea etiquette, Chinese characters for the various dim sum, alphabet spellings for Mandarin character pronunciations, and dim sum ingredients. 

I used the cookbook Dim Sum and Other Chinese Street Food to find ingredients used in three dim sum “dumplings” that you can order in almost all dim sum restaurants: 

*jiaozu – ravioli-like coin purse pasta made with minced pork, Napa cabbage, bok choy, and garlic chives 

*Siu Mai – egg dough cups that are squeezed and twirled before steaming that are made with minced pork and shrimp, bamboo shoots, black mushrooms, and water chestnuts 

*Har Gau – Crescent shaped dumplings stuffed with minced shrimp, water chestnuts, pork fat, and sherry 

Leung’s cookbook shows hot to set up bamboo steamers in a wok over boiling water as well. 

Pre-made dim sum would be welcome to many people who are working at home, because you would just have to steam them or heat them up in an oven. H Mart in California just might have all you need to set up dim sum tea lunches from tea to chopsticks. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Wine and Chinese Food Pairings Suggested by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Wine and Chinese Food Pairings Suggested by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I learned to pair wine with Chinese food in an unlikely location; outside Stuttgart, Germany at the King’s Palace Restaurant in downtown Vaihingen.

One of the major industries of Stuttgart besides cars (Mercedes-Benz and Porsche production) and chocolate (Ritter-Sport) is Riesling wine production.  Stuttgart is part of the traditional region of Swabia, which is located next to Alsace, France with that region’s Rieslings, Gewürztraminers, and light sparkling wines called crémants.

My husband Laurent and I shopped in Strasbourg, Alsace at least once a month to purchase Alsatian wine when we lived in Stuttgart.  We also took extended vacations in Burgundy to purchase Pinot Noirs and Beaujolais.

All these wines match up well with different Chinese dishes.

The 6 wine varietals I will use for wine pairing follow:

-Dry Riesling

-Riesling

-Gewürztraminer

-Pinot Gris (Pinot Grigio)

-Beaujolais (Gamay varietal)

-Pinot Noir

I have used Ken Hom’s Complete Chinese Cookbook as a reference for matching restaurant recipes with these wines.

The first bit of wine pairing advice Ken Hom gives is that Shaoxing rice wine, which resembles sherry, goes best with Chinese food.  Later, however, he concedes that dry whites and light reds go with Chinese food.

I have added gewürztraminer to this list, because it is dry and fruity in Alsace despite being a little heavy on residual sugar elsewhere.  (Some people would like this sugary taste to go with pork dishes, especially those people who eat pork chops with applesauce or braised red cabbage – rotkohl.)

To start I would mention that rosé goes well with the diversity of dishes offered at dim sum brunches.  Rosé can stand up to the vinegar used in many dipping sauces for various dim sum.  (See The Dim Sum Field Guide: A Taxonomy of Dumplings, Buns, Meats, Sweets, and Other Specialties of the Chinese Teahouse by Carolyn Phillips for illustrations and recipes for dim sum favorites.)

I recommend trying the following dishes with the following wines:

- Dry Riesling

1 - Honeyglazed Pork

2 – Roast Crispy Pork Belly

3 – Cashew Chicken

4 – Lemon Chicken

5 – Walnut Chicken

- Riesling

1 – Pork with Black Bean Sauce

2 – Fried Fish with Garlic and Green Onions

3 – Steamed Fish Cantonese Style

4 – Steamed Salmon with Black Beans

5 – Mango Shrimp

- Gewürztraminer

1 – Chili Pork Spareribs

2 – Steamed Pork with Spicy Vegetables

3 – Barbecued Pot Roast

4 – Cold Beijing Pork

5 – Steam Pork Loaf

- Pinot Gris (Pinot Grigio)

1 – Shrimp with Honey-Glazed Walnuts

2 – Crab Casserole in a Clay Pot

3 – Sichuan-style Scallops

4 – Stir-fried Squid with Vegetables

5 – Stir-fried Broccoli with hoisin sauce

- Beaujolais (Gamay varietal)

1 – Mongolian Hot Pot

2 – Yunnan Steamed Chicken

3 – Barbecued Quails

4 – Beef in Oyster Sauce

5 – Stir-fried Pepper Beef with Snow Peas

- Pinot Noir

1 - Crispy Sichuan Duck (mild spices)

2 – Cantonese Roast Duck

3 – Eight Jewel Duck

4 – Braised Duck

5 – Stir-Fried Lamb with Garlic (with beef this becomes Mongolian beef)

Note – Cabernet Sauvignon also goes well with Chinese duck dishes that are not too spicy.

