The Suspense of Chili

To celebrate Ravens' winning the NFL Championship this year, I got up Monday morning to make chili, for the first time in my life. You should know, I'm not a morning person. I don't get up just for anything if I didn't have to. But my love for food is strong enough to pull me out of bed. And you know who else loves food? Alfred Hitchcock.
I love Alfred Hitchcock. Period. I've seen most of his movies, some quite a few times. It doesn't matter how great contemporary horror movies are, Psycho remains the all-time classic. Period.
One of the earliest books I've read about Hitchcock said the Master of Suspense described how you could produce suspense in a story: If you are showing some people playing poker and that later they will be bombed, you should begin by showing there's a mysterious package just under the table and then show the people playing poker. I later learned in screenwriting class that it's part of something called "dramatic irony" where the audience knows what's going on, but the characters in the movie don't. It creates tension and excitement in the audience, and you have to keep watching to see what happens later.
Yes, I do read non-fiction, once in a while. And it shouldn't surprise you if I'm reading anything about Hitchcock.

The book discusses the whole process of how the movie came into being: from how the book came about to why Hitch picked it to all the details in produciton and post-production. It's like a huge Wikipedia article about Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. As obssessed as I am with the fat genius man, I find myself more and more fascinated about his work. Is it possible?
The movie adaptation was great. In fact, I watched the movie before I started reading the book. But now that I'm half way through the book, I still think that the movie is just as great. It seems to have a different focus from the book. The movie shows a lot tension between Hitch and his wife Alma while the book has been solely centering on the production of the movie.
I love the scene from the movie when Psycho's premiere turned out to be a great success, Hitch brings Alma to the front of all the blinking cameras and says to her, "You are my favorite Hitchcock blond." Alma says, "I have waited for you to say that for over 30 years." And Hitch says, "That, Darling, is why they call me the Master of Suspense."

So have you been wondering what kind of chili I made? Did my suspense work?
Here's my recipe, I'm calling it the Super Bowl

Super Bowl

1 lb groud beef
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
5 cloves of garlic
1 green pepper, chopped
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 can of red kidney bean
1 can of corn
1 can of tomato paste
canola oil
chili powder
cayenne pepper
paprika
oregano
cumin
garlic salt
black pepepr
corn starch
1/3 of a bottle of Guinness beer

Brown the beef in a pan then remove to a plate, don't drain the fat.
Cook the celery and pepper in the fat with a little canola oil, when slightly cooked remove to a separate plate.
Cook the onions and garlic for about three minutes then put the meat back in till the onions are clear. Add the canned tomato with juice and the tomato paste.
When well mixed, pour everything into a pot and add water just barely covering the content. Add the celery and pepper.
Let it reach a boil and then add corn and kidney beans.
As the chili is cooking, add all the spices and salt and pepper till you like the flavoring. (I know I use way too much garlic probably, you don't have to. My boyfriend Mr. Judd would tell you it's disgusting, but even though I love him, I don't think his opinion is valid since he hates onions.)
Add the beer and after a while add some cornstarch till you like the thickness of the chili and turn off the heat. Mine cooked for about 30 minutes tops.

I know I probably put in a lot of stuff that normally don't go together in chili, but I think the great thing about chili is that you can basically put anything in and it would still taste great!
Good Evening!

Everything Beautiful Began After

The title of the book is so beautiful I don't know how to talk about it using a different title, so I decided to steal it for this post. Noted: this is not plagiarism.
I can't believe I never knew about Van Booy before. And he had a workshop in Beijing when I was in Beijing! Somehow, however I managed to miss him on my reading lists, I came around to finally meet him, through this beautiful story of Rebecca, Henry and George. This one book is enough for me to want to read everything else he's written and he will write.
Van Booy is a philosopher. Love is his main subject of study.
Everyone can be a philosopher on love, but he has the power to reach into your heart and twist your brain. The softest emotions, the gentlest feelings, the hardest pain and the toughest adventure in life all float around you in his beautiful manifestation of love. It's a book where you want to write down every single sentence in your notebook.

I'm sorry I have not been here for a while. I'm apologizing to my readers, to my self, and most of all, to my blog itself. I never forgot about you. I was forced to travel downhill on a side road for a little while, and then I got back on track. Now I'm moving forward again. Everything that I thought was beautiful was taken, lost, wiped, erased. But everything truly beautiful has just begun after. It's just a matter of how you define beauty. In Van Booy's story, it's a woman, a love, a city, a life, an adventure, a discovery. In mine, it's a book, a love, a movie, and a dish. So I decided to catch up with my serious cooking adventure.

