Xiyun Yang

Most people will say the best thing about living in Beijing is the food. Although to be honest, with the traffic jams and the pollution, there’s hardly competition. But
when most people talk about the food, they mean restaurant food, which no one can argue with. From chewy Shanxi noodles to the kick and tingles of Sichuan spice, the excellent selection of regional Chinese food in Beijing is unparalleled.

Choices in fresh and dried produce Beijing are undervalued and deserve reimagining by a discerning and innovative eye – at least that’s what I’ve always thought and aspired to highlight in these monthly columns. I can’t say that I’ve always been successful, but I certainly hope it’s been entertaining to read my recipes and try them out.

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Ah, Beijing in high summer. When the heat and humidity congeals around you in a polyester second skin of sweat and muck, something sweet and very, very cold is exactly the respite you're looking for. Yet, your local xiaomaibu doesn't offer up the best selection. Corn-flavored ice cream, anyone? The quality of frozen desserts in this country range from strange, gritty, and artificial at best to melamine-laden at worst. But despair not! Every challenge is an opportunity, and crowd-pleasing frozen desserts can be as easy or as artisanal as you want them to be.

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Tomato season never comes early enough or stays long enough. And for those who are still in the dark about the seasonal variations in a tomato, really, I weep for you. But hark! Finally it arrives. So here we have red, engorged fruits that really earn their label as fruits. When the tomato is really juicy and sweet, all you need is a bit of salt and a slice of thick, buttered bread for mind-blowing tomato sandwiches. Or try out my favorite childhood dish: ripe tomatoes sprinkled with sugar. The more sugar you sprinkle on there, the more likely a child is to slurp it up.

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I have a confession to make: I am terrified of children. I don't know what to say to them and I don't know how to act around them. I grew up as an only child who never babysat to make extra cash. The last time I was forced to interact with a child under the age of 15, I froze and downed way more beers than I had previously anticipated.Afterwards, I was told that I had fallen on a professional crutch. "Yes, but can you tell me about the exact moment when you realized blue is your favorite color?" I was overheard saying.

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I am a kitchen purist. Having never worked in a restaurant and diced onions for hours on end, I revere chopping the same way that yuppies are charmed by poverty - so authentic and atmospheric! When my grandmother told me that her mother used to ferment her own soy sauce, I gasped and gurgled with excitement. Amazing! So artisanal! When I suggested that we try a batch, my grandmother looked at me as if I had grown another head. "Are you insane? Why don't you focus on getting into a better law school."

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I'm a little embarrassed to be writing about deviled eggs. For those of you keeping up with the culinary trendsetters,you are surely laughing at me. Deviled eggs? That's like wearing ... well, there's been a recent spat of such terribly bad fashion that I can't even pick an appropriate simile. Deviled eggs  may not have the glamour of a home-made charcuterie plate and they may have slid from their position as clever 60's sophistication to their current culinary rung of populating Tupperware parties, but they are seriously delicious.

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I don't know what it is about eating that brings out my macho, competitive side - the side that leads to irrational one-upmanship. I'm generally a facials and sky high stilettos kind of girl, but when it comes to food, I revel in the eating, cooking and loving of that which others shrink from. I embrace the grotesque and the inappropriate; I'm just waiting on the sidelines until someone deep fries a panda. Endangered? Whatever. Let's talk about the real issue: tenderizing. This personality trait surges forward most often when matters of spice come into the picture. Put a bowl of chilli sauce in front of me and suddenly I'm challenging the waiter to a game of who loses feeling in their mouth first. No one insults my manhood by insinuating that I've met a pepper I couldn't handle.

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Thanksgiving: An unabashed celebration of gluttony and consumption. A holiday after my own heart. It's a time when quantity and quality merge and fuse into a lustrous, roasted fowl the size of a small mountain - a gift that keeps giving days afterward in the form of sandwiches and pot pies.

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How do you feel about congee? It's an odd question as far as cocktail chatter goes, but I am actually, honestly, curious to know. Because if we're really being honest here, I have hated congee all my life. It is one of those essential Chinese foods, made of nothing more than rice. How much more Chinese can you get? Not much more. Whether or not you enjoy congee is almost a litmus test to gauge just how Chinese you are. Congee, as I've felt my entire life, is one of those things that is so tasteless you had to have grown up with it, with no other choice for food, to really enjoy it - like my grandmother, who refined her palate during several decades of famine. I'm pretty sure there's nothing inherently appealing about eating fish heads or rotten eggs. That's where I've categorized congee all these years, with fish heads. Actually, that's not fair, as fish heads are delicious in stews.

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For all of summer's fecundity, the best of the season is in its transitory pleasures: Fresh salads and cold soups - quick and simple to make, and consumed immediately. Summer's adjective is not comfort, and summery foods are not made for durability. That is autumn's field. September is the first month of soup season, and I am excited.

Transitional by structure (preceding stew season and succeeding salad season), but not by nature, soup season is my favorite. The temperature is no longer hot enough to kill your appetite, but it is not cold enough to store up fat reserves (and yes, I definitely store them up over winter, via liberal usage of bacon in pot pies). Thus, a soup. Something to bubble away at the stove for hours as the night air turns nippy. Autumn returns summer's fruits to the earth; rows of persimmon trees outside my office bore fruit and with no one to pick them, they simply over-ripened and fell to the ground. And nothing is earthier or more autumnal than mushrooms.

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