sunao ii [beijing]

Six of us made a visit to Sunao, which I had previously visited on my own at a lunch time, navigating my way through a characters-only menu. We were delighted to find that the dinner menu has English subtitles as well as pictures, so Wendy and I didn’t have to tax ourselves translating for everyone. 





There were worries, and Wendy and I decided on more and more dishes, that maybe we were ordering too many: fortunately, it appears we ordered just enough.

We started with a plate of fruit (tomato here being considered a fruit), provided with no charge and served with dry ice. The waitress explained that eating fruit after a meal inhibits digestion, which is why they serve it to start the meal – when pressed, she suggested that other restaurants that serve fruit at the end of the meal are very wrong.






And then the meal itself, oh wow, it was one of the best meals I’ve had here in Beijing, I think.

My favourite was probably the mock fish, with a ‘skin’ and also battered, it was eerily reminiscent of the fish at the EBC. As you can see, it was massive, but we finished it off, and a lot of the sauce, too. Competing for favourite was the peanut tofu, thin slices of tofu served with mushrooms and a sauce that tasted positively gado gado-like.


The lemon eggplant was a random choice, ordered because of the batter. If I didn’t know this was eggplant, I wouldn’t have known. The lemon was sweet and tart, and the batter was crisp whilst the eggplant remained soft and flavoursome. This was a good dish, but I felt something was lacking. In a completely surprising occurrence, there was tempeh on this menu! It’s the first time I’ve seen tempeh on a menu in Beijing, so of course I ordered it! Sadly, I wasn’t a fan of this one, served here with a wasabi sauce, though others at the table thought it was tasty.


I order kungpao chicken when I can, because V (my previous housemate) loves a (non-vegan) kungpao chicken. The ‘chicken’ in this one was lovely, it soaked up the sauces and complimented the flavours very well. I rarely have had a curry I liked in Beijing, so I also ordered the mock beef curry with a thai sauce. The vegetables in this especially were tasty, but the ‘beef’ was pretty good too, and I wasn’t disappointed at all. I enjoyed this curry.






Two dishes I didn’t enjoy so much: something with pumpkin, and the ‘meat cake’ – meat cake looked a bit jian bing like, but there was something about the flavour that I didn’t enjoy. I also wasn’t a fan of these pumpkin cups, I don’t know what I was expecting but I didn’t enjoy the flavour nor the texture, and in the end it was the only dish remaining that we didn’t finish.








This meal was amazing. I’m going to make a concerted effort to get back to Sunao before I leave Beijing, and I am looking forward to it.

Previous visit: one

Sunao
Ground Floor, East Side
Nanxingcang Business Building
Dongsishitiao
Dongcheng

English + Chinese menu with pictures in the evening, get there on Line 2 (Exit C). Well-lit, little step to enter.

baihe iii [百合素食] [beijing]

Visited Baihe today for lunch! Haven't been for several months, since Charlie's going away in April, but we were at a loose end today and I thought the little walk down would be most excellent. And it was! It was pretty quiet, so service was fast and attentive.





We went with two of my favourites, the peking duck (with pancakes) (half size) and the dry roasted potatoes, as well as the gailan for some greens (listed on the menu as Cantonese vegetables/ 广东菜).





Danni really wanted to try the pipa chicken drumsticks, despite my insistance that they were not very nice. Guess which penguin was right?! They're always weirdly sweet. Seen here served with strawberry jam.




As always, the duck was super delicious, I could totally eat more of that. We also ordered a pot of dragon well tea (龙井茶) which was lovely. 





Previous visits: for CNY and the first visit (which has Englishness, accessibility details and directions)

Baihe Vegetarian / Lily's Vegetarian / 百合素食
23 Caoyuan Hutong
off dongzhimen nei bei xiaojie
Dongcheng District
Beijing

accidentally vegan: belgian chocolate thins

One of the things I love about China is the whole new range of accidentally vegan things to explore, such as this brand of chocolate crisps that Lainie and I discovered in a supermarket in Qingdao. This supermarket, by the way, located in the basement of the Hi-Sense shopping centre (海信广场) if you ever get a chance to go, was amazing. Cappuccino flavoured soy-milk (in both 2 litre and 500ml tetras), my favourite brand of instant noodles, and conveniently located next to a Starbucks and a hilariously painted toilet.

Anyway, chocolate:

They're like chips, but they are chocolate and mint, there were also a couple of other flavours but I was short on space for the trip back to Beijing. They're the perfect size!

fancy eats at capital m

I spent most of yesterday in the vicinity of Xuanwumen, suspiciously close to my work despite it being a public holiday (端午节, the dragon boat festival). As a break between meandering around Niu Jie and heading down Liulichang Jie (which is the calligraphers' area), C (my companion for the day) suggested we drop into Capital M for lunch.