The wine pairings here are my suggestions based on being surrounded by some of the best white wines to go with Chinese food in Stuttgart, Germany.  Trips to France added the Burgundy reds (Pinot Noir varietal) and Beaujolais (Gamay varietal) to Germany’s Rieslings.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Egg Foo Yuck by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Egg Foo Yuck by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I began reviewing restaurants for the Monterey County (CA) Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) via a small column called “Side Dish.”  My second column was about how I came to like Chinese food.

The following article has been modified somewhat, but I still love Asian restaurants for being able to whip up Cantonese refried rice with cooked egg strips, chopped ham, and peas at almost any time of day:

Egg Foo Yuck

My sister worked as a waitress at the Ho-Ho Inn in Detroit’s (MI) Cass Corridor across from the Art Institute while in college.  She brought me to work one day and sat a plate of Egg Foo Yung in front of 5-year-old me.

I quickly renamed this dish, “Egg Foo Yuck.”  Tears ran down my cheeks as I thought about eating it.

The Chinese waiter named George in and looked at me.  He took the Egg Foo Yuck and threw it in the garbage.

He went to the freezer and brought me a coconut and mango ice cream cup.  My sister came in and glared at me.

George said, “She ate everything, so I gave her an ice cream.”

I smiled sweetly at George.  My love for the Chinese, if not their food, began at that instant.

I wanted to visit China one day after that despite the fact “China” was Communist and off-limits for travel during most of my childhood.

In 1978 when I was 14, I raised money with 21 other young people to visit the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China, which was going to be formally recognized as the official representative of the Chinese people on March 1, 1979 when we enter China from Hong Kong.)

I dreaded the culinary side of our visit, because I did not like pork, China’s staple meat at the time.  I was suspicious of all seafood.  My tour mates teased me about all food, saying the shrimp was really cat, rat, or dog or that the dog meat was on the next buffet table.

I subsisted on rice and soup broth for two weeks.  I cringe now when I think of wasting food in a country that still had a collective memory of famine due to The Great Leap Forward, which featured bad planning.  (5 million people died.)

At lunch on a commune outside Shanghai, I tried to play down the fact that Americans had been described in classrooms and in textbooks as foreign devils until just 2 weeks before when China and the US formally recognized each other diplomatically on March 1, 1979.

I was 15 and did not like pork, but I liked pork stir fried with firm, white bean curd and cabbage.  I could not get enough of that and thanked the commune workers at our after-lunch briefing for the meal and admitted that I did not like Chinese food until I visited China and tried that dish.

After graduation from the University of Chicago, I worked for a translation firm and boutique PR firm in Chicago.  We worked with both Asian and European firms.  We celebrated many Chinese banquets at House of Hunan and Szechuan House for clients from both continents at these places.

I learned to say “xie-xie” – thank you – many times.

When I was 31, I bought a wok and a Chinese cookbook. (Lo’s Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines.  He used MSG, but I left it out and kept this treasure chest of Chinese food.)

This cookbook listed different cooking techniques and said that this was “just an abbreviated list.”  I had to relearn how to chop vegetables.  I tried several dishes, but my family had its favorites:

-Cantonese rice

-Egg Drop Soup

-Stir-Fried Beef in Oyster Sauce

When my daughter Florence was small, I showed her China on the map and said:

“Rice grows in South China where it’s hot and rainy in the summer.”

I pointed to the North and said:

“The Chinese grow wheat for noodles and dumplings in the North,” I said.

I showed her how to stir-fry Chinese bok choy cabbage in the wok and hoped that she would visit China one day loving Chinese food before she went.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Note:  Today I use Ken Hom’s cookbooks and Fuscia Dunlop’s cookbooks to prepare Chinese food.

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Eating Cantonese (Chinese) Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Cantonese (Chinese) Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When I originally wrote this restaurant review of Chong’s in downtown Monterey several years ago, Chong’s was a Cantonese restaurant (notably featuring dishes with black bean sauce).

Now Chong’s has transformed itself into an all-around Chinese restaurant (notably featuring dishes with hot, red peppers) thanks to books like Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes for Hunan Province (Hunan is the province next to Sichuan which uses the same ingredients with less fiery results.)

