+ “Cauliflower has vitamins and minerals, and when eaten with chicken it can make stronger bones.  Combined they also improve the detoxing power of your liver and give your immune system a boost. With that you will fight colds much more easily.” Perhaps a little cauliflower in the traditional Chicken Noodle soup recipe would help.

- Combining honey and Spring Onions can create “attract toxins”, “hurt your eyes”, and “in serious cases even lead to the loss of sight.” Yikes, this is a pretty bad combination!

Here’s a decent recipe for Stir-fry Cauliflower and Chicken at Nibbledish! Take a look:

Stir-fry Cauliflower and Chicken

Duck, Pork, and Cabbage with Rice = $1.69

Good food on a budget is a specialty not only in China, but across the developing world. In countries which have recently joined the world economy, or only within the past 20-30 years, local food traditions have stayed strong. And although Western food is becoming more popular in these countries, their preference for local traditional dishes is unlikely to change in the near future.

The one common remark that students studying abroad make about their experience is that food doesn’t meet their standards. For example, the pizza, pasta, sandwiches, and salads option that fill cafeterias in the US provoke a homesickness that is unavoidable. Looking at the common dish I had for dinner last night, could you blame them for missing home?

Right outside my apartment is the “Sichuan Room”, a Cantonese-style Sichuan restaurant which serves amazing food at a low price. When I’m tired after a long day of work or study, I find comfort in a short visit to this restaurant. When I’m not interested in the $.25 options in the university cafeteria here at JNU, I take a two-minute stroll to a nirvana of tasty food.

Greens, Eggs, and Meaty Cauliflower = $.79

Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese all enjoy their local food more than foreign styles. Their dishes are full of vegetable, meat, and fish options. Although we in the US consider these cuisines to be non-native, and therefore an occasional experience, it would be much healthier if we started following more of this kind of tradition.

Check out my Asian recipes in AL.ME’s Cooking section!

Cauliflower

Day two of my visit home and I decided to cook up something unexpected!  Big, white, fluffy cauliflower! Woo hoo! First of all, my father looked at the huge serving of cauliflower I had prepared and was anything but ecstatic. …great… Ben’s cooking dull, taste-less, rabbit food… I knew this meal could be a tough pill to swallow, so I had to take out the big guns!

To clarify, my father is a meat-lover. Most dads are. Steak, hamburger, chicken, or pork should fill the air at most meal times.  A major dish at lunch consisting of rabbit food was a little disappointing to say the least. So, I thought… if I could transform the flavor of this vege into something mouth-watering and meaty, what would it taste like?

Let’s Tarantino this recipe so that the food-drama doesn’t go to waste…

* There was silence on our front porch… a small dog could be heard barking in the distance… an orchard medley serving dish sat still, void of its contents… mere drops of flavorful liquid collected in a lonely serving spoon.  My mother had never seen this side of her husband since the day he first set eyes on… the love of his life… (that would be a pulled pork shoulder sandwich). Then, the time came for him to speak…

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1~ Step one: Cut up your head of cauliflower into bite sized pieces. Let them sit in boiling water for a few minutes before you start cooking. Prepare sausage into bite sized pieces as well. (I used 2 thick links of spiced sausage) Prepare your garlic and ginger slices, and then put them aside.

2~ Cook the sausage pieces in water, turning them often, until they are mostly cooked (brownish). Add water if it gets too dry. After a few minutes, toss in the garlic and ginger.

3~ Then, strain out the water from preboiling the cauliflower and dump them into the pan. They need color, so you could pour some soy sauce over them while constantly turning them with a spatula.

4~ The SECRET: Scoop out nearly 2 big spoon-fulls of Lee Kum Kee’s Char Siu Sauce. It will seem jelly-like, so we’ll need to mix water in with it. As it liquefies, keep mixing the sausage and cauliflower over one another. Cover with a lid.

5~ Cauliflower is thick, so it needs to simmer a while like this. My dish, which consisted of 3/4 head of vege, took close to 5 minutes of simmering with occasional stirring. The sauce should fill about an inch of the pan or wok.

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Cauli-Sausage

* “Wow” was all he said. Just “wow.” But it wasn’t like the wow you say to make someone else feel good about a cool story they just told you. It was more like the wow you say when you witness a grand slam at Fenway. It was more like the wow you say when watching a human-fish win 8 gold medals in Beijing. Wow.

And that is how you make cauliflower with sausage – a dish inspired by real Chinese cooking.

Cauliflower, Carrots, and Spicy Chicken

I would be lying if I said that eating well in China requires more than $3 or  $4 per day. In fact, the more processed the food, the more expensive it is here; which is completely opposite in my country (America). Also, to make my life easier, I choose the campus canteen options which usually vary between 8-12 options. The picture to the right is two options + rice for about $1. (The rice serving is only about 10 cents.)

Today, I ate cauliflower and carrots with thin sausage slices and spicy chicken chunks (辣子鸡 La zi Ji). La zi Ji is one of the most famous dishes from Si Chuan province. This meal was a little on the meaty side …. but,  I usually get a single meat and a single vege (or toufu) dish together with white rice. Other days it is fish and veges and toufu. Most days I’ll also order a soup which contains peanuts, kelp, eggs, and chicken bones.

My canteen meals are quite varied and I get inspiration for new recipes from there. Best of all, I can eat lots of great food for little money. Paying $1-2 for a bag of chips just doesn’t make sense anymore.