HOT POT, MOONLIGHT FOREST MAGICAL LANTERN ART FESTIVAL

I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have a comprehensive understanding of all the cuisines of the world.  I hardly even have a comprehensive understanding of the cuisine of the food that I do know.  For instance, Mexican food.  I love Mexican food, it is one of my favorites, I would never turn it down, and yet, Mexican food to me is pretty much what I will almost always order: chips and salsa, an enchilada, a tamale, a chili relleno, a taco, Mexican rice, and refried beans (or sometimes black beans).  Certainly there is a whole lot more to Mexican food than that (despite how much I like it), and I read somewhere than Mexican food is considered to be one of the world’s greatest cuisines, and why not, especially when you consider that it would develop from the confluence of two quite alien cultures, the Aztec and the Spanish.  Just the cultural exchange of plants and animals between the Americas and Europe was momentous. 

Here are some examples of what came from Europe to the Americas:  bananas, barley, cabbages, chickens, coffee, cows, horses, lemons, lettuce, olives, oranges, peaches, pears, pigs, rice, sheep, sugarcane, and wheat. Think about that for a moment, especially the animals:  prior to 1492, the Americas did not have chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and sheep.  Rice is on this list…yet for us to have Mexican rice in our Mexican food, it originally had to come from Europe (and presumably, from the Far East to Europe, which, of course, was another momentous cultural exchange).

And some examples of what were brought back to Europe from the Americas:  avocados, beans, bell peppers, cocao (for chocolate), chili peppers, corn, cotton, papayas, peanuts, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, rubber, squashes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, turkeys, and vanilla beans. Really, no potatoes before that time?  Yet years later, potatoes became so important that Ireland suffered greatly from a potato famine.  And no tomatoes?  We can hardly imagine Italian food without tomato sauce…but that, too, hadn’t existed in Europe prior to 1492.  Oh, and chocolate…some historians postulate that it was chocolate that ultimately killed Queen Elizabeth I.  Chocolate was such a rare and expensive delicacy that really only the Queen of England could have as much of it as she wanted, and she wanted it so much that all her teeth became black with rot and the resulting oral infections poisoned her. Hmmm.

I have a marvelous cookbook called The New World Wide Cook Book…I love how it is called “the new” world wide cookbook, because it was published in 1939!  But some of these old cookbooks are best, because they really do open one up to a world that is sometimes quite different from the “modern”.  As an example, I have another cookbook that I like a lot, it is a cookbook from England (published in 1963) called “500 Recipes For Cooking For One” (which, since I am “one”, that is really pretty cool…no days and days of leftovers or else wracking my brain to cut down the quantities of ingredients for a recipe intended for a family of six).  (Prior to Christmas, I wanted to make my own eggnog instead of buying it at the store, but all the recipes I found were for, say 30 people at a party. That, I confess, involved using a calculator.  Well, the recipe had a surprisingly numerous list of ingredients…and lots of separately whippingegg whites and egg yokes.  The result was worth it, but thank goodness for the calculator!) 

One fascinating feature in this “cooking for one” cookbook is that it is not only catered to a single person, but to a single person living in what they call a “bed sitter”, which essentially means living in one room (like a bedroom) and not having a private bathroom or kitchen.  In this book written in 1963, the bedsitter would not have a refrigerator, but for cooking, might have a gas ring or a hotplate.

I actually did live like this once for about three days (I was very young at the time), staying in a pretty frightening hotel in Manhattan that was down the street from the 42^ndStreet Port Authority Bus Terminal.  I had planned to live there for month until I found an apartment of my own, and the fact that it had a hotplate was supposed to be the extra feature that would make it livable.  (The more modern, and much better version of all that would be a hotel room with a small refrigerator and a microwave).  Everything was painted a very sickly green.  I quickly got depressed hearing people in adjoining rooms crying all night…but at least there wasn’t shouting and violence, which was how it all looked.  Don’t worry, I soon enough found an apartment subleasing agency where I found and rented what became one my favorite places I ever lived, with, of course, a bathroom and kitchen (although still very small).

But it is pretty useful to have recipes that are delicious, easy to prepare without a lot of equipment, and that you can eat all at once, since there would be no refrigerator to keep leftovers in.

But back to the World Wide cookbook, they feature comprehensive and detailed menus and recipes for 75 different country cuisines. Wow…if I actually wanted to try them all, I don’t think I would live long enough.  Although I would like to take a stab at it.