I've been to Capital M only once before, to meet Senator the Hon Bob Carr, and acknowledged it was a bit swanky without really taking in quite how swanky it was.

After having a two hour, three course meal, and spending way more money on one meal than I have previously in Beijing, I, uh, now get the idea just how swanky it is.


Unsurprisingly I couldn't eat any of the set menus, but with a bit of negotiation I was still able to get a meal with some amazing moments. Such as this salad, above, with grape fruit, flower petals, and an assortment of leaves, in a light dressing. I hate dressing, and yet I still found this absolutely delicious.



I followed this up with a modified pasta, ordered without the anchovies (ps, things that taste terrible: anchovies), but with everything else: capers, olives, tomato. This was very oily, and C, who is Italian, made fun of me for ordering pasta outside Italy.

Finally, to round out my meal, I ordered the fruits with sorbet, which turned out to be made with a coconut milk base, and was rich and creamy and delicious.

Not pictured here: the Turkish Delight with which we ended, nor my delight over soft, fresh, crispy, and most importantly not-sugary bread.

Capital M

3/F, No 2. Qianmen Pedestrian Street
(just south of Qianmen)
Beijing

前门步行街2号3层

beijing and my hotpot/steamboat obsession

It seems weird to blog about hotpot in the middle of a Beijing summer (currently 27C though, so not too bad), but I just had one on Sunday so it’s fresh in my mind. And I love them so. 
I’ve spent years of my life obsessed with hotpot (or steamboat) as the weather cools, and trying to convince my mother that the weather is cool enough, no really, to have a steamboat or two running in the house. After going vego, steamboat at home is still possible, but no longer do I find myself able to steamboat out and about due to the preponderance for good chicken stock in the soup. Beijing, though, is filled with hotpot restaurants of different varieties, and the cheapest, the most tackiest of chains, are so cheap they don’t put animal products in their soups – the cheapest of all are just water and salt and a piece of ginger and an inch of leek.  There’s Little Sheep, and Xiabu Xiabu, both just down the road from my house, where you can choose your soups spicy or not spicy; and at Little Sheep they give you popcorn when you enter (not vegan, maybe not vego) and make you pay extra for the sesame dipping sauce.  Most places I frequent you share the pot, which is fine when I tell my friends in advance that the pot will be filled only with tofu, vegetables, noodles and mushrooms. Inevitably, we’ll get to the end of the order, and the waitperson will look at me. 不要肉, I’ll say, don’t want meat, before they have a chance to ask.  I love a good hotpot, and it can be pretty easy, even if you’re in China and don’t speak Mandarin, because the menus are almost always big and glossy with pictures for every plate you can order, and there’s usually only one type of item on a plate – meat OR bok choy OR tofu, which makes it easy to get nothing but vego things. 

However there are things to be aware of, as a veg*n. There’ll be sauces floating around, for dipping – I’m not a big user of the sauces, but they’ll sometimes not necessarily be vego, they’ll be cut with something fish-based. A lot of places, especially fancy places, fill their soup with animal products, so you have to specifically ask if it’s water or stock in the pot.  When I return to Melbourne I have plans to start investigating as many steamboat restaurants as I can, to see if I have any options. I know that Enlightened Cuisine and Vegie Mum are both doing a steamboat for winter, which I look forward to trying  And if I don’t, I’m just going to have to buy one and start having 火锅 parties at my house. 

accidentally vegan #2331 [+ E120]

[transcription: Um no I am a vegetarian myself and I know for a FACT that vegans can't eat Jelly Beans OR Arnott's barbeque shapes because they contain Worcestershire sauce in them and that is made from anchovies which ARE FISH which is meat and Jelly beans well they contain jelly which is um hello GELATIN which is bones and felsh of animals so I don't know where you got that information but...]

Yes, anonymous commenter who is not the first person to have made this comment and been deleted, you are way a better vegetarian than me because after five years of being a vegan I definitely have never ever done any research and had no idea that gelatine is made from dead animals or that worcestershire sauce generally contains anchovies and I've definitely never read the back of any snack foods or called or emailed any manufacturers in order to verify the things I then post on my blog or put in my body. How kind of you to educate me on these things, because otherwise I would have gone my life assuming fishies were vegetables. And I definitely didn't just go read the back of an Allens Jelly Bean pack in order to not find the word gelatine on it (spoilers: I didn't find the word gelatine).

