and now we are three

Planet Vegmel is turning three! To celebrate, there will be a birthday picnic potluck at Edinburgh Gardens on September 15th (a Saturday) from around 1pm. Come along, readers, bloggers and friends all! It'll be my first potluck in a year (since the 2nd Birthday Potluck, in fact!), and it'll be great fun. There will be another zine! Maybe more badges! Maybe something new!

You can find more details at the fb event page, which will include up to the minute updates if required in the event of rain.

Haidilao / 海底捞 [beijing]

As I've previously blogged, living in Beijing has unexpectedly led to an amazing increase in my obsession with hotpot/steamboat. Frequently I go to Little Sheep, which is a franchise that has a location delightfully close to my house on Ghost Street; however Wendy had mentioned that if there was anywhere a Beijinger would go to hotpot, it would be Haidilao, so when GY suggested we go to hotpot before I left, I was eager to suggest Haidilao. I have in the last week been to Haidilao twice (once with GY and LN, and once with Wendy), and I recommended it very much. 

Haidilao is well-known for excellent service. At the Sanlitun location I experienced a sort of valet-bike parking, where someone helped me find a bay for my bike, and asked if I needed help carrying my bags inside, and when Wendy and I specified that we were strict vegetarians they went out of their way to double check what that meant stockwise, and what would be okay and not okay. It is more expensive than some of the other hotpot restaurants I've been to here in Beijing, though. And it's much, much harder to get a table. At the Wangfujing branch we booked ahead, and the waiting area was full when we went to depart; at Sanlitun we ended up waiting for about 40 minutes to get a table. They provide you with snacks, games to play, and a free manicure while you're waiting for a table, and LN says she often doesn't book if she needs a manicure, so she can wait and get one.

The mushroom broth was amazing, filled with mushrooms and some garlic it had such an excellent flavour. The spicy broth was also quite excellent.  

The thing I love about Haidilao is its excessive complementary condiment wall. Mixing sauces is an excellent part of the hotpot experience - you can choose from (among others) soy sauce ("home made"), sesame sauce, sesame oil, fried peanuts, a soybean paste, a mushroom sauce, a variety of chillis dried, fresh and oiled, green things, vinegar, other types of nuts, and even msg, and that's all without touching the condiments I can't eat. LN introduced me to the concept of creating a dry rub for myself, she used a mixture of salt, dried chillis, and peanuts, which I thought was pretty excellent (though very spicy). The condiments bar also includes a variety of fruits, a pumpkin soup, and some cold Beijing salads (such as tudousi and the smoked tofu strings thing). 

At Wangfujing ordering takes place via ipad, all in Chinese but with pictures. Ordering at Sanlitun is via a sheet of paper all in characters, but some places (such as Little Sheep) have menus with pictures if you ask for it, so that might still be available. 

Haidilao also has noodle dancers, lovely clean toilets, and an awesome array of tofu to put in the boat. 

海底捞 / Haidilao hotpot

Various locations around Beijing

Some locations (such as Wangfujing) have lifts, but others are old and not at all accessible. 

Website allegedly has an English version but I've never been able to access it. 

the hunt for the perfect soy coffee [beijing edition]

When I first moved to Beijing I gave up coffee, on the grounds that it's difficult to find a good coffee in China, and impossible to find a soy coffee. I thought, I can do this for a year! I was wrong, and shortly after my second month began, I found myself trying to track down some sort of delicious coffee.

Part of the reason why I'm vegan is because I'm lactose intolerant, a(n at the time) distressing genetic quirk I picked up from my Chinese mother. Asian people have an increased propensity towards lactose intolerance! Chinese culinary tradition is well known for its soymilkyness! I can buy warm soy milk on my way to work for breakfast on cold winter mornings from little street stores! So you would think, given this, that finding a soy coffee in Beijing would not be that difficult.

Sadly you would be wrong.

My new go-to for a soy, and delightfully a soy flat white, is Serk cafe on 北新桥三条 (beixinqiaosantiao), a Melbourne-style cafe run by a Melbunnie, with bikes hanging from the ceiling and an awesome fitout. They even charge extra for soy milk, can you get more Melbourne than that?
It is, however, the only place in Beijing that you can buy a soy flat white (not even the New Zealand inspired Flat White Cafe does a soy flat), and I'm willing to put up with a lot for such a delight.

And you can bring your keep cup! However alas Serk is not open Mondays, and not open before 11am, so it is useless for an on my way to work coffee purchase.

