Goodbye Shanghai City?
On a recent visit to Nijiya, I noticed that the lettering had been taken off of Shanghai City. This grabbed my attention so I walked on over to find this sign.
It says they are closed for "renovation"……. so maybe it's just a freshening up, which Shanghai City has needed for a while. Of course they'll be opening on 8/8….
Then I saw the Application for Ownership Change.
It seems that the place will be under new ownership. It made me a bit sad, at the least I should have gotten one last bowl of Niu Rou Mein.
3860 Convoy St
San Diego,CA 92111
An update on Guai Wei Can Dou (strange flavor broad beans 怪味蚕豆):
I first wrote about Guai Wei Can Dou in this post. The Missus and I love the stuff, and had been allowing ourselves a ration of two to three pieces a day from the stash we brought back from China. Of course it was just a matter of time before we'd munch on our last Guai Wei Can Dou, which happened all too soon. I soon set out looking for these broad beans around San Diego. I found one brand in Thuan Phat Market, but it looked plain wrong. There was one place that I thought we'd find this snack, and we made sure to drop by on a recent trip to our old neighborhood of Rowland Heights……. T S Emporium.
Emporium is a good name for this large shop which sells just about every kind of bottled and canned food item, snacks, and what they are really well known for, the herbs. It used to be that the smell of Chinese Herbal Medicine would hit you smack in the face when you entered. Nowadays the smells are bit more muted, and the apothecary is gone.
There are still endless aisles of goods, though.
And wouldn't you know they had two different brands of Guai Wei Can Dou.
Including one of the brands we brought back from China.
The strange thing about these "strange flavor" broad beans was they weren't nearly as "Ma" (numbing) as what we brought back from China. We noticed that Sichuan Peppercorn items aren't nearly as numbing as they are in China. I'm wondering if the irradiating of Sichuan Peppercorn affects the numbing aspect. And perhaps they irradiate this as well…. or perhaps it's just a bit of a different formula??? That's ok…. I'll take what I can get until we return to China.
T S Emporium
1457 Nogales St
Rowland Heights, CA 91748
An update on Baihe (Lily Bulb):
The gentleman at Beijing Restaurant in San Gabriel had told the Missus where to get Baihe. He laso gave us some specific instructions for rinsing and soaking to get rid of the sulphides, how to select lily bulb, and to only purchase ones that are labeled to come from Lanzhou. We purchased some from 168 Market in San Gabriel. We also saw the Xiang Chung Ya (salted shoots of the Chinese Toon Tree) that I believe the restaurant uses. It looked terrible, no wonder we weren't impressed……
The funny thing was, the very next morning "Tenjo" mentioned that we could find Baihe at 99 Ranch Market here in San Diego! I thought that I pretty much knew where everything was at 99 Ranch Market…….. but I was wrong. We found the Baihe stacked above the bean sprouts in the produce section.
I trim a little off the top….mostly the brown and discolored stuff, and just enough off the bottom so I can peel the petals of the bulb. I rinse three times, then soak in water for about 5-6 minutes, followed by another good rinse to remove the sulphides used to prevent discoloration. Many of the brown spots are just superficial, and can be rinsed or rubbed off.
If you've noticed a dearth of cooking posts recently; it's because I've been making this five or six times a week.
Don't forget some ginko nuts while you're at it……
Thanks again Tenjo!