Tonight I crossed the threshold into what felt like a brand new dimension of Chinese cooking. I made a Chinese dinner, but there was NO MEAT in any of it. I kept repeating it over and over to K, like I’d happened upon some secret portal to Chinese cuisine. We were eating Chinese food but every dish was made entirely of PLANTS! The mere concept was an impossible incongruity, I’d always thought. K kept eating, I kept marveling like I’d managed to squeeze an elephant into the apartment through our front door.
I’m roughly familiar with Chinese vegetarian cuisine, but usually the kind that’s built around gluten and soy-based fake meat products. (Buddha bless the culinary ingenuity of those vegetarian monks.) Fake duck meat and fake chicken meat isn’t really my thing, but intellectually I understood that vegetarian Chinese food exists for some people.
The dinner I made tonight was such a revelation chiefly because of my upbringing in a proudly meat-loving, and more or less vegetable-spurning family. In my family it’s a running joke, but one based very much in reality. My mom’s side just loves their meat. Newcomers come to parties and need both hands to count up all the ways pork appears on the table, but have a hard time finding the vegetables, which my family accommodates as a seeming concession to the social dictates around health, or a begrudging acknowledgement that greenery just makes a dinner spread look nicer. So imagining a Chinese meal without meat is like asking me to eliminate my family’s entire repertoire of Chinese dishes.
Enter Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice. (Thanks, sister!) “[T]his is primarily a book about how to make vegetables taste divine with very little expense or effort, and how to make a little meat go a long way. … More than two-thirds [of the recipes] are either completely vegetarian or can be adapted to be so, if you choose,” Dunlop writes in the introduction to her cookbook. I read that initially and was like, come again?
Except once I started paging through the recipes it made total sense to me. It wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to me to sauté cucumbers, but I did tonight with mook yee/mu er/wood ear mushrooms, and garlic and red chilies. I saw the photo and was like, oh! I got that. Dunlop’s recipe for Sichuan pepper-infused julienned potato salad, tu dou si, reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make this dish–which is as delicious cold as it is straight from the pan. And while I was at it, why not spoon a rich sauce of caramelized garlic and shallots, dou ban jiang/fermented bean paste, sugar, and soy sauce over thin slices of kabocha squash–and then steam them together! It gave me the perfect excuse to put to use my new kitchen acquisition, a pair of hot plate claws (they look like this). The whole thing turned out great, and opened up a door to another world for me. I’m still not quite over it, if you can’t tell.
Embracing seeming contradictions–there’s a life lesson in there and not just because I love to shoehorn corny wisdom into food stories. This kernel is something I’ve been coming back to over and over again in a year full of scary changes and brand new newness and edges of the earth points of no return. So it is in life as it is in eating.