The Geeks have sent some recipies!

Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes

A great vegetarian side dish. Good with white rice. Adjust egg to tomato ratio depending on preferences.

Serves 2.

Ingredients:

2 medium tomatoes
2-3 eggs

Salt to taste
4 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp scallion, shredded
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, shredded
1/2 tsp sugar (optional)
1/4 tsp chicken powder (optional)

Directions:

1. Drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds. Remove when the skin starts to crack, drain, and peel. Cut in half, squeeze out the seeds, and chop coarsely.

2. Beat the eggs with the 1/4 tsp. salt.

3. Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a wok over high heat until the oil surface ripples. Pour in the eggs and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. Remove from the wok and place in a dish.

4. Add the other 2 tbsp of oil to the wok and reheat until very hot. Add the scallions and ginger and stir-fry for a few seconds. Then add the tomato, the remaining salt, optional sugar and optional chicken powder. Stir-fry about 30 seconds. Then, return the scrambled eggs to the wok. Stir to blend, remove, and serve.

Thai Cashew Chicken

Great over white rice or noodles. A good recipe to use with left over raw veggies. Almost anything can be added in.

Serves 2-3.

Ingredients:

2 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cut into bite-size pieces

1 ½ tsp canola oil

1/2 large yellow onion, chopped

3 ounces broccoli, chopped

1/2 large yellow bell pepper, chopped

1/2 zucchini, chopped

1/2 yellow squash, chopped

4 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered

1/4 cup unsalted cashew nuts

Sauce (mix together a before cooking)

3 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons oyster sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/3 cup chicken broth

1/2 teaspoon white sugar

1/2 teaspoon Thai garlic chili paste

1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter

Directions:

1. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat, cook chicken for about 5 minutes until juice is clear.

2. Add onion and broccoli, and cook for a minute.

3. Add mixed sauce.

4. Add other veggies, and cook for another minute.

5. Mix in cashews just before serving.

Mongolian Beef

Great over white rice or noodles.

Serves 2.

Ingredients and Preparation:

1. Make bursting fragrance

3 cloves of garlic sliced into thin wafers

Small piece of ginger minced into tiny pieces

(if you like hot food) 1 small red hot peppers cut into small pieces

2. Prepare spicy flavor juice

½ cup of water

3 tablespoons of soy bean sauce

1 teaspoon of sugar

1 teaspoon of black pepper

1 teaspoon of cornstarch

3. Preparing meat

½ lbs. sirloin beef cut into thin slices

Mix well with 1 tablespoon of soy bean sauce and one teaspoon of cornstarch. Put in a bowl.

Great if left to marinate overnight.

4. Preparing vegetables

Two heads of scallions sliced diagonally into slices 2" long and 1/3" thick

Half of red bell pepper (not hot) cut into strips about the same as the scallion slices.

Stir Frying:

Step 1: bursting fragrance

Pour 1/4 cup of vegetable oil into frying pan. Wait until oil is at boiling point (some thin white smoke comes out) throw in the "bursting fragrance."

Step 2: adding meat

Several seconds later after the "bursting fragrance,” pour the beef mixture into pan. Use a spatula and turn the contents inside the pan until the meat is about 80% cooked. Turn the heat to low and take the beef out and put aside back to its bowl (keep the liquid part in the pan).

Step 3: adding vegetable

Turn the heat back to high. (Optionally) add a tablespoon of vegetable to the pan. Wait until the pan is hot again, and throw in the vegetables. Stir fry the vegetable for about one minute, and then pour in "flavors/spices juice." Then continue to stir fry a few more minutes till the vegetables are 90% cooked.

Step 4: mixing

Pour back the beef mixture and stir fry some 20 seconds or so.

Shrimp Fried Rice

Best with day old left-over rice.

Serves 2.

Ingredients

1/2 cups uncooked white rice

3 cups water

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup chopped white onion

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 1/2 cups cooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined without tail (frozen ones ok).

1/4 cup chopped green onion

2 eggs, beaten

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

4 tablespoons soy sauce

1/4 teaspoon sesame oil

Directions

1. In a saucepan bring water to a boil. Add rice and stir. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Set aside and allow rice to cool.

