Back alley reportage

The other day, on my way to getting arugula from the Avocado Lady I took a shortcut through a residential block. It's common for residents to turn their first floor apartments into shops, and one apartment I passed had bins of vegetables out front. I spotted a couple bunches of asparagus, another item on my list. 

The owner was napping in a reclined chair in the doorway when I arrived, but when I stopped to look he sat up, smiled, and asked where I was from. I told him. 

"Hey, how come you guys like to eat tomatoes, potatoes, and onions so much?" he asked.

"I guess we just grew up eating them," I offered. 

I picked up the two bunches of asparagus and asked the price.

"That's nine," he said, meaning nine Renminbi (about $1.40) for 500 grams. 

I hesitated, trying to remember the price from the last time I'd bought asparagus. 

"Let's weigh it and see," the man said, and placed it on the scale. "That's eleven."

"I'll just take one then," I said. The other bunch was a little wilted. 

"They're fine, take them all!" he said. "Look." He took a knife and cut off the ends of the stems, and showed me the new ends. They still looked withered, but I took them all. 

Ever the nosy pedestrian, I interrupted this man on his phone to ask him if he knew anything about the tree behind him.

"I planted it," he said. "Fifty years ago."

I wondered if he was a lot older than he looked.

"Wow! Amazing!" I offered, while he looked at me severely. I turned around and kept walking.

I was intrigued by this "Coffee & More" sign above a restaurant near my new apartment. I didn't see any coffee machines inside the restaurant, so I approached a waitress standing outside and asked.

"Excuse me. That 'Coffee' sign up there, what's it referring to?"

"It's a beverage," she replied, lifting an imaginary cup to her mouth.

Across the street from the Avocado Lady, outside of a butcher's shop, there was a sign saying  "Noodles, 2F". Hungry, we pushed in, past the men chopping whole ducks into parts. There was another sign scratched onto the back wall of the shop pointing to the left. Up an extraordinarily uneven, narrow staircase, we came into this room. Bowls of noodle toppings were arrayed in the corner. The rest of the room was full of empty tables.

A woman came out of the kitchen and stood in front of us without speaking.

"Still have any?" we asked. She nodded and asked us what toppings we wanted. 

Noodles with kaofu (烤麸), a spongy thing made out of fermented wheat gluten. So it's basically a type of bread. 

The True Face of Shanghai (with Food Bonus)

 

Shanghai Exhibition Center, near West Nanjing Road.

City buses in Shanghai are equipped with TVs that show a variety of programs. The most common are vine-like, nonstop reels of cats, dogs, and humans doing stupid things or falling over.  

A special reclamation orifice for pernicious garbage at Pudong Airport. 

A private rock garden in the former French Concession.

Food Bonus:

Here's what I made last weekend for brunch: Arugula salad, eggs n' dill, warm pears, peas, and passion fruit, sage beets n' kiwi, balsamic strawberries and bananas, and avocado toast.

A congee place in Hong Kong (!), where I'm staying for a couple days while my China recharges.

Cafe Opening; or, How it Almost Suddenly Ended

Last Friday I started cooking brunch at a cafe near the former French Concession, and predictably, something caught on fire. 

The cafe's kitchen is in the basement, and has about two square meters of floor space. There's a big deck oven, two refrigerators, a cluttered countertop, a sink, flour bins, and a filing cabinet claiming most of the room. In the remaining space we managed to squeeze in a big gas-powered grill, sticking a five kilogram gas canister in one of the cabinets below, rubber hose sticking out and running under the grill to the back. 

This big grilling surface was the key component in our operation: our showcase dish was sourdough buckwheat pancakes, and to cook enough pancakes to satisfy the orders that were going to be pouring in as soon as we started, we would need to be able to cook a whole batch all at the same time. The lonely little electric burner the kitchen already had was going to be laughably insufficient. 

I had tested the burner the night before. The stove had filled the kitchen and the cafe above with toxic-smelling fumes, part of it had turned from the original shiny silver to a plasticky yellow, and the back of the grill got much hotter than the front. But these problems notwithstanding, I was pleased to see it produced some of the most evenly hued golden-brown pancakes I've been able to make so far. 

