你怕辣吗？Ni pa la ma? This is a frequent question I receive when I tell curious Chinese neighbors or my numerous tutors that my favorite Chinese food is Chuan Cai. Being a culture that is obsessed with eating (the common greeting here is not How are you? but Have you eaten?), I am always being asked whether or not I like Chinese food. That questions always leads to the next inevitable topic — Which kind do you like? Now you have tread carefully with your answer here, because the person inquiring is gonna judge you based on your response and proceed to lecture on China’s Eight Different Cuisines for the next half hour. My favorite, and the fave of most foreigners with spice-hearty taste buds, is Chuan Cai — food from China’s Sichuan province. Smack dab in the middle of China’s belly, Sichuan is known for its laid-back lifestyle and spicy spicy cuisine. I’m a personal fan of clearing out my sinuses during meal time — if it’s gonna make me cry, I wanna eat it. So when the question Ni pa la ma? or Are you afraid of spicy? comes up in convo, I say… bring it on. When one of my Chinese friends heard this answer, she excitedly told me that she had lived in Sichuan during college and that she would love to teach me how to cook some mouth-scorching Chuan Cai this weekend.
I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t done too much cooking while I’ve been in China. When there are dozens of great restaurants around your block where you can find much better Chinese food than you’ll ever cook (with much more MSG than you’ll ever want to know about), why would a little white girl wanna cook dinner at home? Well I’ve been trying to remedy that lately by buying a wok and asking people their best recipes for some good Chinese grub. This weekend definitely proved a good crash course to some Chuan Cai — and while I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replicate the scrumptious spicy gloriousness someone used to cooking with chopsticks can make, I at least learned a few interesting things about cooking Chinese-style. One — as a general rule of thumb, when you buy family-size meat in China, you buy the whole gosh-darn animal. We started cooking by marinating the meat generously in sauce, and being able to catch a glimpse of every body part I would be consuming later was a little scary.
I informed my friend that, in America, I wasn’t used to ingesting the feet and heads of animals. She just laughed a lot and told me that, in China, you eat every part of the animal. Then excitedly said that she’d save me all of the weird parts at dinnertime so I could try them. Greaaaat. So later that night I got my first taste of chicken feet — something that’s actually a pretty common snack in China. Besides having to dodge the sharp toenails, it actually wasn’t too shabby. It’s kind of the equivalent of gum or sunflower seeds here — more something to chew on than actually eat. You just munch on the skin off the feet for a while and try not to think about where that foot had been a few days earlier. Later, she fished around for the chicken head and kindly opened it up for me so I could eat the brain. Not quite as tasty. I have no idea why people eat this — it’s a really disgusting mushy texture and it takes a long time to find in that small head. My friend told me about all the different animal brains you can eat in China — no animal appeared to be exempt from the list. Including monkeys. According to Stephanie’s boss, eating a monkey’s brain while it’s still alive is considered a delicacy in southern China and also a great topic for dinner conversation. Hmm I’ll pass.
While being forced to eat strange body parts was a little different, I did learn a lot about cooking some good spicy food that evening. I learned that pretty much any and all Sichuan food is made with Douban — a spicy bean chili paste that’ll light you up. Her husband said that you can make any dish “Chuan cai” by just adding some add Douban. I also learned that super fancy wok technique where you flip the veggies up in the air and look super awesome. That’s a prerequisite for any Chinese cooking course.
In the end, it was great to have a good homecooked meal and sit around the dinner table with a family for the night — even if our table conversation was all in Chinese and centered around monkey brains and NBA players. Can’t wait to get home and try out some of these dishes — heard the Atlanta Asian food market is like a beautiful piece of the Middle Kingdom transplanted in the ATL burbs.
