Now that we have stopped traveling we realized fairly quickly how little food we had in the refrigerator. This morning I dropped Citrus off at pre-school and headed over to a recommended wet market at Chong Pang City, located one neighborhood away in Yishun. I envisioned returning with bags full of vegetables, fruit, fish and poultry.
Before going I dug out our copy of Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, a cookbook and travel journal of Southeast Asia that my brother gave us a year or two ago. The authors have translated most ingredients into western equivalents, and I have never feared Asian supermarkets, but in general I get very aggravated when a recipe calls for cilantro from a specific bank of a river, an obscure type of lime, or something that Whole Foods sells for more than the price of gold. So I had not tried any of the dishes.
Now that we are in Southeast Asia the obstacles are different. Why pound away with a mortar and pestle when you can buy the sauce? Why bother cooking when you can have a similar dish at a hawker stand for $2?
Still, I was determined to cook something. I looked at the fish at the market. There was a lot of it. Some looked familiar. The fishmonger only knew the Chinese names and I only knew that I was looking at a red fish or a long fish or an ugly fish. Never mind details like quality. I skipped the fish and went to something more familiar, roast pork.
I asked for roast pork and got something different than what I was thinking. I think it is crispy skin pork. I resorted to pointing to the bright red pork and then frustrated the cashier by not knowing how many kilograms I wanted. Medium size!
I looked at the produce. Is that cilantro or parsley? Maybe Thai cilantro looks like parsley or maybe it’s neither. Is that vegetable a bitter melon? Is that zucchini? Or maybe they have bitter zucchini, too. I don’t want anything bitter, better move on.
Found fresh chicken, nevermind the odd one with black skin. But then I realized that we had chicken last night and if I am going to cook it tomorrow, I may as well come back to the market tomorrow. Move on.
And so it went. In the end, I got the pork, some “U.S.A. cherries” and a kilogram of rambutan branches, which I gave to Elysia as a sad, hairy bouquet, to munch on at work. And I got a $2 plate of roast duck and rice.
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When I was in Chinatown earlier this month and decided to buy some Chinese pork jerky, I had no idea how much I wanted. First of all, to make things harder, they sold by the jin, which is a traditional Chinese unit of measure. I didn’t know whether a Chinese jin equals a kilo or a pound. In my head I replayed a song I remembered from when I was a kid, called “Half Jin, Eight Liang” — which is roughly the equivalent of the English phrase “six of one, half dozen of the other.” So I reasoned that a jin must be a pound, half of which would be eight ounces, or liang.
As it turns out the imperial jin is closer to a pound, but in most modern Chinese communities in Asia, they use jin when referring to a kilo. Or at least that’s what I think. And the song I remembered? It was a Hong Kong pop song from the ’70s, still under British rule at the time, and which explains why they used English weights.
Anyway, after staring slackjawed at the seller for about a minute, he helpfully asked me (in Chinese) how many people would be partaking in the snack. I answered three, and then we were in business.
When I first arrived in Beijing as a young foreign exchange student, I went to a restaurant with another newly-arrived classmate. We were both starving and decided to order dumplings (as it was one of the only food words in Mandarin that we knew). Upon ordering, we were asked how many jin we would like– which we assumed was a dimsum-sized steamer. After some discussion of how ravenous we were, we ordered three jin as well as several randomly-picked dishes from the menu. The other dishes arrived first and as we started to get full, we wondered what happened to our dumpling order. Imagine our surprise when two HUGE steamers arrived at the table with over three pounds of dumplings in them! We adamantly vowed to learn measurements after that and made a hungry homeless man very happy that day.
So not all jins are created equal, huh? How confusing!
OTOH, can’t go wrong with a $2 plate of roast duck. Yum…