I might say that this may be my best presentation of food so far. A recipe from Saveur Magazine, Shrimp and Grits.
My American Dad grew up in Virginia eating grits. However, My American Mom has never liked grits. Over dinner, my Dad commented on how it was almost a miracle that he was eating grits in his own house. My mom's comment was, there's so much cheese in the grits, so much flavor, of course it tastes better now. I also have to admit that this my first time cooking grits and eating grits. And it tastes just as beautiful as it looks!

The Cheesecake Fantasy vs. The American Dream

I was first introduced to cheesecake when I first came to the States. I remember my American mom bought this collage of different flavored cheesecake from the grocery store and I had fallen in love with this magical creamy delicacy since then. Then I went back to China, and my romance with the cheesecake became a long distance relationship where at the beginning I lived on beautiful reminiscences and then gradually got lost once again in the colorful Chinese gastronomy and alienated from the American desserts. But I was reunited with my estranged lover at T.G.I. Friday's in Beijing.
Now that I'm back in the land of cheesecakes, I have recuperated my love, and I was found whole again.
I remember the first time McDonald's was opened in my hometown in China my aunt took me and my cousin over there for a meal after she got her first paycheck. I took a bite of the Big Mac served in a brown box and was instantly disgusted by it. She bought us many other things as well, but only the disgust I felt towards Big Mac remained vivid in my memory. Who could know that only years later I had acquired a convenient love for the American fast food that was fast invading Chinese market. It was delicious, it's fast and it's American. Fortunately we have passed the era that Ha Jin descibed in his story about the American fried chicken restaurant in China that caused much conflict in the community purely because of the fact that it was considered capitalist and thus bad. The western culture has learned to not only expand to this vast consumer market but adapt to the local tastes. KFC now sells breakfast in Chinese style and meals with rice. I imagined myself eating these wonderful food when I would be in the country of their motherland. It was part of the American dream.
However, I've hardly ever eaten at a fast food place in the States, maybe five times total in the course of a year. I have learned that there's much more to the Western cuisine than McDonald's and KFC and preferred to cook myself, as you probably have figured out by now.
The cheesecake fatansy is realized once more and the American dream is on her way to be realized, I think I shall push it forward more by attempting to make cheesecakes: the task that almost seemed impossible.
So here it is, my 3-D chocolate cheesecake, well technically it's 2-D because I didn't use chocolate graham crackers, you know me, I wouldn't make a single recipe without making a little subsitution.

And I realized I don't have a cookie sheet deep enough for me to put boiling water in to bake the cheesecake, therefore the old saucepan had to do.

When it's chocolate, it has to be a little messy haha.

Friends of the Steak

To make up for my lack of reading during the summer, I have started searching for books my advisor suggested I read. It excited me that I would have an excuse to buy books at Ukazoo again, yet of all the titles I was only able to find Alice Munro's work since he didn't give me any specific titles of her short stories. So finally I read Friend of My Youth, an interesting story written in a interesting way about interesting people. A story told by the main character's mother about a friend of her youth and how the young woman now begins to protray this friend in her own head in a different way from what she was told. If it's just about the friend, then you would think about whether you have a friend like that, who at one time in your life fascinated you so much yet then faded away as a mystery to you forever. Then there's more to this story. While Flora was this wonderful, innocent woman who never had anything she deserved but slaved her entire life for others' benefit, she was conceived by the daughter as a woman who was just as black as she was white. She had her own flaws, and she was just as responsible for her misfortunes in life as other people who had seemingly caused the misfortunes. In her mind, Flora was a total different person from what her mother believed she was. In a way, she saw what her mother really was through her memory of Flora. Then you wonder, what friends are, why some people become friends, and if you are friends, does it mean that you match one another? Does it mean that you go well together? Does it mean that you love one another?

I then wonder why in cooking certain foods only go with certain foods, and whther there is a limit to the combination. I have to confess I tried once the mixture of avocado with kiwi and bacon, and it didn't turn out so well. But last night, I embarked on another one of my own recipe endeavors and created something very interesting: A steak bruschetta. The original recipe is from the magazine Taste of Home, but I almost never really followed it except for the idea. All the time I was wondering if these vegetables would be friends of the steak.