I did, however, find colour 120, which is cochineal. Does anyone know any more about this?

And look, just for the record, I want to know if something I'm eating isn't vegan, and I accept that sometimes I'm wrong and that sometimes I might accidentally tell you a thing is vegan when it's not, but I am not open to being told like I don't know what I'm doing, like I can't read or am incompetent.

an attempt at risotto

I haven't been able to find arborio rice here in China. I don't have my beautiful heavy-bottomed, perfect-for-risotto pot. Although I am perfectly happy to spend a long time cooking just for myself, I wasn't sure I could bring myself to spend an hour on my own stirring risotto in the hot, poorly lit kitchen. But my old uni friend S was passing through Beijing, and brought me a Chinese red wine that she promised was really good, and I thought maybe I could give it a go.

It turns out, despite all bottles of wine being sealed with corks in China (cork-corks, not plastic corks), cork screws are difficult to find. So I poked this one out with a chopsticks, into the wine, and decanted the remainder into a glass bottle I had lying around.

At the local supermarket I managed to find a short-grain rice, and though I'm not sure what it is it's definitely not arborio. I forked out quite a lot for some olive oil, and decided to make a mushroom and tomato risotto.



The risotto turned out softer than it should have, almost congee-like. I love mixing mushrooms, so I went for a couple of button mushrooms (delicious and familiar but fairly expensive here), and enoki mushrooms. I also caramelised half a red onion, and added a tomato in my usual risotto-y way, before heaping in the red wine and the stock.

It was a nice moment of familiarity, and I'm glad I had the wine to do it, and it was expensive compared to the other stuff I cook but not too pricy. But the congee-like consistency made it a little bit weird.

home style restaurant food / 家常菜

The area near where I work has many Beijing homestyle restaurants, and I've developed a bit of a repertoire for dishes I'll hint that should be ordered when we go so that I can eat. Homestyle cooking (jiachangcai / 家常菜) is unsurprisingly easy to cook at home, but also a style quite favoured by little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and even some of the bigger ones.

Our usual restaurant doesn't have any English, and I'm actually not sure of its name, though I know it fairly well as we go there all the time. As a result this isn't so much a restaurant recommendation, but more of a things I eat because they're often vegan recommendation.





Shredded sour and spicy potatoes (算拉土豆丝) can be very sour and a little spicy, or very spicy and a little sour. I prefer a little sour and very spicy. This is a very dry dish, sometimes served with onion, and it's easy to go too far sour and too far spicy, but it's one of my favourites.





Okay I know you're going to notice a pattern, but sour and spicy cabbage (算拉白菜) is also pretty tasty. There is a whole lot of variation with this dish in the way it's prepared, unlike the potatoes, which are always shredded / 丝, but the result is always a slightly saucy, slightly sour or tart cabbage dish that goes really well with any of the spicier dishes you might have ordered.





Down the back of most menus, hidden away underneath and behind many other things, you might find something that reads suspiciously like cantonese vegetables / 广东菜. What they mean is gailan, and you can get them lightly wok-fried in soy sauce or with garlic or, if you're not careful, oyster sauce. I usually ask for them fried with garlic.





Eggplant has been a really awesome experience for me in Beijing. Almost every restaurant will have some sort of eggplant speciality. My favourite is 地三鲜, literally 'three earth treasures', which is potato, eggplant and capsicum and it's so good. Pictured above is an eggplant, capsicum and tomato dish, because when I asked for 地三鲜 on Thursday they said they didn't have any, which given they then gave me this and a potato dish makes me wonder but whatever. The sauce is amazing, the eggplant just soaks it up and so does the potato and it's so delicious. Sometimes you need to check the eggplant dishes to make sure no animals were harmed in the making of them, but this one is usually okay.

You might notice the lack of tofu dishes! That's because there's no tofu dish I can guarantee you is vego, so it's best to make enquiries as you go. But I have a tofu dish recommendation post lined up for soon!

broccoli in my pasta

I feel all out of the habit of writing recipes. It's not that I'm not cooking, it's that what I can do in my kitchen is limited by the equipment and ingredients. Some equipment I'm used to I can buy, but I don't want to purchase only to leave it behind at the end of my twelve months; some equipment I just cannot find. Such as last night's disaster where I couldn't get this bottle of red open. In the end I used a chopstick and pushed it into the bottle, but frustrating was the knowledge that the person who gifted me with this bottle of red had also brought a corkscrew for me, and forgotten to give it to me.


Anyway, PASTA. It's a comfort food for me here in China. As I'm blogged before, it's hard for me to order because very few places in Beijing do a good pasta and they almost always, even if I ask for it without, come with cheese. But I cheat here in Beijing like I never would at home. I've posted a previous cheatery pasta, but this one I cook probably a bit more often. And it's a bit cheaper and easier to get the ingredients.