Just for fun, I will list all the countries whose cuisines are in this cookbook (feel free to skip this part if you want!)—how many of these have you ever had?  Me—a shockingly small amount of them when I see such a comprehensive list—well, I’ve had a third of them.  I am going to italicize the ones I have had:

England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania (that’s how they spelled it), Yugoslavia (when there was that country), Arabia, Armenia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, China,Japan, Korea, Philippine Islands (again, that is how they denoted that one), India, Indo-China, Netherlands East Indies (what is that now?), Siam(what they called it then, but now we would recognize it as Thailand), The Straits Settlements (this one intrigues me), Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, North Africa, Egypt, British Equatorial and West Africa (and now is?), Congo, Madagascar and Senegal, Union of South Africa, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico (those last three were identified as United States Territories, Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states then and Puerto Rico still isn’t), Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Equador, Paraguay, Peru, Uraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti, The Lesser Antilles.  I have had food from Belize, but that wasn’t in the book, and if it had been, they would have called in British Honduras.

All of this was to bring us around to Chinese food.  I would guess that Chinese food is probably the most frequent and common international food in the United States.  I remember growing up that we must have had Chinese take-out, or else Chinese delivered to the house, as frequently as once every two weeks. There were some Chinese take-out places I feel like our family was solely responsible for keeping in business…at least, they were business-savvy enough to make us think so!

There was one Chinese take out in Menlo Park, called Yueng Yung, that when we first started getting food from them, it was strictly take-out, no eating there.  I was around twelve years old at the time.  As time went on, they became more successful and got so that they had three tables in there, then after some more time, had a small dining room.

By the time I was college age, they took over a space that had been a movie theater and turned it into an elegant and highly rated restaurant.  One summer, I took an accounting course at the College of San Mateo and recognized the son of Yueng Yung’s owner also taking that same class. He, too, was now grown up!  He told me that he was preparing to take over the running of the restaurant, as his parents wanted to retire.  Many years after I had graduated from U.C. Berkeley and was working as a computer systems analyst at the Stanford University Medical Center, I was a frequent diner at Yueng Yung and my friend who had learned accounting with me was always excited to see me.  One time I even had a big party there in their private dining room. Sadly, I just now looked it up and while Yelp still does a listing for them, it has one of those “permanently closed” notices, so now I have seen them gone full circle. 

While Chinese take-out was a common staple for our family, one of my parent’s top favorite restaurants was another Chinese restaurant called Ming’s, located in Palo Alto. Ming’s was for some of our special occasion dinners, and sometimes when my parents had out of town guests, they would take them to Ming’s.  I had my first alcoholic beverage at Ming’s; the family had gone there to celebrate my 21^stbirthday.  Having achieved that age now, I had earned the privilege of drinking alcohol.  I loved, and enjoyed, how importantly my parents had treated that, and it meant something to me, as well.

All this is to say that I feel like I have Chinese food flowing in my blood, so it surprised me to discover that there was a whole different branch of Chinese cuisine that I had never heard of.

The Hot Pot.  

And I think it is well worth knowing about!  Nick and Carmen introduced me to it the night we were going to see the Chinese Moonlight Forest Lantern Festival at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia.  Carmen said that we had to have Chinese food, of course, to stay with the theme of the evening!

Nick chose the restaurant, it is called “Boiling Point”, located at 206 S. First Avenue, Arcadia, CA 91006, convenient two-hour street parking in the neighborhood, but if you plan to go there (and I think you should, because it is really good), plan to wait outside for a while to get seated, since it is extremely popular.

Essentially what a hot pot is, is a large, wide bowl filled with an Asian soup stock which is in turn filled with apparently anything you can imagine—meats, vegetables, etc., all cooking on your personal flaming cooking stove, what they call “a mini wok on a box”.  What I chose to have was combination number 6, called “Milk Cream Curry”, along with a side of white rice.  Beyond the “curry” and the “milk cream” (whatever that is, maybe both milk and cream?) what the menu said was in my hot pot were napa cabbage, fermicelli, sliced pork, enoki mushroom, imitation crab stick, fish ball, fried tofu skin, corn, tempura, jicama, Chinese string bean, and sea salt cream.  I chose for it to be medium spicy.  All this is cooking as you are eating it, so I said to Nick, “I guess the ‘hot’ of the ‘hot pot’ is because of the stove, not the spices,” but he said, “No, I think it refers to both,” and I think he was right, because I now see on the menu that the choice of spice levels are “none”, “mild”, “medium”, “very spicy”, and “flaming spicy”.  If you are someone who wants to avoid “spicy”, don’t let this concept of “hot” turn you away, because you could choose to have no spice at all if that is what you want.

