Chili crab vs spicy crab

Like any good Oregonian, I love Dungeness crab.  When I was little, my mom's side of the family would go to our beach house and order a case of cooked whole crab.  We'd spread newspapers over picnic tables outside dump the crab on top with some loaves of sourdough bread.  We'd crack and eat our crab dinner, and when we were done, you just roll up the crab shells in the newspaper and put the whole thing in the garbage.

The best piece of crab meat is if you can get one of the claws out whole.  If you do manage to get a whole claw out, and then you give it to someone else, it's the ultimate sign of love.  I remember how sweet and special it was when my grandpa Choo Choo would give me a claw.

So I love crab.  And I love spicy food.

Asians know seafood and spice better than anyone.  It's like spicy shellfish heaven here.

When Agnes and I first met up, we decided to have lunch at a place called Spicy Crab.  The menu was only in Chinese, and none of the wait staff spoke much English, but with such a promising name, we decided to make it work anyways.  Between trying to find some of the characters in Pleco (a helpful but tremendously confusing and poorly designed app), and resorting to just walking around the restaurant and pointing at other people's dishes, we were able to order a small bowl of spicy crab and shrimp, medium spicy.

This is what we got.  A pretty darn big bowl of smallish crab cut into quarters (I think they were mud crabs which are common here, but I'm not sure), shrimp, young bamboo shoots, peanuts, celery some fat little Shanghai noodles and LOTS of dried Sichuan chilies.

It was delicious, but we had to work hard for our meal.  The prawns and crab required a lot of work to get to the meat.  And the crab meat really stuck to the shell, so you had to scrape the flesh off with your teeth.  I think we both ended up eating a fair amount of shell, but hey, it's fiber, right?  I would love to try to recreate this dish at home with Dungeness crab and larger prawns.  And those chewy Shanghai noodle bits were like chewy gnocchi and soaked up all the chili oil. 

Since the Spicy Crab lunch, I had been wanting to try a famous Singaporean dish called chili crab.  Jumbo Seafood is a small chain of Singaporean seafood restaurants with an award-winning chili crab dish.  I started talking about it when I was working late on a pitch, and I got my co-workers excited too.  We decided to go together on a lunch date when we were done with the pitch.  So last Friday, eight of us went to iapm (my favorite mall in the world) to put the hurt on some seafood.  When you walk into the restaurant, you're flanked by giant fish tanks with tons of live seafood, so you know it's going to be really really fresh.  

First, let's talk about the chili crab.  It comes in a chili sauce that's actually a kind of sweet (I think Singaporean food is generally pretty sweet), and you scoop up the sauce with these little fried buns (pictured in the background).  They give you plastic gloves, crab shell crackers and your chopsticks, and you go after it.  It's very messy, so I didn't take any pictures.  All these photos are stolen borrowed from the Jumbo Seafood website.  The internet is great when you do a sloppy job of preparing to blog about your food.

 We also got a black pepper crab, which was really good too.  I don't normally love a lot of black pepper, but this was nice.  I think I appreciated having something that was less sweet.

 We had salted egg golden prawns, which sounds weird, and it kind of was.  The egg coating was a little bit powdery and grainy.  Like maybe it was sieved egg yolks?  It probably tastes better than my description makes it seem, but I wouldn't choose to order it again.

And we had the (unfortunately named) donut with seafood paste.  These were really good.  It was basically a fish stick, but if your fish stick was coated in savory donut batter and sesame seeds.  You dipped it into a sesame, soy sauce, garlic dip.  I would eat these over a Gordon's fish stick every time.

 We also got a steak stir fry, some scallops and broccoli in a translucent sauce, and a few orders of Haianese chicken rice (more about that famous dish in another post).  And whole coconuts to drink from.  I never saw the bill since the account people expensed it, but I know it wasn't cheap.  It was a really nice sign of appreciation after working over a holiday weekend on the pitch.

So which dish won the spicy crab vs chili crab faceoff?  I like the flavor of spicy crab better, but I liked the kind of crab used for the chili crab and the Jumbo Seafood dining experience better.  Maybe we'll just have to make both dishes with Dungeness crab when I get back to Portland, and you guys can decide for youself.  I'm pretty sure I can find young bamboo shoots at Fubon market.

