what's for dinner #1--jiaozi

Before we came to China, we asked our nephew, Tommy, what kinds of things he wanted us to take pictures of while we were here. He had two very specific things in mind: where we live, and what we eat. With that in mind, I've been meaning to write a post about food for awhile now, and I've been collecting pictures here and there, with the intent of posting them all at once. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at bringing my camera with me when we go out to eat (or anywhere, for that matter) so I don't always get a shot of the interesting things we've had to consume. So, here's the first of what may become a series of entries on what we eat here in China.

I think it's kind of hard to imagine what Chinese food is really like if your only experience of Chinese food has been at Chinese restaurants in the States. We eat some dishes here that are similar to those you can find at your average American Chinese restaurant. For example, one of the first things I ever learned to order was sweet and sour pork (althought I have to say that the sweet and sour sauce at even your most dumpy, hole-in-the-wall restaurant here really is far better than that gloppy pink stuff you find at most American Chinese buffets).

But on the other hand, many dishes here are unlike anything you would expect. For example, many things here (in Tianjin, anyway) are not stir-fried in sauce, or deep-fried like eggrolls, but rather steamed or boiled. Take jiaozi, or Chinese dumplings, for example, which are really unlike anything I've ever eaten at any Chinese buffet in the Midwest (although you can find their equivalent in Chinatowns and nicer Chinese restaurants with dim sum). I guess you can sometimes find fried dumplings on a Chinese buffet, filled with a tight little wad of sweetened meat, but they are nothing like the jiaozi we eat here. Jiaozi here are generally boiled, and can be filled with any number of things, from seafood to beef to pork to mutton, cabbage to fennel to onions to . . . really any meat/vegetable combination you can imagine. Meat fillings aren't usually sweet-ish, but rather savory, and usually include a vegetable and sesame oil flavors. I've seen dumplings accompanied by a kind of sweet sauce in the U.S., but I think that may be a southern China thing. Here in Tianjin, we like them savory and sour.

I went to the Zhou's home (my sister-in-law's parents' home) yesterday for jiaozi lunch. Poor Benny was too sick to leave the house, but they were kind enough to send some home with me. I wish I had taken some shots of the pre-boiled jiaozi. There were several very large bamboo trays of them, all lined up neat and pretty, ready to cook (when you make jiaozi, you make a big batch, because they are pretty labor-intensive to make from scratch). I did, however, get some shots of those I brought home. These were pork and cabbage, and pork and garlic sprout jiaozi.

Jiaozi are usually dipped in dark vinegar, and you can add mashed garlic or red peppers to the vinegar, according to your own taste for them. That's how we eat them at the Zhou's house. A jiaozi restaurant that we have been to a few times serves vinegar and whole cloves of garlic to chew on, along with your jiaozi. Sam says that's his favorite way to eat jiaozi, but I have a hard time bringing myself to bite into a whole clove of garlic. At our house, (when we are eating leftover or frozen jiaozi) we sometimes have chopped garlic in our vinegar, but more frequently just vinegar, because we're too lazy to chop the garlic, and we don't really keep the red peppers on hand.

I think they're best when they're hot and fresh, but they're pretty good leftover, too. And, as I discovered this morning, not bad for breakfast.

Anyway, it's a good thing we like them, because we still have this entire bag left over, even after eating them for dinner last night, and breakfast this morning.