2. Heat a large skillet or wok for 2 minutes. When the skillet or wok is hot, pour in vegetable oil, garlic and white onion. Mix well and cook for 3 minutes.

3. Mix in cooled rice and shrimp and cook for another 3 minutes. Stir constantly.

4. Mix green onions, eggs, salt, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil together in small bowl. Make “crater” in center of rice and pour in egg mixture. Cook for another 4 minutes, stirring continuously, until eggs are cooked and everything is blended evenly.

* adding a little chicken powder, chili powder and/or cayenne pepper to the egg mixture can add flavor

* ground beef can be substituted for shrimp

Shrimp and Three Peppers

Chinese Japanese Fusion Dish

Serves 2-3.

Ingredients

3 Bell peppers, one red, yellow and green are pretty

½ Red onion

½ lb frozen shrimp

1 teaspoon chicken powder

½ teaspoon salt

cooking oil

soy sauce

wasabi mustard

Directions

1. Thaw shrimp

2. Clean the peppers. Cut peppers and onion into thin pieces.

3. Mix soy sauce and wasabi, to taste, in small bowl

4. Put oil in pan, heat then fry onions.

5. Add shrimp until they turn a cream color.

6. Add peppers, fry a little bit, then add chicken powder and salt. Mix well.

7. Serve with sauce mixture and white rice.

Once again from a non-Chinese Location

I am so sorry that our February trip is taking us well into April to tell about. I am bad at blogs…

Part 3 In Changsha or mei you ba shi
In Changsha things started to go actually wrong. We were scheduled for a few days in Changsha which we were to leave by bus for the sacred mountains. In the meantime we visited a really cool museum on the history of the province. The day before we were to leave we went to the bus station to buy tickets. The bus station was cold (in fact this winter was one of the worst China has seen in eighty years.) and crowded there were hundreds of people. However since the ceiling was at least twenty feet high the people did not make it warm up. We were waiting in huge lines to but tickets. Finally we were got to the window and luckily they had someone with good enough English that we could get our tickets.

The next day we went to the station to leave town. I stayed with the bags while Meredith went to find out where we should get the bus. The first person Meredith found told her in Chinese 没有 mei you which means don’t have (you can omit subjects in Chinese). She assumed that meant that there were no more tickets so she showed the person her tickets. He responded 没有巴士mei you ba shi (Don’t have the bus). However due to the limits of our Chinese further explanation was impossible. The Chinese person went and found a co-worker who spoke some English who was able to explain that indeed there was no such bus it was canceled because of the terrible weather.

So we extended our stay in Changsha, well beyond any thing we could find worth doing. In addition the winter was hitting chang sha hard. We kept hearing 没有 everywhere we went. McDonalds even ran out of beef!

Eventually however we went to the Changsha airport to get on our flight to Hangzhou the next stop on our journey Hangzhou. The Changsha airport is tiny. We had found one of three restaurants in the whole airport and ate some dumplings. We still had a couple of hours before our flight and it had been announced as delayed so imagine our surprise when two men came up to us, “You are going to Hangzhou? You must get on a plane now!” And so we did. We ended up in Hangzhou about the same time we were originally supposed to leave Changsha.


Part 4 The Hangzhou Hustle.

The final stop on our trip was Hangzhou. It was not planned to be, but that’s how it went. As I said we arrived early. Of course our luggage did not. Normally lost luggage, while sad isn’t that hard to deal with. We however, are in China with only a basic level of Mandarin… We notice that a lot of other people don’t have luggage either (presumably they also got bumped flights) so we follow them when they go to the lost luggage people. When we get to the front of the line they have an English speaker ready. We give them the number of our hotel, our cell phone numbers etc. They say we’ll get the luggage late that night.

So far so good. So we get on a bus to a downtown area where we can catch a cab for cheap to our hotel since a cab from the airport would have cost 120 RMB-ish. When we get there we see plenty of cabs, many unoccupied. But they won’t pick us up. Some show us signs in Chinese but we can’t read it. Eventually someone from the company that runs the bus hails us a cab, took her three tries. This became a pattern for us. We never hailed a cab on our own in Hangzhou. Fortunately our hotel was right next to the train station so there were a lot of buses.

