A Chinese View on Dining in Athens
For Cai Bin, a first-year Ohio University graduate student from China, three months after he first stepped on the American land, he still can’t shake off his obsession with Chinese food.
“To tell the truth, I dreamed of eating Roujiamo just last night,” said Cai, referring to a famous traditional snack that is widely believed to originate in his hometown of Xi’an, capital city of North China’s Shaanxi Province. The delicious snack is basically made by stuffing diced pork, herbs, and hot sauce into fresh pancake baked in a barrel-like oven.
Like many other Chinese students at OU, Cai prefers to cook quite a lot at home whenever he has time to squeeze out of his heavy workload. He lives in a campus apartment shared with three other peers from China. Yet he admits that, in many other cases, he has to rush to some uptown fast-food store like Wendy’s and grab something to eat before heading for his next class. As a result, cooking by himself has often become a luxury to him.
Despite limited time allowed for him to do much home-cooking, Cai holds that he is well justified for sticking to Chinese food to fill, whenever possible, his dining needs on this foreign soil.
“I feel it’s OK if international students like us choose American food quite a bit during our beginning days when we try to settle down here and get accustomed to the local environment; yet the longer you stay here, the more you will prefer the food of your own traditional culture,” he said.
Consequently, the weekly shopping experience at local stores like Wal-Mart and Kroger, mainly for purpose of purchasing stuff for next week’s cooking, has become a somewhat boring rut for Cai and his roommates.
“We’ve almost formed our routine shopping route at those stores,” he says. “We just stop at certain shelves, grab some vegetables, meat, eggs and other stuff and leave.”
“The problem is, it’s always done in the same manner and we seem quite reluctant to shift from materials for cooking Chinese food to a wide variety of foreign food,” he explains. “Maybe to some extent we have bound ourselves.”
With that apparent stubbornness to remain loyal to the food of his home country, Cai and his roommates have tried to buy whatever Chinese seasonings available around the small town of Athens, with which they can produce somewhat authentic Chinese cuisine in their department, though sometimes their homely dishes lack in enough fineness due to still limited resources.
Recalling some impressive homemade dishes, Cai can’t help bragging about several that he thinks to be recommendable courses: braised spareribs in brown sauce, meatball soup with sliced tomato, stewed pig’s feet, fried eggplant with ground pork, braised beef with potato, diced chicken fried with pepper, stewed fish in brown sauce and fried shrimps, among quite a few others.
“Looks what we eat is not bad? For sure it is…I should say, at least at this point of time, I feel quite satisfied with what we can eat at home,” Cai said, jokingly adding that he as well as his roommates might turn into superb cooks after several years of study at OU.
In Cai’s eyes, the big variety of exotic food available at university dining halls and local restaurants only exists as an “alternative choice” to him. “I haven’t tried a formal dinner at those restaurants,” he said.
Cai maintains that he would more or less take price into consideration when it comes to dining, assuming that many other international students would also do so. “After all, we are not rich enough to afford eating out quite a lot,” said Cai, adding that on average he would spend 150 dollars each month on dining on campus.
“To me, the biggest problem (related to eating) here is that I can’t find a dining hall of the same kind I had in China,” he said, referring to the impossibility to find any dishes of genuine Chinese flavor, a conclusion made after two unsuccessful attempts at the local Nelson Dining Hall to taste Chinese dishes, only to find their Americanized flavor not to his liking at all. “The dishes there turned out to be totally different from what I had expected,” he said.
Yet cooking at home doesn’t necessarily mean everything is perfect.
Unlike quite a few Chinese students at OU who handle their home cooking on an individual basis, Cai and his roommates would, whenever possible, do it together. That means compromise sometimes, especially when it comes to the clash of different taste expectations. For example, he has to learn to eat hot and spicy food typically present in Southern China, which is preferred by his roommates with such a geographic origin.
And the way of cooking here in America may, to some extent, be different from what is back in China. For instance, one can hardly find here a high-pressure cooker, a widely-used cooking utensil in China, according to Cai. To further illustrate his point, he then cited an example of a false fire alarm caused by some Chinese peers in his residence building who awkwardly used their kitchen’s oven for the first time to roast some chicken and ended with a fumed room and floor.
“Try to make yourself at home, yet sometimes it’s not easy to do so,” Cai says. “Perhaps that is a first lesson all international students have to learn here.”