My own historical experience with hot spice probably began in the very first Indian restaurant I had ever been in, in Hollywood sometime in the late 1970s.  I don’t believe that in those days people were generally asked what level of “spice” they wanted…either that, or else the people who were treating me to that particular Indian meal were keeping me ignorant of that option.  I had never experienced anything so hot in my life as that first Indian meal.  This was “turn my whole face into a sauna bath” hot. I am surprised that I still had a tongue left after that meal. And yet, I loved it, even though I was head to toe sopping wet by the time I finished that dinner.

Years later, I learned how to do quite a bit of Indian cooking myself, and I learned how to moderate the amount of the spice.  After that, I then had the courage to attempt going to Indian restaurants again, but also by then, the restaurants had learned that they better find out from the diners how much spice they could tolerate.  I have always been a “medium” since then.

Thai food seemed to be all the rage in the 1980s, and, again, the kind of Thai food that I was exposed to was similar to that first experience with Indian food.  Just pure unadulterated HOT was my summation of it, so I carefully avoided going to a Thai restaurant for the longest time.

However, somewhere along the line, Thai restaurants toned it down to the point where now I want to learn how to cook Thai food myself (I wrote about that in my just previous blog entry).  

My experience with the Hot Pot was kind of funny because while I was really enjoying the flavors, I was also waiting for it to cool down to where I thought I would enjoy it more, until, duh, I remembered that there was a stove burning away right under my plate!  It seems that I hardly had that awareness when our waitress came over and asked me if I would like to have the flame turned off.  Wow, she read my mind!  But then Nick said that others in the room were having their flames turned off, so presumably one could ask for that at any time in the process. 

So, after that, I began to like the Hot Pot so much that I found myself craving it the next day. I have not actually had it again, but I told my sister about it and she said she had seen a Hot Pot in the town where she lives, but hadn’t really known exactly what it was.  She plans to check that out, now.

I have noticed then, that it seems that the foods I have been the most impressed by, namely Indian (in the past), Thai (recently), and now this Hot Pot, are also foods where the hotness of spice is a feature, so it makes we wonder if I ought to ramp it up a bit, that I am being too much of a baby by sticking with “medium”.   Yes, I do believe that I will need to try these foods a notch hotter and see how I feel about it.  Time for me to be, if not “more adult”, at least “more authentic”.

After our much-enjoyed meal at the Hot Pot restaurant, Carmen, Nick, and I then went to the Moonlight Forest Magical Lantern Art Festival and it was spectacular.  I describe these as being various dioramas made of cloth and colored lights, and some of them huge, such as the very large and long dragon or the three-building pagoda:

Probably the most spectacular one for me was a complicated high wall ocean scene that involved several dolphins and other sea life leaping over each other in the waves, again, all shaped by cloth sculptures and lights.  But each and every thing was worth seeing, such as various zoo animals:

 and forests and baby pandas cavorting on a children’s playground:

 and a myriad other creative things such as this underwater pass-through with a cool octopus:

Something about all this made me think of Rose Bowl Parade floats, although these dioramas weren’t moving down the street.  It certainly had taken an immense amount of time and skill to fashion these and it took us probably two hours to see them all, so it was quite extensive.

In addition to the dioramas, there was a stage where groups of male acrobats alternated with female dancers.  I particularly marveled at the acrobats who did all sorts of group leaps and somersaults in and out and around hoops and performed complicated juggling with hats and later with several juggling pins thrown back and forth among them all and even doing that standing up on each other three guys high, I can’t even understand how they are able to get up on each other like that.  Each one was young, small, and slight, yet quick and strong and controlled and certainly extremely practiced and rehearsed.  So many of us in the audience (me) felt just the opposite, heavy and weak and wondered what it would be like to reverse that ratio, all useful, able, responsive, lean body mass and virtually no fat at all. Anyway, it was entertaining and amazing as well as somewhat inspiring!

It did become a very cold night though, to the extent that all three of our cell phones that we had been using as cameras began to fold up.  At first it looked like the batteries had been used up, but if you put your phone back in a pocket for a while, it seemed to “thaw out” for a bit.  It was odd in that once I was home and had downloaded the photos I took onto my computer, near the end there were a few blanks where a picture had supposedly been taken, but no image showed up. Despite there being no visible image, the phone kept the blank space as if it had in it a picture.  Well, I just deleted those blank spaces.  I wonder if for cold nights it would be beneficial to have some of a “jacket” for the phones?

Once we were all back home, Carmen, Nick, and I shared among each other all the photos that were taken and they were really beautiful.  It had been a great evening.  I am thankful for Carmen having thought of it in the first place and for Nick to have found the Hot Pot restaurant.  I now have been much culturally enriched!  Now I think I need to get busy with some of those 75 international cuisines.  There is still so much to explore!