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Passed the Bar Party

To celebrate our bar passage, we held our "We Passed the Bar!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" party last night in our apartment. Generally we enjoy cooking for parties--it's actually one of our specialties, assuming you ignore the little grease fire we had last year. (But even then the food was so good that our guests simply lifted up the tables, moved everything outside, and kept eating while the fire department cleared the smoke out of the house) In China, however, things took on their usual level of difficulty.

We were intent upon cooking "American" food (as advertised) for our classmates, so we assembled a menu consisting of quesadillas, hamburgers, humus and babaganoush with pita, and deviled eggs. Though not an entirely "American" meal, our food fit the label in the sense that you can find the right ingredients for our dishes at the Safeway on Iris and 30th in Boulder. Not so much in Beijing.

Finding all of the ingredients in Beijing took about three days and four different shops. We went to Jenny Lou's in Sanlitun on Friday to get spices, mustard, ketchup, cheese, salsa, vegetables, tortillas, and crackers. On Saturday we went to Chaoyang to buy the Israeli items from Bite-a-Pita, the Lufthansa Center for the hamburger buns, and back to the Haidian Carrefour for cheese and computer speakers. On Sunday morning, we went to the "Western Grocery" to get overpriced corn chips, followed closely by a trip to our neighborhood Chaoshifa for eggs, meat, and paper plates. The lessons learned vis-a-vis shopping in Beijing are as follows:

• Paprika is not available in a small bottle, but you can buy this thing labeled "Mexican Spice" that will appropriately season deviled eggs.
• Lean ground beef is not available in China, and can not be purchased in percentiles of fat. So we seasoned the salsa liberally with a new spice that we like to call "Lipitorika."
  
• As in most European countries, eggs are not refrigerated in China, so pay close attention to date stamps.
  
• Getting to Carrefour requires knowing the name of the shop in Chinese, which is not pronounced "Carrefour," but instead 家乐福.("Jia-le-fo.") Thank goodness our friend Judy took our call when we found ourselves speaking gibberish to our cab driver, because otherwise we would have been stuck in Chaoyang, and she would have kept on singing karaoke with her friends.
• Saturday night at Carrefour is to be avoided. There should not be a traffic jam of rude shoppers in any toilet paper aisle, but Katie found herself in one nonetheless. I have promised to never make her go to Carrefour ever again.
  
• Read the prices on items at Western groceries. Finding a store that sells things like canned soup tends to trigger a gustatory homesickness in expats, so they (read: us) tend to throw things in the cart without looking at stickers.
  
• Out of all the Chinese grocery chains we've visited, Chaoshifa has the most Western-like set-up in Beijing, right down to individually packaged meats (as opposed to piles of cow parts that get picked over day to day) and solid produce selections. The absence of turtle tanks was most welcome.

Once we had all of our ingredients, it was down to work. I used to complain about our kitchen in Boulder, mostly because it was too small and forced us to cook a 20-lbs. turkey on a Weber grill. Here, however, we had to start prep about an hour earlier than usual, mostly because we only have two pots, no oven, and a tiny refrigerator. But we adapted.

Katie, for instance, made a pastry bag out of a Ziploc and used it to fill the deviled eggs. We bought a no-bake desert because most Chinese kitchens (including ours) do not have ovens. We par-boiled all of the vegetables so that none of our guests went home with hepatitis, even though we're pretty sure that the stuff from Chaoshifa and Jenny Lou's is safe. (Evidently the Chinese use "night soil" to grow their crops) And, best of all, we made our quesadillas in a wok.

We think our guests had a good time. In fact, one of them commented that we make the best burgers in Beijing, which seems like high praise until you consider that the other burger-makers are McDonalds and a small shop near the subway. But it was still a nice complement. ;-)

Today we're off to watch the Yankees get knocked out of the pennant. (It turns out that they're a bit like the Chinese.) Then we're cracking the books, since our vacation ends tomorrow. We found a nice little cafe called "Logon Cafe" down the street from our apartment, so we're going to spend the day studying there.

Update: false alarm--the Yankees managed to stay alive. I will be wishing them ill again for their next game in the hopes that my bad wishes yield a similarly stellar save.