Steak Bruschetta with BBQ sauce

three stalks of celery

one container of cherry tomatoes

one red bell pepper

three cloves of garlic

one package of steak

cheddar cheese

parmesan cheese

BBQ sauce

slices of bread, baguette prefered

Chop the vegetables and sautee them in the pan, season with salt and pepper.

Grill the steak and cut into small pieces if you can, or you can cook them in a pan as well, season with BBQ sauce.

Mix the vegetables and steak, set aside.

Grill the bread with cheddar cheese on one side.

Spread the veggies and meat mixture on top of the cheese and sprinkle with parmesan cheese on top. 

The Return of the Cook

After a long a lazy vacation, coming back to the blog seems to be a wake-up call that pulls me back into reality. The blog site is blocked in China, so for two months I had no access to my lovely blog. Don't ask me why it's blocked, probably for the same reason that Facebook and Youtube are blocked and the same reason that diabetic patients should be completely shunned from sugar. But it's good to be back, it's always good to be back, no matter where I am. I have grown so used to having two lives in two countries that moving from one to the other doesn't cause me any discomfort at all; in fact, I don't even feel the difference any more. The countries have blended so well in my head like an all-berry smoothie that there's no way for me to tell exactly how many berries there are any more.

Before I bring out today's plat du jour, I do have one confession to make and hope that my advisor doesn't see this, or if he does, would forgive me nonetheless. I finished perhaps only three books this entire summer: one from the Hunger Games trilogy and two Chinese collections of proses: none of which were on the reading list that we had discussed before. Although I did get started on a collection of short stories by Ha Jin, which was interesting and very educational. I now have tons of questions about the very little English reading I have done, and they keep piling up as I'm catching up now with some Garcia Marquez.

One thing I did get from having two cultures coexist in my head is a combination of two flavors in writing and in cooking, which I greatly appreciate.

Last night's return to the American kitchen dinner was a big failure according to Chinese standard, but according to American standard it was perhaps only different, and according to my endearing boyfriend Chris's taste, it was pretty good. Oh what can I say, someone who thinks eating fried fish with its head and tail is weird should not be considered a valid judge for food, haha.

It may give the impression of purely Chinese stir-fry, but true Chinese would tell you they normally don't stir-fry potatoes with red bell peppers, and they would not recognize that zucchini in the left plate. All in all, it was a culturally merging dinner, mixing the Americna ingredients and Chinese cooking style together. The failure was that I had lost some touch with the flavoring and the spices. It seemed that Chinese dishes are usually much more flavored and have more tastes while a lot of American dishes would consider rather blend; of course, the western habit of adding salt and pepper is a totally different habit whereas in Chinese cuisine the dishes are always well seasoned enough before they are brought out on the table. So, it turned out that although I felt like I shook the salt dispenser more than enough it still was blend to my taste. Oh well, my cooking skill needs just as much time to adjust as my jet lag.

Should we always make our own pie crust?

I have been putting off posting this vegetable tart recipe I made a long time ago, simply because it's such a long recipe due to the number of ingredients in it. But the recipe itself is really not that complicated, and the result was fantastic. However, before I tell you about the recipe, I think we should have a little discussion about the making of pie crust.
I have always tried to make my own pie crust; in fact, I have never bought a pie crust from the store. I insist on staying true to my cooking ethnics and making everything from scratch if possible. Nonetheless, pie crust, like any other pastry, requires meticulous work and precise measurement, none of which I can pride myself on. Therefore, I brag about my making my own pie crust, but I never say it's really really good. But I try, you see, and that counts.
Why do we admire so much people who make their own pie crust? Is it just because we think we can't do it? No, everyone can make a pie crust. It's because we admire their commitment to the craft of cooking, I believe. Back in the time when ready-made pie crust was not available at grocery stores, endearing mothers and grandmothers made their own pie crusts; sometimes it almost feels like we are losing the tradition when our hands reach out to the frozen pie crust in the gigantic freezer in the store.
Are we losing the tradition?
I ask myself the very question when my hands touched my new kindle. I had been debating about whether I should get one or not, and my strong commitment to the texture of paper and the smell of ink had been keeping me away from this new fruit of modern technology. But I finally broke down and asked for it for Christmas, while my books were screaming at me calling me a traitor.
For the record, I did not touch the electronic monster since I opened the box on Christmas morning. But I have been feeding free and bargain books into it. When Amazon allowed me to borrow the kindle version of The Hunger Games for free, I finally started using it. And I have a confession: so far, I have loved every single second of it, and there's no problem of reading, if anything, it saved the time of page-turning and saves a lot of space. Am I losing the tradition?
Everytime my finger swiftly touched the right lower corner of the screen to flip a page I felt an incredible sense of anticipation, and it cost so much less energy than flipping a paper page: my laziness got the upper hand you see. I threw a glance at my bookshelf after I closed my kindle one night; I could barely smell their unique scent, and a slight feeling of guilt passed in my heart before I closed my eyes.
After I finished The Hunger Games, I put down my kindle to another hibernation and returned to my paperbacks, yet I knew that was not just because I missed them so much but because most of the books I wanted and needed to read were still in paperbacks. Guilt strike number two. Once I resumed the touch of the thin paper, I began to feel extremely calm, and the rush and excitement that kindle brought was vanished as if a husband returning to his endearing and considerate wife after a flashlike affair with a naughty mistress.
I know some tradition would never be lost.