Here are some links to a couple of promising-looking chili crab recipes if you want to start experimenting in the meantime.
Serious Eats recipe 
Tyler Florence recipe

Enjoy, and next time I see you, I'll happily give you a whole crab claw.

Escape to Chongming Island

Restaurants and malls and city life are great, but sometimes you need to get ooooout of the city.

But before we go on a day trip, I should introduce you to Agnes.  Agnes and I met once in Portland when La brought her to a party at Caroline and Michael's place over Christmas.  Some of you blog-readers were there.  Do you remember that party?  The one where we watched a Blazer game and Gardner made the only pecan pie I have ever enjoyed?  Yeah, it was that party.

Agnes happens to be in Shanghai for six months for a Nike project.  It feels so fortuitous that we're both here at the same time.  I feel like I must have built up some really good karma to deserve this.

Sunday was supposed to be nice, so Agnes and I wanted to get out of town.  We were going to go to Hangzhou to pick tea leaves in the fields and hike around.  Hangzhou is 2.5-3 hours away, and it's supposed to be beautiful.  I was going to meet Agnes at her apartment at 11:00, and we were going to head out.

Agnes lives over by People's Square, so I was going to take a cab.  My Mandarin skills are practically nonexistent, and cab drivers definitely don't speak English.  But there is a great way to give directions to a cab driver.  Lots of places provide their address in Mandarin or online.  You show the address card on your phone to a driver, and voila, they take you where you need to go.  Foolproof system, right?

My taxi driver nodded confidently when I showed him the address, and we started driving.  I wasn't really paying attention, since I didn't know where I'm going anyways.  I started feeling like it was taking longer than it should, so I tried to follow our progress on the Apple map on my phone, and it say I was in Pudong (on the wrong side of the river) and continuing to head away.  I tried to get the driver to stop so I could show him the address card again ("Ting" means stop, and is one of the few Mandarin words I do know), but he just talked rapidly in Mandarin and kept driving on the freeway.  I called Agnes and she handed the phone to her driver, Jimmy, and I handed the phone to my cab driver.  Jimmy yelled at him in Mandarin (I could literally hear him yelling), and the guy took a huge U-turn across traffic and started heading west again.  When I got the phone back and Agnes told me that there is another Green Court apartments in deep Pudong, and the cab driver hadn't actually looked at the address and assumed that I wanted the east location.  I was probably 20-30 minutes east of where I needed to be.  

He finally brought me to Agnes' apartment after being in the car for more than an hour.  I had no idea what the cab fare would be, but at that point, I didn't even care.  I would give him all the cash on me just to let me out.  I was more than an hour late.  He told me to give him 20RMB (about $3.30) and get out.  I don't know what Jimmy said to him, but he must have been very persuasive.

Since I was so late, it didn't really make sense to go to Hangzhou anymore.  I felt terrible, but Agnes and Jimmy were so nice about it and insisted that it was the cab driver's fault, not mine.  We decided to go to Chongming Island instead since it's only about an hour and a half away.

Since it wasn't out intended destination, I hadn't done any research and didn't know what to expect.  Chongming Island is like the Sauvie Island of Shanghai.  Big, flat, agricultural, great for biking, close in proximity to the city but remarkably rural by contrast.  I didn't know how starved my eyeballs were for open space, trees and flowers until we got out of the city.

(In real life, the East China Sea is more of a khaki color than in this photo.)

First, you drive over an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly long bridge to get to the island.  Jimmy said that the bridge was only two years old, and that before it was built you had to take a ferry to get to the island.  I guess that explains why it the island can feel so rural even though it's close to the Shanghai sprawl.  Fun fact: Chongming is the world's largest alluvial island at 750 square miles.  Hopefully that knowledge can make you can feel really pretty and smart when it inevitably comes up a dinner party.  You're welcome.

We were driving along and saw field and fields of yellow flowers that were as tall as a petite adult or large child (Aggie my love, you would disappear).

Our first scheduled stop was Chongming Dongtang Birds National Natural Reserve.  The wetlands are a stopover or wintering ground for lots of migrating birds.  Agnes and I have zero bird-watching experience, so we heard lots of bird calls that we couldn't recognize.  Also, most birds are really good at camouflage.  

