We like the moon!

As some of you already know, tomorrow is the date of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, a.k.a. "the Moon Festival". So Saturday became our day to run to South Chinatown for supplies. What can I get there that I can't get up in North Chinatown? Two things without which no Mid-Autumn celebration would be complete: Mixed nut mooncakes from Feida Bakery and Chinese wine from Richwell Market. (For more on these and other items, see monshu's special page.) Since Nuphy is nearby, we decided to invite him along on the condition that he let us come back to his townhome with him to watch the moonrise from his roofdeck. For his part, he insisted we go to Lao Sze Chuan, which he has somehow never ended up going to despite having lived in this city longer than I've been alive. (Of course, monshu and I needed our arms twisted for that.) Then when we get there, what does he order? ORANGE BEEF! Good gravy! While you're at it, why not go to Hot Doug's and get a freakin' Polish?

Actually, I think Doug's Polish would probably kick a helluva lot of ass--and that's just what Tony Hu's orange beef did. The sauce was lighter than what you get at a Cantonese place (i.e. less gloppy, not so much soy and sugar) so the predominate taste was actually the orange peel. We went a little appetiser-happy, so monshu decided to forgo the lamb. Instead, we had ginger calamari (a bit of a misnomer, since it was steamed rather than fried), Chengdu noodles, Sichuan wontons (i.e. the "red oil folded hands" we were so thrilled with in Utah that we've been searching for them ever since), and--quite unexpectedly--Chengdu dumplings. (A waitron set down a plate of what we took to be badly misshapen Sichuan wontons in red oil, so we began to eat them. Then the real thing arrived with the second waitron--and when I complained about the mistake, she tried to take them away!)

With all that meat and dough spread among three people, I suggested a vegetable dish. "What is tongcai?" Nuphy asked me. Now, since he can read a little Chinese, I thought he meant 唐菜 tángcài, the word the menu used for bok choy[*]. But he was actually referring to 通菜 tōngcài, one of those crazy vegetables that seems to acquire monikers like an international spy. There's no fixed name in Chinese, let alone English, so Xiao Fei and I took to calling it "hollow-stem vegetable", a loose translation of its Mandarin name 空心菜 kōngxīncài "empty heart vegetable". The 通 tōng in 通菜 tōngcài (or the variant 通心菜 tōngxīncài) means "to go through", giving this term more-or-less the same meaning.

( A digression on botanical nomenclature )

In the end, we got tángcài instead of tōngcài, stir-fried with Sichuan pickled vegetable (i.e. 四川泡菜). The menu warns you that this is "hot", but it's not spicy, it's sour. All in all, we ate ourselves stupidly full and then went our way through the accumulating diners to catch a cab to Nuphys. The moon was well ahead of us and had already cleared the high-rises south of his house by the time we reached the roof. Complementing our 玫瑰露酒 ("rose essence wine") and our mooncake were crisp, sweet slices of apple Nuphy had picked up at the farmer's market. The evening star was gleaming in the south, I was cozy in monshu's overshirt, and we were all in high spirits.

[*] Incidentally, anyone know where this is current? I thought it was a Cantonese term, but that's where we get bok choy from. Surprisingly, none of my dictionaries list it and most Ghits seem to be irrelevant, but I know I've seen this usage before!