做菜:Cooking

Thinking ahead to the time when I will no longer be in China, I want to make sure I know how to cook some Chinese dishes before I leave, so that I can relive the glory of legitimate Chinese food at any time during the rest of my life. Plus, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add a few more dishes to my current roster, which includes peanut butter and jelly sandwich, peanut butter and honey sandwich, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich, and chocolate milk.

So yesterday I got on to Fudan University’s “BBS,” located the “food” board, and started “communicating” with some folks about making some Chinese food. This is fantastic practice for my reading and typing skills. Correspondence is relatively quick, yet gives me enough time to race through my dictionaries when I come across words I don’t know, without having to make up excuses like, “sorry for the delay, I stepped away from my computer to use the restroom,” while in reality I was busy burning 700 calories flipping through dictionaries trying to figure out the words between “you” and “haha.” What matters is that I found somebody to help me out.

Although I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I was secretly hoping that my cooking partner would be a beautiful Chinese girl, allowing the BBS to function not only as my gateway to professional cooking, but also as a blind dating service. On my way to meet my new friend the following afternoon, I received a text message, “I have arrived, I am wearing a black athletic jacket, jeans, and I am fat.” Because the word for fat has the same sound as the word for pan, and kinda-sorta looks the same, at first read I thought maybe it was “and I brought a pan with me,” you know, since we were getting ready to do some cooking. Upon second read, it indeed said, “I am fat.” That is one thing you have got to love about Chinese people, even though it can make me feel kind of uncomfortable. However awkward it seemed, it was extremely effective. Being overweight in China is about as common as being an American with blonde hair in China. Also, he was a male. Better luck next time, Russ.

From there, we went to the market to buy some ingredients. On the menu for tonight was eggplant, my favorite dish here in China. I figured that if I learn how to cook one dish, it should be eggplant, being that if I eat half as much eggplant in the US as I do in China, I will gain enough MVP points at Harris Teeter to buy a private jet. (When you add on all the additional points I will gain from Mint Oreos, each seat in the jet will also have a DVD player in the headrest.) In total, we purchased two eggplants, an onion-ish thing, two peppers, and a garlic thing, costing about RMB3, which converts to about USDfree.

All in all, the cooking was rather straightforward:
1. Cut stuff.
2. Add a gallon of oil.
3. Add a dash of salt (x15).
4. Make it hot.
5. Let it cool down.

As simple as the preparation was, the results were outstanding. I have eaten eggplant at just about every restaurant in China, and this was competing with the best. I think I will try it again by myself sometime in the near future, to make sure I can reproduce such excellent results, so that I can take this back to the states and do what any normal man would do: make a burrito out of it.