Baby Food (and fun with words)

Do you remember this ‘mystery soup’ from the International Women’s Day post?

dessert plate, including a mystery soup

When we walked around the courtyard before Women’s Day dinner, Wang老师 had commented on the bamboo shoots. I said I had eaten some with my friend Pan in Nanjing. They’re very good, and I told her about a funny incident I’d had the previous weekend regarding bamboo shoots: I had asked Pan what they were called. “Baby Bamboo!” she and her friend decided to translate it into English (similar to Baby Spinach). “婴儿竹子 (ying1erzhu2zi)” I replied, combining the Chinese words for ‘baby’ and ‘bamboo’. Pan stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth, looked at me, and said, “Now, that’s just creepy.”

During Women’s Day dinner, I went up to the buffet to gather my dessert-plate. I added to it a small amount of a strange, but sweet-smelling soup. The soup seemed to have Zaozi, little “Chinese dates” that are like tiny, softer apples, in addition to some thin, wrinkly, yellow-white things. I wondered if it was jellyfish, but the texture wasn’t like jellyfish…
“Oh, what soup is that?” Wang老师 asked when I returned to the table. “I have no idea!” I replied. “Is this Zaozi?”, I asked, pointing to the date-like fruit. She said yes. Ok, one down…

“Oh,” she said, indicating the suspected non-jellyfish, “These are 银耳. 白木耳, Like 木耳, but they’re white.” 木耳 mu4er3 (tree ear) is the name of a mushroom commonly used in Chinese cooking, so called because it’s thin and folded, like an ear. The new food seemed to have two names: 白木耳 and 银耳. I understood the 白木耳, a white tree ear, but the 银耳 pronunciation, and therefore meaning, was just escaping me. I tried to repeat it, unsure if the first syllable was a 1st or 2nd tone: “ying2耳 还是 ying1耳?” I tried.

Wang老师 kind of froze with her cup in her hands.
“银！yin2!银色的银!” she corrected me. Oooh.. silver. The things were called “silver ears” even though I thought the color seemed more like soft yellow-white than silver. ‘Silver’ is yin2: ‘yin2耳’. I had said ‘ying1耳’.

“Baby Ears!” Wang老师 cracked up, and so did the rest of the table when she translated the situation 🙂

Persimmon

On Friday, I found some persimmons in the corner of the Walmart grocery section.

A very soft persimmon

Everything I know about persimmons comes from two sources: this poem (Persimmons by Li-Young Lee), and from remembering a friend at college (whose family was of Chinese descent) being excited about discovering a persimmon tree in the backyard of the place she was renting with her fellow schoolmates. Her schoolmates had been ignoring the persimmon tree since they did not know what it was, but she was ecstatic about it.

It had been a long time since I read the poem. I did not remember if I was supposed to eat the skin, but standing in the corner of the grocery store, I did remember that they were supposed to be very very soft. I think I have seen them for sale before from the street-side fruit vendors, but I mistook them for one of those not-quite-tomato fruits, and did not buy any. My loss.

In the grocery store, there were two kinds of persimmons – ones that looked like tomatoes with different sorts of leaves on top and ones that looked like the others, but as though they’d been grown with a string tied around their middle, causing them to bulge on the top and bottom. I got one of each. I got the ripest-feeling one that I dared to carry home. The ripe bulgy one felt like it was made of water swishing in the bottom. It did not smell bad at all, but I could not help thinking of rotten tomatoes. It had the same feel of a thin skin with watery swishing fluid beneath. I was concerned that it might actually be too ripe or rotten, so I got a slightly firmer but still soft one of the non-bulgy kind. It felt about they way that a tomato feels when you know it needs to sit on your countertop for 2 or 3 more days to be perfectly ripe.

The next morning, I ate the bulgy one. It had been a long time since I read the poem, and I did not remember if I was supposed to eat the skin, which looked speckled and beginning to mold on top, so I cut the top off with a knife like a pumpkin. Inside, there were a few wafers of solid fruit material drifting within what I have so far only figured out how to describe as fruit custard.

fruit custard-gel that comes in its own bowl

The fruit had mostly become a sort of custard-jelly texture within its skin. I scooped it out and ate it off the end of my knife. I haven’t figured out how to describe the flavor yet. It was sweet, but not overpowering or sugary or tangy. The sweetness was so soft and almost creamy, just like the texture. A really lovely fruit.

The other persimmon is still sitting on the tabletop, ripening, I hope.

First Things First: Breakfast

Ok, I have some catching up to do.  I’m into my third week of being the Foreign Teacher (外教) for the Suzhou Experimental Elementary School at their brand-new Wujiang Pearl Elementary School (and Preschool/Kindergarten) branch, and I’ve only just gotten around to establishing some kind of web-presence.  More explaining and flashbacks later – I figured I’d start y’all off with the same thing I start myself off with each day: Breakfast.

School breakfast: boiled egg, congee (rice porridge), pickled somethings, and two cute little mantou.

Yep, every day that I go to work, that’s what I eat. It never changes. I rather like it. The bowl of white stuff is plain congee. Congee is rice porridge/gruel. Kind of like watery oatmeal, except with rice instead of oatmeal. It’s not just rice in water – the watery part is smooth and has some substance from the starch of the rice. It’s a good cushion food for my stomach to hit first thing in the morning. It always comes with a hard boiled egg, and some pickled somethings. I usually mix both of these into my congee (after peeling the egg) to give it some more flavor. Finally, the dessert of my breakfast, there are the two adorable little mantou. They are just little rice dough rolls. They taste a teeny bit sweet, but I’m not sure yet if they have sugar added (probably) or if I just happen to think that rice dough tastes a little sweet. Anyway, this is what I eat every single morning that I go to work. Ok, I guess there is one thing that may vary. Sometimes one of my little mantou has … I think a sweet lotus paste … inside. Surprise :3 !

mmm... lotus paste...

Although, if you look at a filled mantou and an unfilled one, you can see that one is a little rounder.

Breakfast is served while the kids and teachers roll in between 07:30 and ~07:55, so every day I make sure that I’m at least moving around by the time the pleasant music comes on over the intercom system. Then the dorm bells ring, I imagine driving the boarding kids out of their rooms and propelling them towards the classroom buildings. I haven’t actually witnessed this yet, though. I live in one of the four large buildings on the brand-new primary school campus. I live on the 5th floor, and I think that one of the staff people also lives there, but I haven’t seen them yet. The boarding students live on the 2nd floor of the same building. Not all of the students live at the school. A large percentage are retrieved by their family every day and delivered again in the morning. Also, even the boarding students go home for weekends.

Today is Friday, the last day of my third week here. The students go home early on Fridays. Tonight’s activity will probably be to forage for food downtown because with the students gone for the weekend, the school won’t be serving dinner. But, dinner and lunch and school and downtown and all those other things will have to wait for later posts. This one’s just supposed to get us started.