I got to the cafe early Friday morning, crouched into the basement kitchen, put on my gas mask, opened the gas canister, and started the grill. I mixed the pancake batter while it heated. The stove began letting off noxious fumes again, but not as profusely as the night before. 

The barista/cashier came in and stood by the door. He started coughing. 

What's up? I asked. 

Not much, just curious, he said. 

Just making some pancakes, I replied.

Oh. Cool, he said. He went back upstairs. 

I had just turned back to my batter measurements when there was a sound like a big match head igniting, and kitchen got noticeably brighter. Something other than the burner itself was shooting flames from under the stove: the rubber hose had caught on fire. 

While the rubber fire blazed, I turned off the grill and cast around for something to smother it with. I was dimly aware that if the fire reached the gas canister, something bad would happen, but the sudden adrenaline rush kept me from reflecting on this idea for too long.

The fire went out on its own before I could do anything to it. The kitchen went quiet. Hands shaking, I opened the cabinet door and closed the valve on the gas canister.

I took my first coffee break.

No orders came in that day, luckily. The barista had been telling customers all morning that breakfast wasn't ready yet. 

The next morning, Saturday, I came to the cafe with a bag of bagels and eggs.

Over the past few weeks I've set up a mini home fermentation lab. It comprises many layers -- this is just the top shelf. 

From left to right, back to front: mashed grapes (i.e., wine), kumquat pu'er tea mead, shiso mead, burdock beer, traditional kvass, kefir, basil soda, grape tea enzymes, pineapple soda. 

Underneath and not shown are all the pickles, including various kimchis, dill cucumbers, spicy okra, and beet kvass.

I'm hoping to produce bigger batches of whatever works best and sell it at the local craft market.

Here are some more photos of Shanghai:

 

Typical breakfast foods: tea eggs, fried glutinous rice cakes, doughnuts, and sesame balls

 

Buildings, a Stone Lion that Actually Resembles a Lion, and other Things that Defy Expectation and Common Sense

Here are some photos from the Yangpu area in northeast Shanghai where I'm currently living.

No, those aren't Snickers bars, they're carrots. And we wonder why our youth can't keep up!

"Chinese amaro": herbs and medicinal plants steeped in alcohol. Best served warm.

A steamed bun, cleverly shaped to look entirely like a mushroom.

An alley in Suzhou, an ancient city west of Shanghai.

The Lion Grove Garden of Suzhou

A little over two weeks ago I came to Shanghai to earn my living making pancakes in a basement. But that's a story for another time. Happy new year. 

Suzhou is a bit inland from Shanghai, and takes only about twenty minutes to get there by bullet train. It's a much older city than Shanghai, and looks it -- it's even surrounded by medieval-looking walls and a moat. Other than escaping the smog of Shanghai for the day, my main goal was to visit the Suzhou Museum, whose building was designed by I. M. Pei and which is supposed to have a lot of cool ancient Chinese art. 

By these measures, the trip was a complete failure. The PM2.5 AQI in Suzhou was well over 150 the entire day, and the museum had closed early. With face mask securely blocking my nose and mouth and nowhere else to go, I settled for the nearby Lion Grove Garden. 

The garden is a complex of carved stone, with multiple levels of intertwining trails that make it feel sort of like a maze, and sort of like that structure you can test out hiking boots on at REI.  It was supposedly started in the 14th century by a monk named Tianru (were any non-monks starting gardens back then? Apparently none have survived). The garden is now in the yard of a big house that for most of the early 20th century belonged to the renowned Bei family, and was then appropriated by the government and in the 50s opened up to tourists. 

This stone is supposed to be in the shape of a lion

The apex of the artificial mountain

A lake in the middle of the courtyard, next to the artificial mountain. This was taken from the walkway that crosses the lake.

On the deck of a stone double-decker boat (stationary)

A secret passage behind the house

The entrance to the artificial mountain

A park in Suzhou, not far from the Lion Grove Garden