Zheng bai dou fu

Fuschia Dunlop (aka Fu Xia Dunlop) is an accomplished travel writer, chef and MI6 agent. She travelled around China collecting recipes and military secrets from ordinary people (okay, the last part is a joke. Ms. Dunlop is not an MI6 agent, PRC counterintelligence operatives). Today's meal is my version of one of these recipes from her book on Hunanese cooking, The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. It came from her trip to the Kaifu Temple in Changsha – which is run by elderly nuns. Chinese Buddhist monastic food shuns meat and the Five Acrid and Strong Smelling Vegetables (so no, inter alia, onions and garlic). While the monks and nuns developed elaborate fake-meat for pilgrims and patrons, the following recipe is more reminiscent of ordinary Chinese vegetarian fare:

Steamed White Bean Curd with Black Beans and Chiles

Block of tofu

2 tbsp black fermented beans, rinsed

3 chiles

1 tbsp oil

1 tbsp soy sauce
Slice the tofu and pile into foil along with rinsed black fermented beans, sliced chiles, vegetable oil and soy sauce. Steam over medium heat for 20-25 minutes. Stir well and serve over rice.

Serves 2.

The green chili came from my garden and the red ones (pickled) came from my friend Leo, who gifted them to me before he travelled o'erseas. The fermented black beans also came from him. They add a complex and pungent flavour to food, unfortunately they make your kitchen smell somewhat like feet. The original recipe calls for the use of a heatproof bowl– as I'm not sure which (if any) of my bowls are heatproof I constructed my own out of foil. Your results may vary.

Introduction

My roommate gone for the summer, I decided to start a food blog. I suppose I could've learned how to yoodle or gotten a fish (which I'd have named Pushpanathan) but I decided to do this instead. I do love to cook, though I guess it doesn't naturally follow that I should thus share recipes and my thoughts on vegetarian cooking with the entire internet. The project might seem narcissistic but... well I guess it is narcissistic. Still, it's not any more than most other kinds of blogging, so I guess I'll try it for now.

I didn't cook much for most of my life. My parents cooked for me throughout high school and there was a (not particularly great and overpriced) meal plan in first year university. Everything changed in second year when I went to live at Sci '44 Co-op a co-operative housing organization. Well not everything, there was still a meal plan. The difference was, we needed to work for it. Every week I'd enter our big stainless steel communal kitchen and cook for a hundred people (hundred fifty if everyone showed up). I'm still very grateful for my co-cooks and the head cook (A wonderful woman named Wanda) for really teaching me how to cook and tasting the meat for me to see if it was ready. I'm definitely still an amateur though.

I consider myself fairly frugal when it comes to buying food, but I definitely don't want to get into a frugaler-than-thou contest. If being frugal is part of your identity, I'll concede you're more frugal than me (for example, I just switched away from Lakeport Beer. Not worth the savings). Still I have some fun stories about frugality that I'll share over the course of the blog, some of which maybe only I find funny. One thing about not spending a lot of money on food is that it can still taste great! I remember reading a blog about a person who ate for a dollar a day for a month. It was really cool, but a lot of the stuff sounded really bland. He ended up having some money left over, it probably would've been good to invest in some spices other than relying simply on salt. It certainly did for me when I've spent a similar amount in some months (which isn't, of course, a fair comparison because I already have spices).

When it comes to cooking, aside from the internet I have three main cookbooks. Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian is fantastic. It's a thousand pages of information about how to set up a kitchen, buy produce and, of course, hundreds of recipes. My other two are both from the earnestly vegetarian Moosewood Collective: Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day and Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals. They're less comprehensive but there are some really great recipes in there. And although I don't own it, Fuschia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province is also amazing. Though far less vegetarian (maybe cause, uh, it's not a vegetarian cookbook) it also does double duty as a travel memoir.

So that's where I'm coming from. Basically the plan is to talk about recipes, cooking and vegetarianism and hopefully not be too boring in the process.