A Short Letter Home

Cooking lesson

While life in China has been rather routine this second year, occasionally we do have a new experience. Last Sunday we learned how to cook tan yuan. Tan yuan is a peanut/sugar combination packed into a rice flour dough, boiled and served in a broth. It's rather tasty.

Our teacher for this lesson was Gail, an incredibly helpful student who was one of our travel agent/tour guides for our Dali excursion. Apparently not one to rest on her laurels, she has now decided to show us lao wai how to cook. the first I had heard about it was Saturday evening. Gail had gone to the community English Corner and I had a brief chance to chat with her on the way back to campus. She suddenly asked if we had any sugar at home. I thought it an odd question, but I replied that we did have sugar, both granulated and powdered. She then said something about that she needed it for the dish she was going to cook for us. On Sunday, she said. I just mumbled something about that being nice. I always try to be non-committal about social engagements, since Yau Neih always handles the social calendar. As soon as I got home I asked Yau Neih about this whole cooking concept. She confirmed that Gail had said that she wanted to "cook for us". Yau Neih hadn't realized how serious she was about it, but it looked to be an interesting, if not tasty, experience. We all had fond memories of the fine dining we enjoyed on our Dali trip.

After lunch on Sunday, Gail accompanied us as we made our daily shopping run. She gathered all the ingredients that we needed, including the sugar. Apparently tan yuan uses some sort of brown sugar that comes in big blocks. Later that afternoon, Gail came over to our flat to begin the lesson. The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients

• a mess o' peanuts
• a packet of sesame seeds
• a block of that brownish sugar
• a bag of rice flour
• peanut oil
• water

Mix the water and rice flour to make a nice dough. Lightly fry the peanuts in the skillet. Crush or finely chop most of the peanuts, leaving the rest for people to nosh on. Grate the brown sugar. Mix the crushed peanuts, grated sugar and sesame seeds in a bowl. Form the dough into small, flat pancakes, about one to two inches in diameter. Cup the pancake to make a bowl-like shape. Put a spoonful of the mixture into dough bowl and add a dollop of peanut oil. Close the dough in on itself to make a little dumpling. Drop the dumpling into boiling water. Serve two or three dumplings in a bowl with broth and a sprinkling of the leftover peanut mix. Serves five with two leftover meals.

(I should confess that I really didn't take part in the lesson, so the recipe may be somewhat, er, inaccurate. Our kitchen is rather small and since both girls were interested in the lesson, I chose to limit my involvement to snapping a few photos and sampling the final goods.)

posted by John @ 6:39 PM