You know what birds don't care about camouflage?  
Black swans.
You know what black swans don't like?
Well, actually, lots of things.  They're pretty cranky.  But we learned that they don't like wasabi peas.  (I know, we're terrible.  I promise this is our last foray into bird-watching.  Please don't send the audubon society after us with their pitchforks and binoculars.)

Next we went to Dongping National Forest Park.  We got there shortly before they closed, so we persuaded them to let us in without paying, and then we tried to run around as fast as we could.  

There is a lot of natural beauty, but I couldn't get over how was laid out like an amusement park and had ambient music and fake bird calls playing over speakers off the pathways.  I guess it really is telling that when you are this close to the largest city in the world, nature is a little bit of a novelty.  We saw women walking around in dresses and high heels.  Toto, I don't think we're in Oregon anymore.

But OMG!  They have something called grass skiing.  We were so curious to see what grass skiing was, and discovered that it's exactly what it sounds like.  People rent very sturdy ATV-like roller blades and "ski" down one gently-sloping, well-groomed grass hill.   And then they take a rope tow back up again.  I guess the closest good skiing is Japan, so sometimes you need to get creative.  

All in all, it was a great sunny Sunday adventure.  We had big bowls of ramen at Ippudo when we got back to town.  Ippudo is a Japanese chain, and if you're curious, you can check out the site for their NY locations since it's in English.  It was delicious.

And then I happily walked the 1.5 miles home from dinner.  It was a nice night out, and I think I had spent more than enough time in a cab that day.

My dumps

I've received a lot of requests for more dumpling pictures.  Okay, fine.  Twist my arm.

These little dumps belong to another soup dumpling family called sheng jian.  The filling is made with pork aspic (don't cringe, if it was good enough for Julia Child, it's good enough for you), so there's a little bit of soupy deliciousness inside.  They're cooked in a big pan so they're pan-fried and crispy on the bottom and steamed on top.

You still have to bite and slurp, although it's not as much liquid as xiao long bao.  You dress them with a little soy-vinegar mixture and some spicy chili flakes.  I mixed both into a little slurry mixture in that reservoir of my plastic plate.  (Does that plastic tray make anyone else think about grade school cafeteria food?)

Multiple people recommended that I try Yang's Fried Dumplings, which has several locations.  The closest location is in the food court of the Réel Center Mall in Jing-An, which is a 10 minute walk from my apartment.  I told you, malls in China are awesome.  But I would go to Clackamas Town Center for these dumplings, which is saying something.

In the busy food court, Yang's doesn't even have a sign, but I followed all the people I saw slurping dumplings and the vendor with the longest line.  They don't have an English menu, but they do have pictures and weird plastic food replicas of dishes, so I gestured through ordering one order of pork dumplings for ¥6 and one order of shrimp dumplings (the ones with the black sesame seeds) for ¥16.  My whole dinner cost about $3.50.  And it was damn good.

They hit all the right dumpling notes: salty, spicy, fatty, vinegar-y and addictive.  The would make great hangover food.  Which may have been an added benefit after going to a good-bye party the night before for a Shanghai co-worker.  But they'd be good anytime.

After eating so many delicious dumplings, I've been craving salads.  Salads and raw foods aren't really a part of traditional Chinese food.  There's a great food memoir about Chinese food called Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper (I highly recommend it), and one of the chapters is called "Salad is for Barbarians."  

Most travel guides will tell you not to eat any raw foods here unless it has a peel that can be removed.  So... that would definitely rule out any salad.  I love salad.  I can't live like that.  So I've been buying some fresh veggies and fruit at little storefronts that seem at least somewhat reliable.  I've really had to lower my standards for what qualifies are "reliable."  As long as they're not cleaning live fish on the sidewalk in front of the store, it's reliable.  I guess I brought charcoal capsules and grapefruit seed extract for a reason, right?

I don't have a kitchen or basic kitchen supplies, such as a chef's knife or cutting board, in my apartment, so my salads are pretty pathetic.  I cut up cucumbers in my hands using a plastic butter knife.  Or just give up and eat a cucumber like a banana.

But even a terrible little salad with jarred, pickled cabbage (there are a lot of British import foods in this part of town), bottled dressing and pretzel croutons is better than no salad.  

Looking forward to reinstating my CSA box and going shopping at farmers' markets when I'm back.  

Eat a salad this week and think of me, my friends.  I'll eat some dumplings and think of you.  And from across the Pacific ocean, we can be jealous of each other.