Frugal Food

[Ian_Lee]

What I mean by "Frugal Food" is the foodstuff that is edible but you normally throw it away.

When I was a kid, almost everyone lived on a budget. I recalled by that time Shiitake (Chinese mushroon) was a really expensive item (by that time massive plantation had not started in China and almost all the Shiitake came from Japan).

So Chinese mushroom was almost exclusively reserved for the feasts during Chinese New Year and Nid-Autumn Festival.

Anyhow all those Chinese mushrooms came in dry package. What my mom did was asking us to take out every piece of the dried musfroom and used scissors to cut out the short hard dry stem on the center of every mushroom.

Then she used the pressure cooker to boil the mushroom stems with pigtail and peanuts.

The mushroom stems were so yummy after they absorbed the flavor of pigtail and peanuts.

But nowadays hardly any cook bothers about the mushroom stem anymore!

[skylee]

What my mom did was asking us to take out every piece of the dried musfroom and used scissors to cut out the short hard dry stem on the center of every mushroom.

Then she used the pressure cooker to boil the mushroom stems with pigtail and peanuts.

My mom did the same. She used the stems to make soup and the mushrooms themselves would be in another dish.

[Quest]

碌柚 and 碌柚皮

[geraldc]

My grandmother cooks with pomelo skin, it's very nice, but we don't know how to do it, so we have to throw it away.

When my mother and her friends moved to the UK as a trainee nurses, they discovered that the butchers sold chicken giblets very cheaply. So she and all the other nurses from HK would go to the butchers at the weekend and buy lots of packs of chicken giblets and cook various chinese dishes with them. After doing this for a few weeks, the butcher finally asked them how many pet dogs they had, as he assumed that they were buying the chicken giblets to feed to their pets ( at the time English people never ate giblets). My mother was so embarrassed she didn't know what to say.

One of my friends told me a story about some of his friends, who when they first got to the UK, would go to the supermarket, and as they couldn't read, when they saw the tins of pet food in the supermarket, they assumed the picture of the dog or cat on the tin, meant it was dog or cat in the tin, so they bought some to try.

[liuzhou]

My grandmother cooks with pomelo skin

Pomelo skin is quite popular around here (Guangxi), but I don't know how to cook it either! I can ask my mama-in-law at the weekend. She has cooked it often in the past.

I also vaguely remember some old story about a famous concubine whose favourite food was pomelo skin. Ever since hearing it, my wife and I have called the dish "concubine food".

Try to get back to you on that one, too.

[skylee]

And my mom used to make us "ginger sweet soup" (i.e. ginger + rock sugar + water). This was the only sweet soup that she made. My friends laughed at me when I told them this. They said nobody used ginger to make sweet soup. So I guess it was "frugal food" as well.

[imitation]

Being from Australia I don't think my stories can be quite so frugal, however my mother always encouraged me to eat food from the floor if I dropped it, because it is good for the imune system. This is great because now in China I have never ever been sick from the food and have eaten pretty much everything from anywhere, whilst other friends who've been here for years still regularly get sick. I laugh because the only time I have had food poisoning was from eating some very expensive sushi from a Jusco supermarket in HK).

[Ian_Lee]

The most famous dish for pomelo skin is called 蝦子柚皮

The cook uses shrimp egg (or shrimp sperm) to stew with the pomelo skin. But this dish is very seasonal since restaurants only serve it around Mid-Autumn Festival.

Guangxi is famous for pomelo but now I prefer those red meat pomelo grown in Thailand which is sweeter. In Hawaii, it is easy to grow pomelo and the natives call it "Jabon". But the quality pales with those grown in Thailand and Guangxi.

[geraldc]

I've always called pomelo 沙田柚, are there differences between them and 碌柚 or are they just the same thing.

I've always been puzzled by how the west rejected the pomelo, but went for the grapefruit.

[Jo-Ann]

Does "Wash the Pot Soup" count?

[skylee]

冷飯粥 ...