You know how to make pasta, you don't really need a recipe, but in case you're interested (it's kind of like cataloging what I can get in China):

coloured broccoli pasta

slice three button mushrooms, and fry in a little olive oil. add half a dozen cherry tomatoes, halved, and saute until they start to soften. add some tomato pasta sauce, a little chilli flakes, and one or two cloves of garlic, and simmer on reduced heat for five minutes. in the meantime, cook 250 grams of coloured pasta, and when it's almost done, add one small head of broccoli that has been pulled apart. drain and mix it in with the pasta sauce and two or three or four tablespoons of nutritional yeast. the broccoli should be crisp and everything else should be squishy.

did I mention that in China, cherry tomatoes are considered a fruit, and found in the fruit section?

veggie table iii [lama temple area, beijing]

I've written twice before about my love of the Veggie Table, and I love it, I really do - located close to my house, with excellent cake and good pasta, they have free wifi and don't mind if I sit there working and drinking coffee made with coconut milk.

So it saddens me to say how much I disliked my lunch there on Monday.

I've never taken the opportunity to try any of their specials and, having previously tried everything that interests me on their regular menu, I thought I'd give their daily special of sundried tomato and mushroom pasta with pinenuts a go.







Unfortunately I struggled to eat this, and I regretted that I hadn't ordered the mushroom burger as I'd been planning (it's the best burger I've been able to find so far in Beijing). It was a little too oily for me, and filled with a combination of flavours that I'm not a fan of on their own. I'm perfectly willing to concede that others would like this pasta, and really, I should have known better.

My previous (and extremely tasty) visits: one (includes accessibility details) and two.

Other reviews: Lum Dim Sum had a very mixed experience, and Bespoke Beijing had a much more pleasing time.

veggie table
19 wudaoying hutong
dongcheng district
beijing

making baozi

One of the things on my list of things to achieve while I'm living in Beijing is to improve my cooking repertoire. Last week I made tofu from dried organic soybeans, which was lots of fun and the result was some of the most delicious tofu I've ever eaten, plus a whole lot of inspiration for making my own tofu (and also adapting the technique to make vegan, gluten-free haloumi).





This week I made steamed buns!

We started with making the dough, which was (unsurprisingly) quite similar to making pizza dough. We gave it just the one rise, though if we'd had more time the teacher recommended a second proofing, before and after going to choppy town with a cleaver and making balls. (Cleaver optional)





I was really interested to discover just how fast the dough dries out, and what a difference it makes both to my ability to finish making the bao, and also the final bao. It dries out very, very quickly, and the dough becomes very difficult to handle as you try to fold the shape and press in the filling at the same time.





I became much faster and better at this even after just a handful of baozi, though my skills in this area still have far to go!

We used a smoked tofu, bok choy and shitake filling for these baozi, and it was delicious! I wish I hadn't been feeling a little below average, because I would have loved to have eaten more. There was also a bit of sesame oil in these ones because my cooking teacher, who is also a nutritionist, insisted, due to the lack of animal fats in my diet. It's okay the reason, because it was definitely a tasty filling.





Unlike the tofu, which I will make again but not until I get home and can impress my fellow vegmel bloggers with how awesome freshly made that hour tofu is at a potluck, I plan to make bao often both here and at home, just as soon as I can get some yeast!

making tofu at the hutong

Yesterday I learnt how to make tofu!



I'd been eying off the tofu classes at The Hutong for a while, and finally I and housemate V got a chance to get down there!

The entire process took about two and a half hours, start to finish, though in a non-classroom situation I suspect I could do it in significantly less time. I learnt a lot of interesting stuff about timing, too, in terms of making silken or firm tofu. I also learnt about okara, which is a by-product of making soy milk, and can be added to vegan baking and vegan burger patties. I'm looking for ways to use it that don't involve an oven, and if anyone has any experience using it I'd love to hear.



It was a really interesting experience, and although buying tofu remains cheaper and more convenient (at least for me here in Beijing), I'm looking forward to making my own tofu on occasion when I get back to Australia, and have access to a full kitchen.

I'm also looking forward to more classes at The Hutong. I've got a bao class next week, and I've got my eye on the hand pulled noodles class. Because hand pulled noodles!

[beijing] sunao vegetarian, dongcheng district

I was lost and running late for a work dinner located somewhere in the Nanxincang complex when I saw a giant, well-lit sign declaring 'vegan tea.' I was intrigued and would have preferred to go there rather than the duck restaurant that was my destination, and so I followed this discovery with a visit the following weekend.