Other than Serk, it's sadly lattes all the way. I go quite frequently to the Vegie Table on Wudaoying Hutong, where I can get the world's largest soy latte (or a latte with coconut milk, which is fun). They don't do takeaway but if you bring your own cup they'll whip something up for you. This coffee is nice enough but it always leaves me with a funny after taste.
More frequently, though, I go to Starbucks for a soy latte in my reusable Starbucks cup (because oh, don't try to convince them you should be able to use your keep cup). This is fine and functional but not what one would call a coffee, more a coffee flavoured beverage. In Australia I don't drink coffee after lunch, but I can drink a Starbucks coffee as late as 5pm and still be fine to go to bed.

Starbucks is funny here, it's mostly considered a bit of a dessert place, the most popular drinks seem to be the ones with lashings of cream on the top, and I know of business people who take their clients to Starbucks for a bit of after business lunch dessert.

Don't go to Costa Coffee for a soy coffee. They use Asian soymilk, which is definitely not the right thing to use in a coffee.

pure lotus [beijing]

Pure Lotus is probably one of the most well-known vegetarian restaurants in Beijing, as well as probably the most expensive. So Wendy and I decided it was a must try before my imminent departure.

I got lost and ended up late, thanks to the annoyance of the Beijinger website giving me the wrong address. Eventually I found the right complex, and then was directed on my way by ushers in pink and grey clothes, those pyjama pantsuits. At the front door I was greeted by wait staff in shapeless glittery dresses, and directed up a million flights of stairs to where Wendy was very patiently waiting for me.

The lighting was very poor, so I didn't end up taking too much in the way of photos with little orange toy camera (an aside: looking at some photos my brother took of the night skyline in Singapore recently, and they've turned out beautifully. I really miss having a real camera), especially as I was sitting in my light source.

Not pictured here: the juices we chose not to order, on the grounds that they were 150元 a glass. Depending on the day's exchange rate, 150元 is at least AUD20! No, no thank you. We had boiled water.

Our place settings were these interesting but obviously not-vegan shells. A very interesting aesthetic!

We ended up ordering six dishes: some bao, "japanese tofu wrapped rice" (this turned out to be plain inari), smoked tofu with chilli and beans, a hor-fun thing, a kind of sushi cones thing, and (not on the menu, we had to ask for it), their famous vegetarian peking duck.

Don't get me wrong, I love inari as much as the next person, but the best thing about these inaris was the presentation, here in a boat with some pickled ginger and a whole lot of leaves.

The smoked tofu was not as delicious as I had hoped it would be, there was a funny aftertaste and absolutely none of the promised 辣 (chilli).

Duck was good, but nothing more special than the duck I've had again and again at Baihe (and for half the price, and five minutes walk from my apartment).

These baos were filled with a mushroom-nori combination, and were incredibly heavy going. They came last, and in the end I think we had to leave one behind. But look at them shaped like fruits!

Finally, we ended the meal with a complementary fruit bowl - this thing was massive and contained about half a dozen slices of rockmelon, which Wendy doesn't like so I ate it all (even though I'm not a huge fan of Beijing's rockmelon).

Afterwards, we were escorted out of the complex by the pink and grey pyjama-clad people, this time holding giant lanterns on sticks that were held close to the ground to light our way.

Pure Lotus was an experience I had to have - a large number of people had stated it as a place to visit, and I'd heard so much. The notable thing abut it is definitely the presentation. But for me, one visit was enough.

Tongguang Building
12 Nongzhanguan Nan Lu
Chaoyang district

朝阳区农展馆南路12号通广大厦院内

Get there on Line 10 (Tuanjiehuzhan), or on the 406 (which is what I did)

Not accessible at all (little step into the first floor, awkward seating, dim lighting). Chinese menus with hilarious and occasionally useful English subtitles. Open every day, 11am-11pm.

cooking from books

Wendy and I went on an adventure to Wangfujing yesterday, because we want to stock up on Chinese cookbooks before we leave Beijing.
It was pretty exciting - this is not even half of the vegetarian section. Of course you may recall the problems I have at times had with being vegetarian in Beijing - enduring meat as garnish, 'it doesn't have egg, it's sweet' - so some of these vegetarian cookbooks have the occasional shrimp garnish, but the ones I have are super awesome and I'm so excited.
I have eaten so many amazing dishes while I've been in Beijing, that I cannot wait to start making these at home, and for my friends and family at home.

It was funny, my excitment over these cookbooks. I've mostly moved on from cookbooks in my life, because it's so easy to find recipes online. But a lot of this stuff I've never been able to find while searching in English, and when I google in Chinese often my eyes start to glaze over, and it's hard for me to skim read. So these beautiful cookbooks, with pictures, sometimes step by step.

Anyway, prepare yourselves, vegetarian Melbourne, for some delicious new experiments.

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