...China (Comfort Food)

Choosing which fat-tailed sheep to have for dinner in Kashgar market

 Being back in China after the food drought of Central Asia has been like crawling through a desert and suddenly finding an oasis. An oasis with a massive buffet where you can eat and eat and eat. Hooray!

I adore Chinese cuisine but before I go any further I must clear up a common misconception. Chinese cuisine bears little resemblance to the stuff the takeaways dole out in the UK. Our Chinese food is a poor imitation of Cantonese food, Chinese immigrants generally being from Hong Kong. Cantonese food for me is heavier and sweeter. But still when I talk about 'Chinese food' I'm pouring four main schools of cuisine and millions of 'sub schools' into one massive pot. To experience all the schools would require a lot longer than our 30 day visas allow. Instead, I thought I'd focus on the food that brings me comfort and joy.

My absolute favourite 'school', which gets me drooling at the mere mention of it, is the Sichuan school which is famed for its use of chillies and the tongue-numbing wonder that is Sichuan pepper. So when I use the word drooling, that's in a literal sense too. I met an Australian who'd developed an ulcer on his bottom lip from eating too much spicy hotpot (a chilli infused broth). Living the dream.

Dried Fried Beans

  
A Sichuan classic. This is one of the first dishes we ate when we came to China 6 years ago and we've never forgotten it. Fresh green beans are fried until blistered with crispy pork fat, dried red chillies and Sichuan pepper are added nearer the end. The result is a dish that manages to be spicy, sweet, salty and mouth numbing. I haven't met another dish that can do that. I cannot put into words how delicious this dish is. We ordered it one night with new friends who instantly fell in love with it.

Da Pan Ji

On an uncommonly rainy evening in Kashgar, Finn and I decided to go in search of the ultimate comfort food, Da Pan Ji, again another favourite from our last trip here. The name basically translates as 'big pan chicken' which is exactly what it is. Due to its humongous size you need at least three people to eat it. Having twisted the arms of four other people with the words 'big' 'pan' and 'chicken' we headed to a restaurant and made our way to the back, past tables splattered with sauce and picked our way over gnawed bones.

Soon enough, a huge bowl of tender chicken pieces on the bone, dried chillies, green peppers, fresh spring onions and potatoes arrived in the centre of the table. We dug in with our chopsticks, swigging green tea to try and regain feeling in our numbed tongues. Halfway through the dish, a mass of thick, fresh noodles were dumped on the top to help mop up the sauce. Heaven.

Yunnan Goat's Cheese

After too long without cheese, our taste buds were getting all excited about heading to Yunnan Province in the south west of China. The Chinese generally don't do cheese (a digression: six years ago we were in Shanghai for Christmas and managed to get our hands on some blue cheese. Leaving it out on our balcony while we went out, we returned to find the cleaner had found it and thrown it away. Needless to say Christmas was ruined. End of digression). Yunnan DOES cheese. Unfortunately it's goat's cheese but, at this stage, beggars can't be choosers. Thin slices are fried in a little oil and arrive with ground sichuan pepper and salt to dip them in. It doesn't have the strong (old goat) taste goat's cheese normally has, instead resembling haloumi. Which isn't a bad thing. I ate enough of the glorious stuff to take my mind off the fact that a fish in a net on its way to our table had taken a leap for freedom and ended up inches from my chair. There were tears but the fish was duly deemed fit for cooking and although I didn't partake in the gobbling myself (having a crippling fear of the little devils dead and alive), Finn and others gallantly devoured that fish in revenge.

Steamed Buns 
 In China we embraced the fact we could eat dumplings and steamed buns for breakfast and dedicated ourselves wholeheartedly to this task. Steamed buns arrive in a bamboo steamer and the bready wrappers are generally either filled with pork or greens. 

With your basket, you each have a small saucer into which you put vinegar and chilli flakes and then dunk the bun, hoping it won't all fall apart from saucer to mouth. Chinese vinegar is this rich, delicious dark liquid and, to be honest, for me the bun is often just a vehicle for absorbing all that beautiful, dark, tangy, gloopy... Sorry, had a bit of a Nigella moment there. Your normal dumplings are readily available, with a thinner, more pasta-like wrapper.

 

Just as tasty as the buns but well, quite frankly not as absorbent.