There’s not been much in the way of adventurous eating lately, but there has been a lot of travel. I spent 7 days in New York City and ate almost as many Pret sandwiches. (Work’ll do that to a girl.) I celebrated Valentine’s Day on my own at Eataly, where by virtue of being a solo diner amidst a sea of couples I was treated to a lot of unexpected attention. As in: immediate seating, a small plate of amazing cheese and tomatoes on the house, pity small talk from my seatmates at the bar, and, uh, an invitation from a man to meet up on the 14th floor.
I celebrated Lunar New Year by myself two nights ago up in the air, after scarfing down airport McDonald’s. I never eat so fast as when I’m eating chicken nuggets and last night I came up with two theories why: the first, I usually get fast food when I’m desperately hungry, so I’m in devour mode. Also, McDonald’s just never improves the longer it sits in the bag. The faster you eat, the better. All that to say, it was a more depressing than entertaining way to ring in the Year of the Sheep.
The last big cooking thrill I had was just about a month ago, in my Auntie Margie’s kitchen. She’s 80 years old, and can run circles around everyone in the family. She was making gurn fun (捲粉), and I asked if I could come by and learn. It’s a labor intensive snack that I rarely (more like never) see offered in restaurants. “Because it’s too much work!” was Auntie Margie’s answer when I asked her why. Gurn fun, in my family’s interpretation, is a rice noodle roll filled with barbecued pork, red pickled ginger, pickled cucumber, cilantro, green onions, and scrambled egg all chopped into a gorgeous confetti. There’s actually not that much “cooking” involved (unless you’re making your own damn noodles, and Auntie Margie said our family gave that up two generations ago).
When I got to her apartment before 8 in the morning, she’d already been up for hours. She goes to a noodle factory in the Mission to get freshly made sheets of rice noodles and had come back with 20 pounds worth. (Big family = big portions.) She’d chopped up all her ingredients–a hard job, the most laborious part of the whole recipe–and she doesn’t let just anyone help. My aunt Fun Bew Yee, who’s been assisting Auntie Margie longer than I’ve been alive, told me she was recently demoted when her minced cha siu wasn’t fine enough.
My family came to the U.S. in the late 1800s, and what’s left of the Chinese we speak can be pretty odd. Something happens, I think, when people migrate. They bring the language and customs of that time and in their new homeland those traditions and words, protected from the inevitable shifts of culture back home, can become frozen in time. Auntie Margie told us about going to the noodle factory in the Mission for the first time after her favorite Chinatown source closed down, and not being sure exactly where on the block she could find the shop. She asked another elderly Chinese lady on the street, in Cantonese: “Do you know where I can buy some bak fun?” The woman gasped in horror and shooed her away. Auntie Margie was perplexed. It was only later that she learned that bak fun, today, refers to heroin. She’d had no idea. You mean it doesn’t mean white rice noodles? I retold the story to my Uncle Barry, and he gave out a great, hearty laugh. He came to the U.S. from China as a teen, and he says he’s always trying to update his wife’s outdated Chinese. “I’m gonna remember that one,” he said.
Auntie Margie said she scrambled two dozen eggs, and it took her over an hour and a half. Try for something close to light egg crepes, she explained. Just enough oil so the pan is greased, “Chinese is always best,” she said, tapping her time-worn frying pan with a pair of chopsticks, medium-low heat, ladle in the egg, rotate the pan till the egg covers its entirety, and then wait. Wait some more. Flip once, then transfer to a plate and cool before slicing into the thinnest egg ribbons. Anchored by the salty barbecued pork, and tempered with the sweetness of the ginger, and the bright kick of the green onion and cilantro, the rice roll and fluffy egg bind it all together into a perfect one-bite morsel. Gurn fun is a once a year treat in our family, and as Auntie Margie ages, something that’s all the more special.
My Auntie Doris says that whenever she learns a new recipe, she forces herself to make it as soon as she can. The only way to really know a dish is to make it on your own away from your teacher, she says.
So…. where would one get fresh sheets of rice noodles in LA?