Roasted Vegetable Tart (from Bon Appétit Jan 2012 issue)

The recipe is intimidatingly long, so I spared you the reading on my blog after going through my own long post. I do want to admit that I had two ovens working at the same time to roast the vegetables and lost track of time and temperature(Damn the Harter double ovens!!!), so I almost burned the pastry. I also believed any vegetable can be used so I used asparagus and broccoli that are not in the recipe, so my tart was very thick. One last confession: due to the lack of spices in the Harter household, I ended up omitting the fennel bulb and fresh thyme leaves, for which reason I vow to make this again in the future with much more precision.
But it was delicious after all!!

Find Where Your Roots are

During our trip to the Shenandoah National Park, I noticed my American mom was reading a book called Tiger's Wife. I was not particularly happy after reading about the author on the book cover: the girl is only a few months older than me and she has already published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic and has won numerous awards. Oh some people say you don't have to be published to prove you are a writer, but what kind of writer doesn't want to get published?!
So I went on reading the synopsis of the book and learned that this Belgrade-born author moved to America when she was 12 after the Yugoslavian war, and the novel is set in a Balkan country one and a half century ago: a family saga that's about a heroine and her relationship with her grandfather.
I was not surprised by the setting of the story, because American writers of different ethinic backgrounds usually tend to write about their own cultures. Think about my favorite writer Amy Tan and the one I'm currently reading, Junot Diaz. People tend to dig out their roots and bring them out in the open. It's what they know the best and what they can sell the best.
But is it stereotypical for a Chinese American writer to write about China or a Dominican American writer to write about Dominic Republic? Do I, a Chinese writer, have to write about China? Sometimes I so want to break out the stereotype but realize it is what I know the best. I can't write about a cowboy's life in Arizona because I don't know about it, but I can write about a Chinese beggar who spends her days on the streets of Beijing because I know about it. So I guess there's nothing wrong writing about your own culture, and you don't have to break away from the culture to jump out of the stereotypes.

To go back to my own roots, I picked up Chinese cooking again after a long dry spell of home cuisine since Chinese New Year.

Eggplant stirfried in soybean sauce

I had to use a lot of oil stirfrying eggplant as it absorbs a huge amount of oil when you fry it, but the salty soybean sauce makes you forget about the grease and highlights the taste to the Nth degree.

Sweet and Sour pork

You would never have guessed what made it sweet and sour is a combination of ketchup and sugar; although, I do have to admit that the color of the dish is not entirely professional, I may have to work on this one later: it may be an issue of measurement in terms of the proportion of ketchup to sugar.

Sour and Spicy potatoes

Don't be so impressed by the thin strips of potatoes, they are really not that thin: my Dad would not be particuarly impressed let's put it that way. You may not be able to see, but there's some dried red chili peppers there somewhere. The color is supposed to be lighter since you are supposed to use rice vinegar, but apparently I didn't realize Emily had cleared out our kitchen and all we had was balsamic, which is not exactly Chinese. So here you go, still sour though.

The rice had tiny cubes of potatoes and sweet corn in it. In case you didn't notice, I have a lot of potatoes to kill.