[Quest]

I've always called pomelo 沙田柚, are there differences between them and 碌柚 or are they just the same thing.

http://www.e2121.com/food_db/viewherb.php3?viewid=152&setlang=3

柚之变种甚多，尤以中国广西容县沙田乡所产最着名，所产的沙田柚味甘可口而闻名。大造期在九月後，故中秋佳节，拜神、赏月，不易买到正式沙田柚。沙田柚果大皮厚肉多，肉可生食。未熟果皮名广桔红或化桔皮及核、果都作药用。粤人叫「碌柚」，因样子「圆碌碌」，像大个子的梨。中秋月最圆。往时习俗，凡碰及不吉利事物，或运气不佳，要用「碌柚叶」煲水沐浴，去除「衰气」，大吉利市。柚叶含挥发油，能消炎、镇痛、利湿，用其水洗澡，分外精神爽利，岂止心理上得到安慰而已哉。

[Ian_Lee]

If you have not been through those really difficult days, you won't know how frugal it can be in terms of food.

I recall three kinds of frugal foods that I had when I was a Kid:

(1) Chaozhouese families were very thrifty (they still are -- Li Ka Shing just wears a Seiko Watch even though he is the richest man in Asia) -- and my family was no exception. After every dinner, my mom used to selectively pour the residual food into a big pot. In the big pot, there were already some mustard cabbages. After she poured the residual food in, she heated it. And everyday she repeated to selectively add the residual food in. And she always added some new mustard cabbage. After a few days that pot of food was ready to be served as a daily dish in the dinner. We almost fought to have the mustard cabbage because it had absorbed the flavor of all kinds of residual food -- chicken, pork, beef, duck,....etc -- that mom added in everyday. This kind of dish got a Chaozhouese term called "kuok tsoi" -- but I don't know what it is in written form.

(2) During those days when you only had shoyu chicken or roasted duck in New Year's time, my mom used to go to the market to buy "Assorted shoyu chicken" or "Assorted roasted duck". Why do I mean "Assorted"? Because by that time, many restaurant waiters made some extra money by keeping the leftover food from banquets and resold them to this kind of shops. This shop rearranged these leftovers and made them look nicely on a plate and resold it. They were much cheaper than if you bought it at the regular roasted food shop. But because it was quite unhygienic (even though my mom heated them before serving), I recalled that I got a couple times of diahhera probably owing to food poisoning.

(3) Before the coming of supermarket, there were many mom-n-pop shops which sold soda, candy,....and loaves of bread. Usually they would trim the edges of the loaves of bread and then send the bread to restaurants which usually serve them as side order toasts. But those shops didn't throw away those edges of bread loaf. They packed them up and sold in a big bag. During summer time, my mom used to buy them for us as snacks. And whenver we felt hungry, she put the bread edges into boiling water, let them become swollen and soft and added sugar. It tasted awful--But as a kid, it was okay because it tasted sweet and the swollen bread got you a feeling that your stomach was full.

By that time, a lot of foodstuffs were given by US military to the charitable organization and then routed to our schools which distributed to students. I still recalled that my mom loved every item except margarine because she did not know what food to prepare with it.

[bosnoop]

Liuzhou,

Did you manage to find out about the pomelo skin recipe from your grandma? I tried making this the other day and the skin turned out to be very bitter. What a waste of effort! Had to soak the skin for at least 24 hours etc!

[liuzhou]

Did you manage to find out about the pomelo skin recipe

Sorry, I had forgotten about it.

I will tie her up and torture her untill she spills the beans! However, I'm not sure how much it will help, as she uses fresh pomelo skin, so no soaking involved.

There is a recipe here which seems similar to what she does, except she uses pork.

If you can understand Cantonese there is an MP3 file here, which apparently explains a recipe for "shrimp eggs and pomelo skin".

[bosnoop]

Liuzhou, thanks so much for the links - very useful, I'll try them out today. Thanks again!