Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (20 page)

This simple homely dish will add colour to any multi-dish table, but is also a good choice for breakfast or a light lunch.

3 tomatoes
2 eggs
1 tbsp oil
½ tsp finely chopped ginger
½ tsp finely chopped spring onion
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp salt (or to taste)
½ tsp sesame oil

First peel the tomatoes by putting them into a heatproof bowl, pouring boiling water over them and waiting a few minutes. The skins should now slip off easily. Remove the core and chop roughly.

Beat the eggs and season with a small pinch of salt.

Heat the wok to medium to high heat. Add half the oil, turn the heat down to medium and tip in the beaten egg. As it hits the oil it will puff up; stir it with a spatula to break it into pieces, then remove and set aside.

Clean the wok, heat again, add the rest of the oil, turn down the heat and add the ginger, spring onion and tomatoes. Cook quickly (all you need to do is warm the mixture through), then add the sugar and salt. Mix in well and return the eggs to the pan.

Stir again to mix together the eggs and tomato. Turn off the heat and finish with a splash of sesame oil.

If you start to take texture into consideration you can lift your cooking to new levels. Chinese chefs often add pinenuts to sweetcorn – the eye doesn’t even see them half the time, but they provide a great treat for the mouth (and they are full of healthy oils, too). Minced water chestnuts add a bite to pork or tofu balls; bamboo shoots, lotus root and mushrooms provide a contrast in a stew and are even used in fried rice; a handful of beansprouts makes a unusual crunchy filling for a creamy omelette. The mix of textures can be within the meal as well as in the individual dishes: make your vegetables into purées, steam a whole fish or chicken over a very low heat until the flesh melts in the mouth. Chinese chefs use a wealth of dried vegetables to add interest: you can try sun-dried tomatoes, strips of seaweed or reconstituted fungus.

A basic Chinese store-cupboard

The following bottled seasonings are all mentioned in the text and will enable you to cook most of the recipes in this book or add interest to your own creations.

Chinese cooking wine
(liao jiu)
: This brings out the flavour (
ti wei’r
). It is used for pre-treating practically all meats and fish before cooking and also sprinkled on stir-fries and splashed into stews. The most famous cooking wine is from Shao Xing, but any rice wine can be used.

Vinegar (
cu
):
This is much more heavily used in Chinese cooking than it is in the West. It is believed to dispel the rankness (
xin wei’r
) of meat or fish, but also adds a depth of flavour and contrast to cold mixed and stir-fried dishes. The mild-flavoured, rice vinegar is the most commonly used. Dark, black vinegars, fermented from sorghum, are popular in the north of China and are used as a dip for dumplings.

Soy sauce (
jiang you
):
This is easier to use than salt, and as well as being salty (
xian
) it adds colour and additional liquid to cooked dishes or dressings. There are two types of soy sauce in common usage:
sheng chou
, (literally translated ‘young’ and sold in the West as ‘light’); and
lao chou
(‘old sauce’) – called ‘dark’ in the West. The light soy sauce has the fresher and stronger taste and is used for dressing cold dishes and some stir-fries. Dark soy sauce offers no taste advantage but is used for heavy stews, some beef and lamb dishes and whenever a deep colour is required.

Sesame oil (
xiang you
):
This should not be used for cooking because it does not hold the heat, but it can be splashed onto hot and cold dishes and soups to add or enhance the
xiang
, or fragrant taste.

A note about MSG:
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a flavour enhancer used by some Chinese restaurants. It is a chemical that occurs naturally in some foods, including Parmesan cheese, Shitake mushrooms and seaweed, from which it was originally extracted. It was first imported into China from Japan in the early 1900s and welcomed by chefs trying to make
cai
taste good when fresh ingredients were scarce. MSG is colourless and flavourless but stimulates the nerve endings on the tongue, thus enhancing the eating experience. Unfortunately, this means that it can also stimulate other nerves, causing headaches and twitching. It is not a traditional Chinese food. I have never used it in my cooking school and it is not used in high quality restaurants. You do
not
need it in your store cupboard.

Time to cook

Despite the ease with which the Chinese chef works, no two, or three, ingredients are ever thrown together without consideration. A Chinese chef would never slap a piece of steak in a frying pan or boil potatoes whole. A piece of beef might be treated with wine and cooked with a range of seasonings such as ginger, spring onion and salt and possibly much stronger flavours (in Western China, chillies and in the south, oyster sauce) then partnered with tomatoes or slivers of carrot. Potatoes are generally shredded and stir-fried with Sichuan peppercorns or dried chillies – but I love them sliced and braised with fresh green chilli and soy sauce.

For the uninitiated to reach the degree of food knowledge of the average Chinese domestic cook is a long-term ambition, and cultural differences may mean that it is impossible fully to appreciate all the aspects of the Chinese diet. But you can begin to think more about how you prepare, season and cook your ingredients. All that chopping may seem a bit daunting, especially when followed by a hot wok session. But look back to Chapters Five and Six and remember to base your richer and tastier stir-fried dishes with lighter soups, stews and simmered dishes, which are very simple to prepare and do not require last-minute attention.

The aim of this chapter is to encourage you to make dishes that always taste, look and feel good and to move away from the idea that there are two types of food: the nice, rich, fattening ones, which you want to eat but shouldn’t, and the low-fat, tasteless, boring ones which you don’t want to eat, but should. In China richer, heavier dishes grace the same table as delicate and light ones, but there is no trade-off – they are all enjoyed for their various characteristics.