----> Go to Part II
For Cai Bin, a first-year Ohio University graduate student from China, three months after he first stepped on the American land, he still can’t shake off his obsession with Chinese food.
“To tell the truth, I dreamed of eating Roujiamo just last night,” said Cai, referring to a famous traditional snack that is widely believed to originate in his hometown of Xi’an, capital city of North China’s Shaanxi Province. The delicious snack is basically made by stuffing diced pork, herbs, and hot sauce into fresh pancake baked in a barrel-like oven.
Like many other Chinese students at OU, Cai prefers to cook quite a lot at home whenever he has time to squeeze out of his heavy workload. He lives in a campus apartment shared with three other peers from China. Yet he admits that, in many other cases, he has to rush to some uptown fast-food store like Wendy’s and grab something to eat before heading for his next class. As a result, cooking by himself has often become a luxury to him.
Despite limited time allowed for him to do much home-cooking, Cai holds that he is well justified for sticking to Chinese food to fill, whenever possible, his dining needs on this foreign soil.
“I feel it’s OK if international students like us choose American food quite a bit during our beginning days when we try to settle down here and get accustomed to the local environment; yet the longer you stay here, the more you will prefer the food of your own traditional culture,” he said.
Consequently, the weekly shopping experience at local stores like Wal-Mart and Kroger, mainly for purpose of purchasing stuff for next week’s cooking, has become a somewhat boring rut for Cai and his roommates.
“We’ve almost formed our routine shopping route at those stores,” he says. “We just stop at certain shelves, grab some vegetables, meat, eggs and other stuff and leave.”
“The problem is, it’s always done in the same manner and we seem quite reluctant to shift from materials for cooking Chinese food to a wide variety of foreign food,” he explains. “Maybe to some extent we have bound ourselves.”
With that apparent stubbornness to remain loyal to the food of his home country, Cai and his roommates have tried to buy whatever Chinese seasonings available around the small town of Athens, with which they can produce somewhat authentic Chinese cuisine in their department, though sometimes their homely dishes lack in enough fineness due to still limited resources.
Recalling some impressive homemade dishes, Cai can’t help bragging about several that he thinks to be recommendable courses: braised spareribs in brown sauce, meatball soup with sliced tomato, stewed pig’s feet, fried eggplant with ground pork, braised beef with potato, diced chicken fried with pepper, stewed fish in brown sauce and fried shrimps, among quite a few others.
“Looks what we eat is not bad? For sure it is…I should say, at least at this point of time, I feel quite satisfied with what we can eat at home,” Cai said, jokingly adding that he as well as his roommates might turn into superb cooks after several years of study at OU.
In Cai’s eyes, the big variety of exotic food available at university dining halls and local restaurants only exists as an “alternative choice” to him. “I haven’t tried a formal dinner at those restaurants,” he said.
Cai maintains that he would more or less take price into consideration when it comes to dining, assuming that many other international students would also do so. “After all, we are not rich enough to afford eating out quite a lot,” said Cai, adding that on average he would spend 150 dollars each month on dining on campus.
“To me, the biggest problem (related to eating) here is that I can’t find a dining hall of the same kind I had in China,” he said, referring to the impossibility to find any dishes of genuine Chinese flavor, a conclusion made after two unsuccessful attempts at the local Nelson Dining Hall to taste Chinese dishes, only to find their Americanized flavor not to his liking at all. “The dishes there turned out to be totally different from what I had expected,” he said.
Yet cooking at home doesn’t necessarily mean everything is perfect.
Unlike quite a few Chinese students at OU who handle their home cooking on an individual basis, Cai and his roommates would, whenever possible, do it together. That means compromise sometimes, especially when it comes to the clash of different taste expectations. For example, he has to learn to eat hot and spicy food typically present in Southern China, which is preferred by his roommates with such a geographic origin.
And the way of cooking here in America may, to some extent, be different from what is back in China. For instance, one can hardly find here a high-pressure cooker, a widely-used cooking utensil in China, according to Cai. To further illustrate his point, he then cited an example of a false fire alarm caused by some Chinese peers in his residence building who awkwardly used their kitchen’s oven for the first time to roast some chicken and ended with a fumed room and floor.
“Try to make yourself at home, yet sometimes it’s not easy to do so,” Cai says. “Perhaps that is a first lesson all international students have to learn here.”
----> Go to Part II
posted by Leon @ 5:15 AM
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