Cooking Liaoning Dumplings - Beijing Style

It was the popular 19th century American columnist Fanny Fern who first coined the phrase “The way to a man's heart is through his stomach” – though as Republican politician Robert Byrne retorted, "Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography"!

[An aside: I’ve often wondered that if the way to a man's heart really is through his stomach (and I have to say, I have my doubts), what organ do we go through to get to a woman's heart?]

I was waltzing with my friend Lixue at my Saturday evening dance class, when she asked me if I liked dumplings (it’s amazing the range of questions one has to field from some of the girls there.) Naturally, I told her I did. I mean, I’m a guy and I love my stomach. And at that self-same moment, the only recorded coherent sentence from Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria came to my mind: “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings”.

And so it was that we decided there and then to set a date for me to be taught how to make Liaoning dumplings (for Lixue comes from this north eastern province of China which borders on the DPRK). Liaoning is famed for its food; and according to Wikipedia, Liao Cuisine is one of the eight famous cookery styles of China. Jiaozi (dumplings) and noodles form the staple foods of the area.

Before the appointed hour of her arrival, I rush out to Wumart to stock up on some of the necessaries that she has given to me as a shopping list and then do my gentlemanly duty of meeting her from the subway station and escorting her back to my place.

Alas, she is suffering from a sore throat, so before we knuckle down to the cookery lesson, I give her my own tutorial in sore-throat-manipulation: a mixture of honey, whisky and hawthorn juice, warmed up in the microwave and gargled down. This seems to do the trick and before one can say akhem akhem, she is busy chopping my prized pieces of pork fillet into a fine mince that would surely be the envy of many a butcher’s shop in the west.

While Lixue is busy hacking the poor pig into submission, it is my duty to fine chop an onion (no tears, big boy!) as well as a leek and some pak choi (that are standing in as a cabbage substitute), together with a few slivers of ginger…

and before you know it we have a dumpling mix whose aroma fills the kitchen. (It is only half an hour later that someone – mentioning no names, of course – realises that “we” forgot to add any oil to the mix; so a bottle of olive oil is extracted from the cupboard and a dollop is added. No one, we are sure, will be any the wiser.)

It is only at this point in time that Lixue admits to me that she has never made dumplings before in her life. Oh, she has seen her mother do them countless times, but she has always wondered if she could do them too – and guess whom she has chosen to be her first guinea-pig?

Now she tells me!

I quickly do some mental calculations. On the basis of what-is-the-worst-that-could-possibly-happen scenarios, I know I have enough eggs in the fridge to satisfy the most demanding of appetites, so we decide to carry on and see what we end up with. For who was it who said that it is (usually) better to travel hopefully than to arrive?

Next up, it’s play-dough time. I search my addled brain for any dough jokes I can come up with, but realise they wouldn’t translate well into Chinglish so instead I shake the flour canister (a.k.a. an old peach nectar juice bottle) as Lixue adds water and kneads the resultant dough into a ball.

The dough ball needs to “rest” a while after being pummelled into submission. Now, if you look at all the top chefs doing their cookery shows on TV, there are loads of them slurping back a few mouthfuls of beverage as they do so; so I work out this is a good time to introduce my Master Chefette to the joys of Gin and Tonic – except, of course, that this is China, so we settle for Gin and Sprite, which actually isn’t a bad substitute.

Already the thought of Liaoning Dumplings is tickling my taste buds. What is the difference between a Liaoning Dumpling and a dumpling from any other part of China, I ask her. Errr, not a lot, it would seem!

Next up I am shown the art of rolling the dough into flat discs. It looks so easy the way she turns the dough ball under the rolling pin, which goes back and forth over half the dough each time until she ends up with a perfect circle of wafer thin skins.

She picks up some of the filling and dollops it onto a skin …

and before you know it she is squeezing the skins and innards into raw dumplings.

Huh! What could be easier, thinks the Boy Wonder. As if reading my thoughts, Lixue stands back and “suggests” your favourite blogger has a go. Visions of a 1970s TV game show called The Generation Game immediately spring to mind, in which an expert shows the contestants how to do something seemingly easy-peasy and then stands back while the audience falls about laughing at the pathetic efforts of the contestants trying to remember the sequence of events – in this case flattening the dough ball, rolling the rolling pin halfway over the ball, gripping the resultant dough shape, giving it a semi turn and applying the rolling pin again and again until such time you (should) end up with a perfectly shaped disc.

I am left wondering if anyone can really tell, just by looking, which are my finished dumplings, and which ones Lixue has crafted. But by the time we have prepared 37 of the little blighters, there is not an awful lot to choose between them (he says, working on the principle that if you say something with enough conviction, there are always some people who will believe you, however much B-S is contained within your statement!)

[Time for an aside here, as I am reminded after committing the cardinal error of misplacing the chopsticks while working on the dough discs; you can place the chopsticks on top of the bowl…

or propped up against the side of the bowl…

but NEVER can you stick them up straight out of the food. It reminds the Chinese of placing incense sticks when paying respects to their ancestors, and so is extremely bad form / bad luck / bad manners should you ever do this at the table, or even when preparing Liaoning dumplings!]

