Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 16

This week was a Holiday Week in Shanghai. National Day is celebrated every year on October 1st, which was Saturday. IBM China, as well as most of China, takes the entire week off, although Saturday and Sunday the 8th and 9th seem to be work days then. National Day celebrates the founding of the People's Republic of China, which was on October 1st, 1949 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The National Day starts one of the two "Golden Weeks" in China (the other being the Chinese Lunar new Year in January/February) and it is a huge week for tourism. There are organized festivities including fireworks and concerts. In Shanghai, there was an hour-long fireworks celebration on Thursday night (we didn't go, but friends of ours did) and we say some fireworks over the river on Saturday night on our way home from dinner. All over the city, there are Chinese flags and red lanterns, including large red lanterns on each of the buildings in our complex. I got the week off, although I did work in the evenings for some meetings with the US, but Tom had to work the whole week since it was Quarter Close.

Our 2 white geese (I called the swans before) seem to have left us, and in their place, we now have 3 peacocks. They are kept in a kind of cage between our building and the one next to us.









I also tried my hand at making dumplings at home. I had taken the class, and we had bought the rolling pin and the bamboo steamer, so it was time to try it out. I seem to have forgotten a couple of the steps, and didn't get the dough rolled out quite thin enough, so they look pretty bad but they tasted good. Here they are before they went into the steamer, and our new bamboo steamer.



Cooking Class #3

I decided to spend one of my days off at a Cooking Class, this time with 3 other American ladies from the American Women's Club of Shanghai. Having taken a class both at the Pudong kitchen as well as the Puxi kitchen, I decided that the Pudong kitchen was a better setup and layout, so we went there. We did Xiaolóngbao dumplings and vegetarian steamed buns. The Xiaolongbao are sometimes referred to as "soup dumplings" and seem to be traditional in Shanghai. These dumplings have a soup inside of them which you suck out prior to eating the dumpling itself. They are traditionally filled with pork but there are also pork with shrimp and pork with mined crab meat and roe. The soup is created by the addition of pork jelly into the meat prior to filling the dumpling. The pork jelly is something you actually cannot buy (we asked) but you end up making at home and it is made by basically cooking down pork skin without the fat until it becomes gelatin-like. Then when you steam the dumplings, this gelatin aspic melts and becomes the soup.

Then we made vegetarian steamed buns, which are made much like the dumplings but the dough is different. The dumpling dough is made with just flour and water, while the steamed bun dough includes baking powder, sugar, salt, and yeast. It is kneaded and rolled the same way although the steamed bun dough is rolled thicker. You then fill it the same way and close them up although the steamed buns normally have a small hole at the top. Instead of going directly to steaming, you put the bamboo steamer over warm water (but not on the fire) for 10-15 minutes to allow the yeast in the bun dough to work and rise and then you steam then for 10 minutes. The filling that we did included diced tofo/bean curd, mushrooms, and bok choy. We also did one steamed bun that contained the a pork filling. YUM!!!



Saturday, while Tom was finishing up on the close, I walked over to a "wet market" with our friends Carol and Duane. A wet market is generally an open food market. The floors and surroundings are often routinely sprayed and washed with water—to the extent of flooding it at frequent intervals—which gave it the name "wet market". There are many wet markets around and many of the locals shop there daily for their food that they will cook. This one is just across Century Avenue from the DongChang metro stop, which is the one that I take to work. At this market, there are lots of fruits and vegetable stands, as well as fish (live ones that you can pick out of the water) and meats (mostly sitting out, hence I wasn't going to buy any meats there). I did pick up fruits and veggies there, which all seemed to be quite nice. There are also stands to buy Tofu in a couple different forms.





This week, we also lost a visionary in the technology industry with the death of Steve Jobs. There is an Apple store just up the road at the IFC mall, and when we went by there tonight after dinner, they had a memorial where people had left flowers and apples.





Tom leaves for Beijing tomorrow morning for a week, so I'm "single" this week (so .. pizza every night!).