It turns out that the search for the ingredients of the vetkoek recipe that I posted yesterday, was not that difficult. I used the Chinese Language Tools from the other handy post that I made to translate English to Chinese Characters, and then the characters to Pinyin and viola!, instant Chinese.

In my best Chinese handwriting I drew up a shopping list, went to the supermarket where I handed it to one of the ever-so-helpful assistants, and she kindly took me to where all the ingredients could be found; some obvious, some not so obvious.

So I spent the later afternoon improvising proper kitchen utensils in order to create the vetkoek dough. The only hiccup I encountered was the 15g yeast sachet of which I required only 10g, and with nothing market accurately for me to measure with. I used my obviously-not-so-sharp eye to guess the approximate, and applied. The vetkoek result ended up tasting a wee bit yeasty, but it wasn’t that bad.

I also tried a Chinese technique on my vetkoek. They have steamed bread, buns really, inside which they sometime put the filling before they bake it. I tried something similar with this recipe, but I think my filling was too hot still, as it ‘melted’ through the vetkoek dough. After I let the filling cool, some of them worked well, but the filling’s sauce then caused it to become raw again after a while. I guess the filling should be dry for it to work.

The traditional way to eat vetkoek would be to finish the product, and afterwards cut it open to fill it with either just butter, or jam, or whatever you fancy really. A meaty something inside the vetkoek tastes best though.

My next endeavor will be good old pancakes… maybe a variation thereof.

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To stop drinking coffee is like quitting smoking - you have to find alternative things to do or you will indulge again out of shear boredom. I have taken to drinking alcohol instead…

I’m just joking (which I say in case my mom discovers this blog). As the weather is getting ever more biting by the day (even though the sun is out today), it calls for pondering what to eat. And in weather such as this, pondering what to eat happens very often indeed.

I have finally equipped myself with most of the tools I might need in the kitchen and thus will attempt to cook. Or bake. No, cook, I don’t have an oven. The challenge will be to find the ingredients for the South African recipe for ‘vetkoek’ that my mom has emailed me. There are a few ingredients I have never seen here, never mind know what they’re called in Chinese.

Here, in an un-presidented second useful post, is the treasured family recipe for ‘vetkoek’. I’ve seen similar things in other countries, but can’t remember what they’re called there or in English. It’s fried… as if my cholesterol can afford it, but delicious (aren’t all friend things?). It literally translates to ‘fat cake’ although, I think the fat refers to it being puffy, rather than fat as in dripping.

Oh, the recipe is Metric. Here’s a handy conversion site if you’re stuck with Imperial: http://www.onlineconversion.com/cooking_volume.htm.

• 250ml luke warm milk
• 250ml luke warm water
• 50ml butter
• 25ml white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1600ml flour
• 10g dry instant yeast
• 5ml salt
• oil (for frying)

Do this:
Mix the milk, water, butter and sugar together.
Once the butter has melted, add and beat the egg.

(As I don’t have proper tools, I heated the mix ever so slightly to encourage the butter to melt).
Separately mix the flour, yeast and salt.
Add it all together and mix until a smooth, elastic dough is formed. Add more flour if its too messy.
Prepare a large mixing bowl and smear with a thin layer of oil.
Place the dough in the bowl, and flip it over so that the oily side is facing up.
Cover with a cloth and stash in a warm place until it has expanded about twice its original size.
Lay the dough flat on a surface coated with flour, and roll and kneed until flat and about 1cm thick.
Keep some flour handy, it might still be sticky.
Cut in circles (not too big), or tear off clumps and roll in balls, and fry in hot, but not too hot, oil.

Make sure to flip it regularly initially so that it can heat even all around and not just burn.
Drain excess oil on a paper towel. Cut open and stuff with your favourite filling. Jam (jellie) works well, or minced meat stew prepared to taste will do nicely.

Added after:I tried to put filling inside the ball before frying it, but firstly, my filling was too hot and it melted through the dough, and secondly there was too much sauce with the filling which prevented the dough from being cooked propperly.

It should work though, but you need to use cold, dry filling instead.

And that’s it. Now to go find those ingredients.

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Here’s some handy tools I’ve stumbled across in my journey to becoming a Chinese speaker, fluent or otherwise:

http://babelfish.altavista.com
This nifty little website can translate all sorts of languages from one to the other. To see the Chinese characters you will have to install the font. Google ‘Chinese Fonts’ to find out more about that.

If you translate sentences, you may find you end up with something you can’t use, especially because Chinese ‘words’ come in anything from 1 character on it’s own to 4 or 5 or more strung together to make up one ‘word’ and unlike English they are not always seperated by spaces to indicate this. So, if like me, you were speaking to a Chinese person using this translator, you will end up with some funny sentences which may, but probably won’t, be what you intended.

Translating individual words and then stringing them together yourself might make for more correct sentences (for the beginner too lazy to learn more and for the purpose of a casual online chat perhaps). A basic understanding of the lanugage structure might go a long way too.

Character to Pinyin Translation
http://www.pingasianimports.com/Chinesepinyin/Translate.asp or

http://www.pin1yin1.com/
Having the Chinese character is all good and well, but it gives no indication to the way it is pronounced.

