Vegan101Girl Goes to (and Comes Back From) China! Part Three

Click Here to Read Part One of Vegan101Girl Goes to China

Click Here to Read Part Two of Vegan101Girl Goes to China

Rice Noodles and Veggies with my Simple Brown Sauce Recipe

For the third and final post in my living in Beijing series, I am talking about cooking and grocery shopping in Beijing.

For the two months that we lived in Beijing, Steven and I cooked almost all of the food we ate. We quickly learned that the restaurant food in Beijing was incredibly unhealthy, oily, and not at all vegan. We love cooking and cook almost all of our own food at home in the US anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was a relief to cook our own food really. 

Rice (you can't really find brown rice in Beijing) and Veggies with my Simple Brown Sauce Recipe

For breakfast, I ate plain rice cakes with peanut butter on them and a banana each morning. For lunch, we ate whatever food the school provided us with. Learn more about that here. For dinner, we cooked either rice noodles and veggies or rice and veggies, with our special sauce that I created our first night of cooking in our apartment in Beijing. If you are feeling particularly naughty and unhealthy, cook your vegetables in a tbsp of peanut oil, which comes in gallon jugs in China.

Lindsay's Simple Brown Sauce

½ cup Soy Sauce or Tamari if you are avoiding gluten

2 tsp Brown Sauce

1-2 tsp Garlic Chili Sauce

½-1 tsp Sesame Oil

Mix all ingredients together and pour over rice/noodles and vegetables and mix it up well. Play with the amounts of each of these ingredients to figure out what tastes best to you. 

Someone ripped open this orange, ate a few wedges and then put it back.

Oh the grocery store! The grocery stores in Beijing are so weird! First is the produce section, where people will eat pieces of fruit for sale, and then leave the rest for another person to finish eating. In the aisles, there are about 4 aisles of ramen noodles, 4 aisles of gallon jugs of oil, several aisles of packaged dried meat snacks, and of course, don’t forget the weird flavored chips and cookies. 

One of the many aisles devoted to Ramen Noodles

One of many aisles of cooking oil

Another aisle of oil

One of the aisles devoted to meat snacks

Shrimp Flavored Lays Chips

Cucumber Flavored Lays Chips

Fish Flavored Lays Chips

Chicken Flavored Lays Chips

"Sweetie Barbecued Pork" Flavored Lays Chips

Fish Soup Flavored Lays Chips

An assortment of fruit flavored Oreos - strawberry, lime, banana, orange, pineapple, etc.

Next week, I will not have any new posts up. Instead of working on my blog, I will be spending a week up in Norfolk, VA with PETA working on some projects with them. I am very excited, and I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it when I get back!

I also wanted to throw out there that I know I never wrote about my experience at the Main Street Vegan Academy in NYC and I plan to have a post about that soon. I also promised a giveaway for Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s new book Whole, and I promise that is still happening too.

‘Til next time, have a wonderful cruelty-free Thanksgiving!