No 2: Yunnan

Beijing, mid August and the weather is, to say the least, unpleasant. Most
days a yellow tinged haze hangs over the city and occasionally, as today, a
strong sun beats down over the capital causing even the Chinese, who in my
experience rarely sweat, to amble slowly under parasols, a dark streak
running down the back of their shirts the only sign that they too find the
heat a little oppressive. It’s a month for large wedges of icy pink watermelon,
cold slippery garlicky noodle and tofu dishes, t-shirts rolled up over flabby
bellies, and long evenings spent on the streets, playing Chinese chess,
dominoes or gossiping with neighbours parked on low wooden stools with cold bottles of local Yanjing beer, pumpkin seeds and spicy, cumin encrusted lamb kebabs.

If you are me, and lets face it most people wish they were, it’s also the month of bi-hourly showers and insane air conditioning bills.

However, the province challenge waits for no man, and this week it was the
turn of Yunnan. Following the last posting on Ningxia, I ran a survey and
100% of those surveyed loved the idea of ‘top ten facts about’ said province
(thanks Cissy!) so here we go, my top ten facts about China’s Yunnan
Province:

1) Yunnan is located in the far south-western corner of China, bordering
Laos, Burma and Vietnam

2) Just under 45 million people call Yunnan home

3) Ethnic minorities in Yunnan account for about 34% of its total
population. Major ethnic groups include Yi, Bai, Hani, Zhuang, Dai and Miao

4) Yunnan has abundant natural resources and the mainstays of its economy
are agriculture, tobacco, mining, hydro-electric power, and tourism

5) Yunnan is a very mountainous province. The average altitude being 1,980 m

6) Both the Yangtze and the Mekong, two of Asia’s largest rivers flow
through the province, but the Yangtze is known as ‘the river of golden
sands’ there…far more poetic than the Yangtze’s ‘long river’

7) Yunnan has three UNESCO world heritage sites, the old town of Lijiang,
the ‘three parallel rivers’ area and the ‘South China Karst’ area

8) At 394,000 sq kms, the province is significantly bigger than both Germany and Japan

9) Yunnan is host to 15,000 species of plants, including 60% of the
plants used in traditional Chinese medicine

10) 7 million people live in the province’s capital, Kunming which because
of its high altitude and balmy climate is known throughout China as the
‘city of eternal spring’. Lovely.

So, on a particularly hot and steamy evening in mid August four of us went
down to the Dali Courtyard restaurant nestled inconspicuously down a dusty
alleyway in the bell tower area of Beijing.

The Dali Courtyard is a well known restaurant in the city and deservedly so.
Tables spill out of wood floored rooms all around a central courtyard
dominated by a large pomegranate tree and a fish pond.

After a few glasses of icy water and a gin and tonic, our body temperatures
has dropped back down to normal human levels and we ordered some
Yunnanese delicacies. I say ordered, but it seems that at the Dali Courtyard this is not how things are done, instead for a flat fee of 120 Yuan (around 10 pounds) a selection
of starters, meats, fish and desserts are delivered to your table over the
course of a delicious hour. It really is money well spent.

Considering Yunnan’s location, nestled on the northern borders of Vietnam
and Burma it should come as no surprise that there is a disctinctly south
eastern asian feel to much Yunnan cuisine. Lemongrass makes a regular
appearance as do mushrooms and Yunnanese food is particularly famous for
the fact that flowers are used extensively to both flavour and decorate food.

To start we ate a plate of chewy, surprisingly meaty fried mushrooms, mini
vegetable spring rolls, cooling tofu ribbons and some, despite my
apprehension, totally delicious slabs of Yunnan cheese sprinkled with
pepper.*


Between the four of us these dishes were devoured in 19 seconds.

Next came a plate of incredibly tender beef fried with lemongrass, ginger,
garlic, Sichuan numbing pepper and possibly mint. Whatever the flavour combo
was that was going on, it was AMAZING and totally justified a cow’s death.


To accompany this we ate some simply stir fried garlicy spinach and a plate
piled high with huge juicy prawns and crispy fried bay leaves.



A plate of chicken which followed was, although very nice, not dissimilar to
chicken I have eaten in a million and one Chinese restaurants and doesn’t
really deserve special attention. Harsh, but fair.

Thoroughly stuffed and sitting slumped in our chairs, deeply satisfied
smiles spread across our slightly sweaty faces we still managed to polish
off a plate of steaming hot sweet potato doughnuts which appeared out of the
darkness on our table and then we were totally, fully, wholeheartedly done.



* I am generally scared of non-European cheese.

A few random thoughts

1) I am searching for a good coffee shop in Beijing. In this post Olympics, super modern, hi tech, international city where is seems these days every third person is tapping away on an iphone or loitering at traffic lights in an Audi, I can’t believe that there is not a wealth of awesome little coffee shops hidden away amongst the Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Chinese places*. I don’t ask for much, just good prices, comfy seats, good hot coffee, maybe a muffin or two to choose from, no best of Kenny G CDs on loop and no whipped cream….where art thou? I know they are out there, I must find them!

2) I now have settled into my new apartment and need to start cooking! I really have no excuse. A job that, for now at least, provides me with plenty of free time, a reasonable sized kitchen and plenty of friends nearby that can serve as my gastronomic guinea pigs. What I don’t have is a) any food or b) any cooking utensils….so that is one of my tasks for the next week or two, to equip my kitchen with a variety of pots and pans, woks and griddles, rice and noodles, oils and sauces…then the cooking can begin.

