Lively chickens and a cold but bearable kitchen

I’m sitting in bed under covers and a lovely warm cup of peet’s coffee. Next to me is a radiator I bought recently, which gets my room to a bearable temperature. I’m actually getting used to it all – the cold that is. Yesterday I made some soup, and found that at least in the day light the kitchen temperature quickly warms with both the sunlight and the heat of the pan. The night before one of my colleagues took me to the local fresh foods market – like a farmers market but found daily from sunrise to sundown in every area of shanghai. Not sure how they’ve changed since big supermarkets likes Carrefore (French) and it’s Chinese competitor Jiadeli have moved in. Maybe I’ll turn it into a side project of mine – to understand where food comes from in China, particularly the food sold by these fresh food markets and small informal vendors that spot the city. The chicken I bought was a small, young male – looked healthy and the lady told me he’d be good in a stock. She grabbed him as he squawked and fluttered pointlessly and then as he calmed down quickly weighed him, brought him to the side of the room and over a bucket away from costumers quickly and cleanly snipped the neck with a pair of scissors and sent his lifeless body away to be cleaned. The process wasn’t without some gory bits, because as she handed me my change I got a small piece of bloody flesh hanging onto what seemed to be baby feather. After I was given my once very lively chicken, now stripped of his clothes and all individual characteristics, we grabbed some very nice looking vegetables, including leeks, fat healthy carrots, scallions, and some tasty shitake mushrooms. My colleague now friend shared small bits of wisdom about how her mother picked certain ingredients – how the shitakes must not be pulling away from their edges revealing the underside ribs, how ginger is better when it’s old but with very fresh almost transparent skin, and of course her favorite type of chicken. There seems to be a great difference in chickens. The chickens you buy at the fresh market are of course alive, but they also have many different types, which at this point is lost on me, and color of the meat and fat is completely different – yellow fat and more pale brown never completely white flesh. I’m guessing it has something to do with the process, the diet, environment etc. The fact that we produce millions of chickens, who have probably been genetically modified or at least selectively breed, in factories may be the biggest difference. In supermarkets like carrefore you do not find the fresh market chickens, only the prepackaged very white and sterile chickens, with choices of tote sized bags of wings or just legs, and sometimes the whole bird. I’m not saying one way is better – because although my stock was amazingly delicious, I wasn’t sure the meat tasted any better – but there are certainly differences.

I’m off to try something out in the kitchen and then head to work.