Of course, it is one thing to enjoy sweet-and-sour aubergine or to appreciate the fragrance of a fresh wok-cooked fish if you have been brought up on such a diet, but if you hanker after steak and chips, pasta with creamy, rich sauces, or cakes and biscuits and luscious puddings, are they really a substitute?

In the first instance just try to incorporate the Chinese approach to cooking into your meal plans. This does not necessarily entail your giving up your household favourites; what you should be focusing on is adding to and developing your diet and eating more and different foods at every opportunity.

nine
Choose ‘live’ over ‘dead’ or processed foods

‘Consider how much time and effort have been spent before food is ready for consumption: in farming, harvesting, processing and cooking, not to mention the slaughtering of animal lives – all this to please our palate. ’

HUANG TING JIAN (AD 1050. 1110)

Qi
, life-force, is all around us, in the earth, in the air and in the heavens. It is found in the balance of
yin
and
yang
and in the flow of the Five-Elements cycle. When we are young our supply of
qi
is plentiful, though all too often we abuse it and suffer in later life. As we get older our supply of
qi
gradually diminishes, until we become weak and eventually die.

A curious incident one October evening helped me to understand the real importance of
qi
in the Chinese diet. It was the end of the October National Day holiday and we had just returned from a weekend at Beidaihe, Beijing’s nearest beach resort and favourite summertime retreat of Communist Party officials. With the new motorway, the drive was only two hours and, having left after a fine lunch of fresh seafood, we arrived home in good time for the children to get ready for school and for me to prepare the evening meal. Leaving our bags in an untidy heap just inside the front door, I went into the kitchen to check out the fridge – but I never got that far. The room was alive with little white maggots. I screamed for help, wondering whether crying was an option, and noticed with horror that the worms had two beady little eyes and a black nose.

Tim started to suck them up into the vacuum cleaner and Max and Christian suddenly remembered urgent engagements with their friends in other compounds, so I attacked the cupboards. I found infestations in my black sesame seeds, walnuts, pinenuts, almonds, Chinese dates and wolfberries. The ‘Job’s tears’ were crawling as was a bag full of dried aubergine slices. We had recently taken a trip to the countryside where, in my usual spirit of culinary adventure, I had stocked up on local produce. The original infestation could probably be traced back to one, or several, of these purchases of dried fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. Because I had bought so much I had left them all in the flimsy plastic bags they came in, rather than taking the precaution of transferring them to airtight containers.

At first I thought that the untouched wheat biscuits, bran-flakes, the extruded wheat squares and even the crunchy wheat and malted barley nuggets had been protected from infestation by the packaging: my ‘healthy’ breakfast cereals had all been imported from Australia at great expense. But although all the packets had been opened – in fact most them were gaping – they were all bug free. A half-empty box of salted crackers left over from some party was also untouched, as was an open packet of digestive biscuits that should have been in a tin but weren’t. As the contents of my kitchen cupboard were spread over tables and sideboards the pattern was unmistakable. The maggots preferred brown rice to white, and buckwheat or wholewheat flour to bleached. The connection was clear: creepy crawlies are not slaves to their tastebuds, the pressures of advertising or convenience. Nature directs them to the foods that will provide the most nourishment – live, not processed, foods.

The following morning I tipped out the contents of the breakfast cereals into bowls amid screams of ‘maggot hunt!’ ‘Don’t worry, the maggots know better than to eat these pieces of sugared cardboard,’ I told the kids triumphantly. ‘Enjoy what’s left because I’m not buying them again. ’

Live food is better than dead

After the creepy crawly incident,‘live food is better than dead’ became the new motto in our household. Real food does not come from supermarkets, or even from factories. It grows; it lives. All life forms contain
qi
. Our bodies are living organisms; it is better to nurture them with live foods if we can.
Qi
is sometimes translated as ‘energy’, which leads to a comparison with the Western concept of calories. This is totally misleading.
Qi
is not about quantity, it is about quality, and quality is what the Chinese cuisine is all about.

Once you acknowledge the concept of
qi
in food, you will truly understand the need to eat a diet made up of fresh, natural foods and have the confidence to refute the health claims that food manufacturers make about hundreds of processed and packaged goods.

The main characteristic of
qi
is motion or the activity of life. When a food goes bad or rancid or grows mould, these are all indication that
qi
is present. Absence of activity tends to mean that
qi
is either suspended or absent. Hence preserving may compromise
qi
, and some modern processing methods that allow foods to be stored for extensive periods destroy it completely.

Where
qi
is suspended it can re-activate to some degree when the food is released from its preserved state. Tinned tomatoes, once exposed to the air, soon grow mould; pickled onions will eventually decay once unsealed and opened. Small amounts of bottled or canned foods, using naturally available preservatives such as salt and sugar, can make a contribution to a balanced diet, both Chinese or Western, and there are circumstances where these add variety to a regime that would otherwise be very limited. Freezing is another method that nature has made available. A Chinese friend once told me that her family would always kill their pig at Chinese New Year (in late January or early February) and then make a massive pork stew. After the holiday the remainder would be left in the central courtyard to freeze; when the family ‘felt like eating meat’, they would hack off a chunk, heat it, adding cellophane noodles and chopped white cabbage before serving.