Mai Tais & Thoughts on Turning 30. I starting making mai tais at home while researching tiki culture for my cookbook. You see, tiki culture and Chinese food have quite a history together. In the 1940s and 1950s, restaurants like Trader Vic's and Don the Beachcomber brought Chinese food to a bigger, mainstream dining audience by serving it with tiki drinks in a fun, festive environment. You could have eggrolls, spareribs, chow mein, and more with your mai tais, Singapore Slings, Scorpions, and other tropical-themed cocktails.
And so I had an excuse to recipe-test mai tais again and again for tiki parties. The original Mai Tai was actually a simple and well-balanced cocktail, in contrast to all the overly sugary and unnaturally colored drinks you see today. The Mai Tai I make for parties was inspired by the Trader’s recipe. It's a fairly sophisticated drink, or as sophisticated as a cocktail sometimes served in coconuts and tiki mugs can be. Mai Tai Makes 1 drink More cocktails for celebrating: Black Cherry Iced Tea | Recipes. This is what I drank after a long hot sweaty bike ride in Beijing. I have a $25 one-speed from the local Carrefour which I am supposed to leisurely pedal. Cheap one-speeds are not meant to go fast. Sometimes I forget this, especially when I go to my favorite grocery stores that happen to be half an hour away by bike.
My tendencies to zip by old men on their Flying Pigeons and come home glowing with perspiration I blame on having commuted to work by road bike on New York’s Greenway, alongside the multitude of spandex-clad cyclists. Here, there is no spandex in sight to make you feel the need to ride fast. Everyone just glides gently along with grocery-filled baskets. So until I learn to slow down, I am keeping a pitcher of something cold and a tray of ice cubes ready in the fridge.
The hardest part is not snacking on the cherries before you start making the tea. Thai Lemongrass & Ginger Iced Tea Vodka-Thyme Lemonade Ginger-Mint Lemonade Yangmei Iced Tea 2 quarts water 1 1/4 cups sugar. Recipe: Asian Pear and Banana Smoothie. One of my favorite things about fall is that pears are in season.
Here in China, we get Bartlets and Bosc pears like in the US, but Asian pears are by far the most popular and most abundant. I did a little research on the origin of Asian pears and found out that all pears may have originated in China. From The Washington Post: All pears, it's believed, have a common parentage from rootstock native to western China. But centuries ago, trees that were taken westward to European countries changed over the years and produced fruit with a texture and flavor like the common Bartlett pear.
Asian pears tend to be sweeter, more crisp, and juicier than their European cousins, which means they're excellent for making smoothies. Asian Pear and Banana Smoothie 8-10 cubes of ice 240 mL (1 cup) unsweetened soy milk 2 Asian pears, peeled and chopped 3 medium-sized bananas, peeled and chopped 15 mL (1 tablespoon) honey, optional Add the pears, bananas, and the rest of the soy milk. Thai Lemongrass and Ginger Iced Tea. Last week I helped out at a Thai cooking class at The Hutong taught by my friend Sandra of Savour Asia. As we sat down to a meal of mango salad, pork laap, and red curry chicken, I realized how much I missed having lemongrass as a kitchen staple. In New York I could easily take the train to Chinatown whenever I wanted to cook with lemongrass.
In Beijing, Sanyuanli market has several stalls selling the aromatic stalky grass, but is such a trek from my apartment that it doesn't enter my cooking consciousness at a moment's notice. After scooping the last of my laap mu into my mouth, I decided I must must must get lemongrass that day and make iced tea. Lemongrass and ginger iced tea is my drink of choice with Thai food if I want something lighter than iced tea with condensed milk. A somewhat long trip to Sanyuanli later, I had four stalks of fresh lemongrass to take guilty whiffs of and inspire bleary yearnings for a trip to Thailand this winter. Oh, and the green lemongrass tops?