3) Reading other food blogs, or indeed any blogs at all, I have realized that a blog is pretty dull without some photos to break up the text. You can never have too many in my mind..…now, in China it is a challenge to even read a blog, let alone write one. The main hosting site www.blogger.com is blocked by the powers that be and you have to go through a variety of proxy servers to access the site. Even then, half the functions are hidden or seem to shut down the page if you try to access them, but I am persevering. Soon I hope to find a way to upload pictures and will then start peppering my postings with photographs galore.

4) I am hungry…..boring, but true, in fact that is true most of the time. Always, always hungry.

*Chinese coffee shops in my experience are deeply upsetting places. Menus 20 pages thick, a wide selection of ‘Italian coffee’ and ‘Brazilian latte’ concoctions but all served in knickerblocker glory sundae glasses, complete with orange food colouring and straws.

No 1: Ningxia

Last week I had the inaugural meal of my ‘eat the food of all China’s provinces challenge’. I was joined by my friend Cissy, a fellow food blogger (check her out at www.grazingbullock.blogspot.com) and her boyfriend Andy who I think found the idea of this challenge faintly ridiculous, but humoured us and came along nonetheless.

We started with a humdinger, Ningxia.

Before I crack on talking about the food, here are my top ten facts…and not at all courtesy of Wikipedia… about the great province of Ningxia:

1) It is a classified ‘autonomous region’ like Tibet, Guangxi, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which means, in theory at least, it retains a degree of independence from decrees passed down from Beijing
2) Both the Yellow River; China’s second river after the Yangtze as well as parts of the Great Wall pass through the province
3) It is 1,200 from the nearest sea
4) Its capital, Yinchuan, is home to the International Car and Motorcycle Tourism Festival…whatever that may be
5) Wolfberries, which are eaten extensively in western China and made into all sorts of teas and Chinese medicines are mainly produced in the province
6) Ningxia is mainly desert, meaning the population is relatively low at 5.8 million
7) At 66,000 sq kms, it is slightly bigger than Sri Lanka, oh yes indeed
8) An earthquake in Ningxia in 1920 killed an estimated 200,000
9) It is 34% Hui nationality (Chinese Muslim) making it one of China’s most Muslim areas.
10) In 2006, satellite images indicated that a 700 by 200-meter fenced area within Ningxia is a near-exact 1:500 scale terrain model reproduction of a 450 by 350-kilometer area of Aksai Chin bordering India,
complete with mountains, valleys, lakes and hills…but nobody knows why. Strange.

So, now we all feel thoroughly educated, to the food!

When I told my Chinese colleagues I was going out for Ningxia food, there was a lot of sad eyes, shaking heads and one or two ‘whatever for?’ type comments. It seems the traditional food of the province is not held in particularly high esteem by the sophisticates of this nation’s capital, but I was not put off and we subwayed our way down the Andingmen station near the Beijing drum tower and, complete with a Google map found our way to the Ningxia Mansion, a typical Chinese, white tiled building plonked in the middle of a hutong alleyway and muslimed up with a faintly ridiculous mosque style roof.

Once inside, we were shown to the dining room and despite my concerns that we had not made reservations found ourselves in a large banqueting hall, only two or three tables of which were being used. From the chandeliers hung the remains of party poppers, obviously there has been some kind of party – record wolfberry production rave maybe? Or perhaps it was a celebration to commemorate the 2 month mark before the 2009 International Car and Motorcycle Tourism Festival? Who knows.

Our waitress, who seemed ever so slightly scared of us – I don’t think she had ever had the delight of serving three slightly sweaty foreigners a cross section of Ningxia specialties - helped us order some and then all of a sudden our table started filling up….

At this point, apologies are in order. Silly me, I didn’t write down the names in English or Chinese for any of the dishes so am going to have to rely on my dazzling writing skills to get across what we ate.

First came a large plate of what can only be described as tasteless dough sticks, rather cleverly twisted into a jumble of ‘U’ shapes but which would have benefited from some salt, or at the very least a sprinkling of MSG. Still, we managed to nibble on them till the rest of the food arrived, trying to decide whether the after taste was of petrol or merely cooking oil.

To accompany this…ummm…delight we ate a small plate of cold salty chicken, which was a lot more tasty than it sounds. Succulent chunks of chicken in a salty, spicy light sauce, most of it still on the bone.



Some stir fried bitter mountain vegetables cooked in a simple 'qing chao' style and a large plate of very tender mutton chops which appeared to have been boiled were also consumed with an incredibly garlicky dipping sauce



, but my favourite dish of all, and one which I am definitely looking forward to eating again was a plate of fired mutton, garlic and heaps of cumin which we were instructed to heap into tiny boiled mantou bread parcels before devouring.



Upon leaving the restaurant, reeking of mutton and cumin, I think we all agreed that although the food was better than expected, it wasn’t mind blowing. I did enjoy it, but then again I enjoy most food…perhaps we ordered wrong? Perhaps the restaurant was not all that great, but put it this way, a trip to sample the delights of Ningxia cuisine is not going to become a weekly occurrence in my social diary.



Still, live and learn…on to the next challenge. Watch this space!