This was, coincidentally, the day it snowed, about which I was PRETTY EXCITED, so had spent two hours wandering around Ditan, taking photos and playing in the snow.



So I wandered over to Dongsishitiao and in to Sunao, covered in melting snow and wearing a hoodie under my coat, only to discover that Sunao was not a casual tea house, as I had expected, but a very fancy restaurant. The menu was all in Chinese characters with minimal pictures, and the staff were beautifully dressed (no English speaking) and the settings were awesome, and I sat down, intimidated.

The front of house asked me twice if I could read (I don't think he believed me). The waitress was super excited to see me reading, but when I ordered a salad and then a tofu dish, she redirected me to another dish. I wasn't clear on all the characters, but I thought I'd give it a go, see what I ended up with.



I ended up with a mushroom pepper steak, which, it's been a while. And it was unexpected. But it was excellent! Not too chewy, slightly hot mushroomy flavour, presented beautifully and served with roasted potatoes and carrots. Totally unexpected but an interesting experience.

I would definitely not go by myself again, but I would consider a group (booked, and well-dressed) visit.

Sunao
Ground Floor, East Side
Nanxingcang Business Building
Dongsishitiao
Dongcheng

Get there on line 2, exit C. Little step up to enter, well-lit but I was only there in the daytime.

thursday chinese animal miscellany

Dear readers of my blog, presumably mostly in Australia (I really should install some sort of tracker); I am pretty sure you don't know some of the animal things going on in China at the moment, so I have decided to share with you some of the stories I have been following in the last week! Maybe I will even attempt to do this regularly. Let me know if reading this interests you!

Protests in Shenzhen against the extraction of bile from live bears:Activists Protest Guizhengtang’s Live Extraction of Bear Bile. (not gonna lie, I'm looking for a new face mask and the ones the activists are wearing bear one might be it!)

In Panjin, it is super common for seals to be brought in to hang out for the rest of their lives in a little pool inside a restaurant. The pool is so tiny I would not want to sit in it! (I have certain Body of Water preferences, and I suspect so do seals). Netizens rally to aid of captive seals

In Chongching, hundreds of dogs were rescued but now they have nowhere to go! Dogged by misfortune (I see what you did there).

Another pun: To bee or not to bee. China's native bees are disappearing, due to a) encroachment by exotic bees, and b) environmental degradation. Story of everything, Y/N?

Beijing has a feral cat problem. I know it because I walk past at least two colonies on my way to work, one right beside my house and one inside the grounds of my work (which is a park with a temple! and a feral cat colony). Beijing's Feral Cat Problem Comes Back

a day of singapore makan

Thanks to the joys of Jetstar (don't do it), I spent a Monday in Singapore, and used this opportunity to hang out with the super awesome Ger and Em. We spent the day eating, and they distracted me from my Plane Delay Panic.

We distracted ourselves at Muji, before brunching on chee cheong fun (no picture) at the Jade Garden.



From there we headed on over to Real Food Cafe, which looks like a seriously delicious vegetarian cafe and I'm sorry we didn't get to eat there. I'm not sorry that we got to try the Brownice icecream, though, which was tasty and melted all over my hands. Since there was three of us, we picked three flavours: peppermint chocolate, peanut butter caramel, and the plain chocolate. It was all good. It's ice cream made from brown rice!



Next up was Hainan chicken rice at Pine Tree Cafe in the Fortune Centre. The Fortune Centre is so amazing, I can't believe I've spent so much time in Singapore and never been there. It's a shopping complex almost entirely filled with vegetarian restaurants and shops! So good.

This chicken rice was awesome. I know I spoke highly of the chicken rice I ate at Madame K's only a week later, but this was perfect. Nice little soup, sauce drizzled over the top, Singaporean and just the way I like it.



We followed this up with a visit to the Mustafa Centre (open 24 hours) and then a dosai at the Syed Alwi branch of Ananda Bhavan. This was my first dosai in about six months and I was very happy to be putting this in my mouth. Ananda Bhavan is a fast service place, a little self-service.

There was supposed to be a burger visit, too, but in my paranoia to get on my plan we gave it a miss and went early to the airport.

Go to Singapore! It's pretty great. As are Em and Ger.

Real Food Cafe
6 Eu Tong Sen Street,
#B1-52/53, The Central
Singapore 059817

Pine Tree Cafe
#02-09/13
Fortune Centre
190 Middle Road
Singapore

Ananda Bhavan
Syed Alwi Road
opposite Mustafa Centre
Singapore