This review remains relevant for comparing the Chinese community of the Monterey Peninsula to that of San Francisco and many other Chinatowns around the country.

When I described this Chinatown situation to the editor of the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000), she was interested in learning more about China and thought Weekly readers might be as well.  The article I wrote follows:

After 40 Years, Chong’s Features the Familiar Dishes and Some Special Cuisine from South China

During a recent dinner party, I asked our friend C., who is Chinese, what his favorite restaurant is in Monterey.

“Chong’s,” he replied without hesitation.

He told me that Chong’s features many dishes from China’s southernmost area of Canton, which distinguishes it from other area restaurants serving dishes from northern China.

Northern Chinese who followed immigrants to the Monterey Peninsula account for the many Northern Chinese restaurants featuring Mandarin Chinese cuisine here.

In most Chinese restaurants around the country, including San Francisco’s Chinatown, you will find Cantonese cuisine.  The overwhelming number of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. came from Canton (referred to as Guangdong by the Peoples’ Republic of China), which includes Hong Kong.

Chong’s take-out menu says its cuisine is Szechuan from Western China, but a look at the menu shows a preponderance of Cantonese classics like shrimp with black bean sauce as well as Chinese-American classics such as chop suey, which were created by Cantonese chefs in America.

After our meals, our server confirmed that all the chefs at Chong’s have Cantonese origins.

The mild climate of Canton and its access to the sea make for a cuisine that prizes fresh vegetables, fish, and seafood served with light sauces.

Cantonese foods are consequently held in high esteem throughout China – similar to the way that French food is esteemed in parts of Europe.

Hong Kong reigns as the capital of Cantonese cuisine and many innovations using new agricultural products with traditional cooking methods come from this gastronomic capital.

When I saw that Chong’s offered steamed fish on its menu, I immediately ordered it while my husband Laurent ordered the shrimp with cashews.

A cup of egg-flower soup comes with the meal along with rice.

Chong’s dresses up its version of the egg-flower soup with tofu rods, chicken, tomato, celery, snow peas, and straw mushrooms.  I liked the soup, but the celery made me think I was eating American soup.

The steamed rock cod I ordered was large – probably twelve inches large from head to tail.  Mounded-up, shredded Chinese chives and cilantro covered the fish, which was surrounded by broccoli with long stems.

Chinese cookbooks poetically call broccoli prepared in this manner “jade tree.”  The fish looked dramatic on the platter with the sauce setting off the greens.

With this glorious dish in front of me, I imagined I was eating in a Hong Kong restaurant looking out at the twinkling lights of the harbor as I inhaled the savory scent that wafted towards us.

The succulent sauce, made from sesame oil, soy sauce, and a bit of freshly grated ginger, enhanced the flavor of the pungent chives and cilantro.  Chinese chives have a more pronounced onion taste than American chives.  These Chinese chives tasted great with the broccoli.

The flesh of the fish slid off the bones, which are big in rock cod, making them easy to remove.  Something this good does come at a higher price than most of Chong’s other menu items.  Even the fussiest foodie would like this dish.

The shrimp Laurent ordered came with cashews.  The shrimp had been stir-fried along with snow peas, straw mushrooms, carrots, and zucchini.  The nutty flavor of the sesame came through in the slightly thickened sauce.  The generous portion makes it perfect for family-style dining.

Laurent and I visited the following day to sample more food.  This time we tried the lemon-chicken and spareribs with black bean sauce.

A light, crunchy crust coats moist, white-meat chicken in Chong’s version of lemon-chicken.  The addition of slightly, sweet lemon sauce makes it feel like eating crunchy lemonade.  This is one of my favorite Cantonese dishes.

The spareribs arrived in one-inch pieces and did require some rather indelicate removal of the bones.  These specialties of the Cantonese countryside are coated with mashed, fermented black beans and garlic before they are steamed.

The flavor of the spareribs is earthy and salty at the same time.  Fermented black beans may require some getting used to, but they are favored ingredients all over South China.

During our two visits to Chong’s, we noticed that Chinese families and workers from downtown Monterey filled the tables.  Chong’s location by the Monterey Transit Plaza helps them fill tables.

End of Article

Once Laurent and I had checked out Chong's, I would take Florence there after school for early dinner while Laurent worked at went to graduate school at night.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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