We ate dinner at a little place near the hotel that kept serving us dishes with little to no regard for what we ordered, including some kind of slimy shrimp with an upside down glass of tea in the middle of the plate. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep. We were awoken by a phone call, Meredith shouting, “It wasn’t me!” the second she opened her eyes. It was of course the hotel telling us the luggage had arrived none the worse for wear. We also decided since Meredith’s respiratory infection was getting worse to go back to Shenzen when we left Hangzhou, and booked tickets at an internet café.

The next day we saw the West Lake, the main tourist attraction in Hangzhou. It was gorgeous. We even managed to find the (active) Daoist temple around the lake. It was a good day. We wanted to go to dinner at a restaurant recommended by the guide book. we got our hotel to hire us a cab and went. We gave the cab driver the name in both pinyin and characters. The cab driver took us to a place about the right distance but that was not at all the place we had asked for. We ended up eating at McDonalds.

There was nothing particularly interesting about our trip back to Shenzen. The adventure was over.

Here is an example of Engrish (Chinese people incorrectly generating bad English) from the back of the box of Dr. Who DVDs. I will not that although I do not reproduce it here if a word is too long to fit on one line it breaks mid word to the next line with no punctuation e.g. spa
ce =space! I have however maintained the idiosyncratic (to say the least) punctuation and capitalization.


Doctor Who back:
“Doctor Who” stories around with magic power, vertical space, the shuttle universe. dominate the time aliens “Dr..” Dr. appear on the surface of the earth usually were not the slightest bit, but is saddled with the mission of protecting the planet. The original had been calm and peaceful global crisis, many of the planet from outer space invaders have abundant resources of the earth which are hostile, often waiting for an opportunity to conquer, If not, Dr. critical juncture in the helping hand extended, I believe that mankind has long been an alien prisoners of war. Accompanied by Dr addition to seeing him fitting into public telephone booth time machine, there are a courageous people on Earth wit Rosa. Dr. Rosa cooperation with the excellent traveling in the universe of endless space than going through a period of exciting science fiction journey.

Another Trans-Oceanic Post

So We haven’t posted in a really long time. The real problem is that living in China takes up enough time that it becomes difficult to take the time to write about living in China. However it is time to put in the saga of the Spring Festival Travel Debacle!

Part 1: Yes we have No Trains.

Our original plan was to spend much of our 6 week holiday traveling to various places in China by train. We wanted to travel in China because well there’s a lot of it and we wanted to see some while we were here. We wanted to travel by train because 1. Trains are cool, and 2. Trains are relatively cheap. Keep in mind that we developed this plan with the advice of our Program Coordinator who has lived in China mostly for the past five years.

It turns out that over the Spring Festival Holiday (which is in fact in the middle of winter, don’t interrupt) you cannot get train tickets. You see, the tickets are available to students before they become available to the general population and since Spring Festival is the biggest travel period in China, by the time the tickets would be released to the general public they are already gone. This is aggravated by the fact that we are talking about physical tickets not a computerized system, so there may be that ticket you want somewhere, but you are unlikely to find it.

We found this all out the hard way of course with Meredith and our Program Coordinator James, trying on multiple days to find tickets for multiple routes with a perfect batting average of .000.

Part 2: The Journey To Changsha

This is actually the least eventful chapter in the Saga but must be included for posterity.

Our flight did not leave from Shenzhen but from the nearby city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province. We got there via a bus that goes directly to the Guangzhou airport.

At first it seemed normal for a charter bus in China, with something innocuous on the TV screens. But about an hour and a half into the three hour ride it took a turn for the bizarre. The screens started showing weird sexual stuff. Not mind you explicitly pornographic material, but girls gyrating around, sometimes even around poles, in skimpy-outfits.

Now the nature of the content would have made it very strange already in the setting of a bus to the airport, but there was plenty of weird in the contents themselves. After all the one scantily clad male in the video was carrying a bicycle above his head. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried. We’re still trying to figure out how anyone did make this up. Somewhere someone thought it would be sexy for a man in a speedo to dance holding a bicycle over his head. The mind Boggles.

Once we got to the Guangzhou airport things were more or less like you would expect. No doubt this is so we’d be put off our guard for when we entered Changsha.