Cooking Class in Beijing, 2008
I admit, I rarely cook Chinese food at home. Despite having taken several cooking lessons in Beijing, I seldom dust off the wok. The reasons are not unreasonable: too many ingredients that can be too hard to find. Too much prep which goes along with too much clean up. There is also a considerable amount of technique involved as well as some specialized equipment. And when you are finished, there are all those barely used bottles of esoteric condiments mouldering in your fridge and bags of spices that will gather dust in your cupboard, growing more mysterious with every passing year.
It is simply easier to pick up the phone and order your favourite special combo #4. But you can get tired of the usual Moo Goo Guy Pan, sticky sweet Lemon Chicken and my particular weakness, curry laden Singapore Noodle. (Most Chinese meals end with a starch: Singapore Noodle ends with me asleep in a carb induced coma)
A Tea Toast at a Yunnan restaurant 2008
When I was staying in Beijing for a summer, Emily, Younes and I would come home most nights, open up the TimeOut (a weekly English language entertainment magazine) and decide on which type of regional cuisine we would enjoy that evening, (from Shanghai, Yunnan, Hunan, Mongolian hot-pot) and then rip out the name and address of a specific restaurant to give to the taxi driver. In eight weeks, we never ate at the same place twice. And we never cooked Chinese cuisine at home.
Anyone who has ever studied the Chinese language knows that Chinese folks talk about food more than any other topic, to the point that in some parts of northern China, people greet one another with “Have you eaten?” (chifanle meiyou) rather than “Are you well?” (ni hao?). Jonathan Lipman, Department of History, Mount Holyoke College
The Inspiration for the Class
But a recent cooking class at Casa de Cocinas has given me motivation to retrieve the wok from the back of the cupboard. Michael and Valarie Coon run this very special cooking school in San Miguel de Allende that focuses on global cuisine. In a fast paced three-hour session entitled A Taste of China , Michael prepared recipes from Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Every Grain of Rice”. Fuchsia, who deserves to be more well-known outside of Britain, is considered to be the best writer in the West on Chinese food. She also crafts recipes for delicious, authentic Chinese meals that the home cook can create in their own kitchen.
‘Fuchsia has a rare ability to convey an encyclopaedic knowledge of Chinese cuisine in a compelling and totally delicious way.’ Heston Blumenthal
And just in, “Every Grain of Rice” was selected this past Tuesday as one of the top cookbooks of 2013 by Canada’s “Globe and Mail”:
Fuchsia Dunlop, a Brit who trained as a chef in Chengdu, China, is the go-to Western authority on regional Chinese cooking. Her latest, loaded with easy, extraordinarily tasty recipes (gingery beef brisket soup with goji berries), is also peppered with easy-to-follow instructions on Chinese cooking basics, from using a wok to proper knife cuts. Indispensable.
Some of the ingredients for Dan Dan Noodles
One of the benefits of attending any of these courses is Michael’s encyclopedic knowledge of food and his interesting stories of cooking personalities he has met during his culinary travels around the globe. He actually had spent time in China with Fuchsia during a chef/cooking tour for the Culinary Institute of America. He put together a menu from her cookbook which not only fed us in style and in quantity, but allowed him to demonstrate the different techniques for preparing all the courses. (It is primarily a demonstration class but you are encouraged to take part as much as you would like.)
He also generously divulges his best culinary sources here in San Miguel, makes suggestions for substitutions and when necessary, adapts the recipes for our altitude and availability of ingredients.
As always, the class was entertaining, educational, full of practical advice & tips, and of course, the meal was superb! Here is what he prepared for us:
“A Taste of China” @ Casa de Cocinas
Smacked Cucumbers with Garlicky Sauce
Classic Dan Dan Noodles (Plus a variation)
Twice Cooked Pork
Pomegranate Ice Cream (his own creation)
Classic Dan Dan Noodles
Stir Frying the Twice Cooked Pork
Twice Cooked Pork being Served
Twice Cooked Pork & Jasmine Rice
It has been a long time since I have tasted authentic Chinese food from the Sichuan and Hunan regions in the south of the country: savoury, pungent, spicy and of course it had that unique numbing flavour that you get only from Sichuan peppercorns. The consensus of the class was that the Classic Dan Dan Noodle was the favourite, but really, for me, it was hard to pick just one dish.
The food was as wonderful and remarkable as I remember enjoying in those Sichuan restaurants in Beijing seven years ago, and I cannot wait to bring my wok (and a supply of those special peppercorns) to San Miguel and get started!
If you would like to attend one of Michael and Valarie’s special cooking classes, you can email them at insideroute@aol.com and they will put you on the mailing list for their schedule of classes, culinary trips, tastings and more. If you would like to try the Dan Dan Noodles, Michael’s adaption of her classic recipe is here. (more…)