The next problemette to be solved is how we are going to steam the raw dumplings. We consider using a rice cooker, before we discover there is actually a steaming pot, hidden away in one of the cupboards, which has never seen the light of day for the past nine months to my certain knowledge.

Eventually, some three hours after starting this marathon cookery lesson, it is lunch time. Lixue explains that a soy dip usually tastes better if you add some vinegar into it; and together with a sweet chilli sauce, we are ready for the off.

The looks of contentment / relief say it all. Has Lixue really never cooked a dumpling in her life before today? She assures me she really, really hasn’t. And I have to believe her.

I tell her she is welcome to come back and give me a cookery lesson again any time. But I guess that with her cooking skills, it won’t be long before some stomach other than mine points her in the direction of a yearning heart and she will finally be lost to the members of Gluttons Anonymous for ever more.

Time for Another Comeuppance

I’m pretty grateful to Karl Marx for putting things into perspective for me so many years ago. Religion, he declared, was the opiate of the masses. Never having thought of myself as one of the masses, I long ago eschewed religion and concentrated instead on self preservation and accepting responsibility for my own actions rather than blaming it all on an unknown Being, who had a few other billions of souls to look after.

Just as well, as it turns out; for otherwise I would be shuddering by now at the prospect of spending the rest of eternity being consumed by the hellfires of damnation. You see, if the truth be known, I haven’t been a very good boy these last few years.

Not content with being arrested in Jeddah, I was also arrested, charged, finger-printed and thrown in jail in Riyadh, fined ginormous sums in Dubai and now, living the simple life in Beijing, I have run foul of the authorities once again.

I first became aware of my heinous crime a few days ago. Suddenly my internet connection stopped working. OMG, thought I. Perhaps the web police had discovered that I had been downloading Johnny English Reborn via the Pirate Bay. The news has been full of stories that China is tightening its copyright piracy measures, so let’s face it… where better to start than stopping its foreign experts from taking a sneak preview of Mr Bean acting incognito, even if your favourite blogger had been trying to circumvent the restrictions by using some proxy software to make himself ‘anonymous’ online?

(An aside here: it is said that the Chinese military are behind much of the DVD bootlegging, so it’s unlikely that this little sideline will stop any time soon! But shhhh – don’t tell anyone I said that!)

Eventually, after two days of internet silence, I decided to face the music and took a 406 bus to China Unicom to turn myself in.

The truth, it turned out, was much worse than I dared to fear. My account, it appears, was unpaid. Despite sending an sms pointing out that I owed China Unicom the grand total of 6.7 jiao, it appeared I had wilfully ignored them and they had no option but to stop my connection.

Now, for those unaccustomed to high finance, I should maybe explain that the Chinese currency is made up of yuan, jiao and fen. 100 fen = 10 jiao = I yuan. 10 yuan = about £1. So I had wilfully run up the equivalent of around 7 UK pence or 11 US cents and it was obvious to everyone that I was trying to avoid my responsibilities by doing a runner.

Shamefacedly I was led to a queue of other miscreants and was asked to wait in line before eventually being relieved of a one yuan note without even being offered the option of getting any change. But the good news was that my internet connection would be restored, though not for a couple of hours.

I took the 406 bus back home again where my internet remained stubbornly unresponsive. I rebooted Windoze – usually guaranteed to breathe fresh life into the old machine. Nothing. I reloaded the software. Nothing. I even thought about kicking it into life, but my soft feminine side prevented me doing anything untoward to my little Lenovo.

Then I realised I hadn’t waited for the promised two hours… so I held back my natural impatience and planned on all the things I would do once I had my window on the world restored.

Night time came and went and still I was trapped in my own little space bubble. I thought of going to the office and asking someone there to ring China Unicom for me. But in the end I braved the ten minute journey on the 406 yet again and went in to the hallowed portals, there to seek someone who could understand what I wanted.

No one at the information desk spoke a word of the Queen’s vernacular.

But luckily someone in the queue behind me had mastered the equivalent of La plume de ma tante in Chinglish and was able to offer up a running translation for me. I was asked to wait. (I presume I was asked to wait, though in theory I suppose it could have been anything for all I knew.) Eventually a petite girl from the inner office emerged and engaged in rapid conversation with my newly acquired translator.

She looked into her database, tut-tutted a few times (tsk tsk sounds the same in any language) and told my interlocutor that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever why my internet connection shouldn’t work… but I noticed all the same that she clicked on a couple of tick-boxes on my record card which had remained obstinately blank up until that moment. Working on the principle that discretion is the better part of valour, I thanked them both profusely for their time and headed back once again for the 406 and home.

And guess what! As I hit the connect button my internet roared into life once more and no longer did I feel an outcast from the world.

I guess yet again your favourite blogger got his comeuppance and in the future will hopefully lead a better, more upright existence for the benefit of mankind. For if a moral is needed for this sad story it is that he who holds the purse strings has the upper hand. Or to put it another way… never brush with authority cos “they” will win every time.