And if ultimately you want to be able to speak, you must be able to pronounce. The links above will help you translate your character to Pinyin - which is the Romanisation (or representation with the western alphabet) of Chinese characters. Of course, the help of a Chinese native is vital, because words are pronounced much unlike you would imagine they would from the way they are written. ‘You’ for instance, is pronounced ‘yow’.

Pronunciation Help
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~pinyin/
There is a catch to Pinyin though, especially the way you will find it above. In Mandarin one word (ie. ma) can have different meanings depending on the tone. There are 4 tones which change the pronounciation of the word and thus the meaning.

So if the word ‘ma’ is written as ma1, or ma2, ma3, it means you should pronounce the word ‘ma’ with the first, second, third or forth tone.

The link above will take you to a page which will help you understand tones and such.

Hmmm, my first non nonsense post. Hope it helps at least a bit. Oh, and when you’ve laid your hands on a Chinese song or so and you’ve got the hang of the tools above, pay a visit to Ting Dong (http://www.powersugoi.net/tingdong/) and source the words (and meaning) of your favourite song.

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Day one without coffee.

No shaking yet, no headaches. It’s going well. But it’s cold. So what to drink?

A few months ago, back in Cape Town, I met a girl from Xi’an. On cold winter days she used to drink cups of hot water. I couldn’t fathom the idea and insisted on taking her for a cup of coffee to save her from having to stomach the bland cup of hot water.

Not sure where my aversion to hot water came from, but I think it was the ingrained idea that drinking hot water leeds to stomach cramps. On reflection however, I realise it was something my mother told me as a small boy to prevent me from drinking my bath water.

Moving swiftly on… so wanting to cut the two most popular hot drinks in the world (coffee and tea) from my diet for two weeks (see yesterday), I am left with very, very few choices of what to drink.

I have however, since I got to China, been indulging in the practise of drinking plain old hot water. The theory is sound, especially now that it is getting cold. Water in general is good for you, right? Water has all sorts of benefits, the one most relevant to the temperature is that being well hydrated helps keep you warm.

As I was saying, keeping well hydrated is fine, a glass or so every hour should do the trick, but who wants to be sipping a glass of cold water on a chilly winter’s day? The obvious solution is to sip a cup of hot water. All the benefits of your cold water, plus it’s warm and yes, comforting to drink.

Of course, you could be sipping a cup of tea, or coffee, but apart from being hot water it has sugar and/or caffeine and/or all sorts of other not-so-beneficial stuff, and you can’t really sip 8 cups of coffee a day, can you? Unless… you can.

Thus, several months post my frowing upon the culture of another in that of drinking hot water on a cold day, I find myself doing exacxtly the same thing… and liking it.

There is much to be said for coffee, but as I’m abstaining, I won’t go into a lengthy discussion about my ‘vice’. As they say, out of sight, out of mind.

Was the kettle whistling?

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Shiyan is like Cape Town. Often, unless you’re busy, there is nothing more to talk about than the weather. It’s a fairly pleasant day today, except for the bone chilling temperature. 4 layers in shirts, two in trousers, am I warm? No.

I have some unwanted genetic traits of my dad. He used to have blisters all over his hands, and nobody could tell him what it was or how to get rid of it. He did discover though that when he was taking health suppliments for cycling, it would get better.

My sister and I inherited this from him, although we have it a lot less severe than he did, and we hardly consider ours ‘problematic’. We get it along the sides of our fingers only. I’ve also discovered that it’s stress related, or if I have a stretch of drinking the wrong stuff (like spirits, or beer, not both, but I’ve never discovered which), or consume regular amounts of coffee, it appears. When the nasties are purged from my system, the dots dissapear.

So, here I was in Shiyan without coffee and Rooibos tea, until I discovered coffee and my mother mailed me some rooibos tea, and who shall appear? The Dots. It’s also cold, and I’m under a bit of emotional stress, so it could be a combition of these factors.

The connection with the coffee struck as I was having a cuppa just now, finally, as the origin of the dots have been in the back of my mind since they resurfaced about 2 weeks ago. I have been trying to figure out what I have introduced into my diet which made them reappear now after they had been gone since I got to Shiyan. So from tomorrow I will abstain from the coffee and rooibos to see if they are the culprits. If yes, I will re-introduce the rooibos only, because it’s apparently good for you, not bad.

I also reconsidered buying a computer. Not really, really needed right now, so I will maybe suspend such purchases for a month or so and see if I can save some extra cash. I really long to have a permanent connection to the outside world though, but I have better things to do with the money.

Had a spat with the xyf again yesterday. Not about anything significant, and as was the theme of our marriage, not about anything that really warrants an argument. Same old topics really. We just can’t help ourselves. With us, either both are pulling or both are pushing, it’s never one that pulls and one that pushes. Tsk tsk.

I’ve got class in half an hour or so. Yesterday they nagged me to teach them an English song. A grown up song though, because this class is aged 12 to 13. My collegue, King, has been teaching the other classes the Celine Dion title track to the movie Titanic, and the whole school is talking about it. So today’s class will teach them, and analyse the lyrics a bit. Heaven forbid they absorb the lyrics into their daily use vocab.

Xiang Ke!

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