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!

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

Click Here To Read Part One of Vegan101Girl Go to (and Comes Back From) China!

Me at The Summer Palace

In Part One, I talked about some of the struggles Steven and I faced trying to live healthfully in Beijing. Now, to cheer you all up, let’s look at our favorite restaurants in Beijing.

First let me say that Air Canada has the best vegan airplane food. I have eaten a lot of absolutely disgusting vegan airplane food that has made me very sick. Air Canada did a decent job and served us edible, not horrendous food. I would recommend Air Canada for long flights where you will be served several meals. Our flight from Toronto to Beijing was 13 hours and they consistently served us decent meals.

One of my Air Canada meals. Quinoa and veggies, with a side of beans and a cookie.

As far as restaurant going goes, during the week, we eat breakfast at home, lunch was provided at our school, and we cooked dinner at home every night. Once a weekend though, we would venture out to a different vegetarian restaurant for lunch. Let me just say that all the vegetarian lunches on the weekends were better than our weekday lunch. We ate white rice, onions, and cabbage pretty much every day during the week at the school.

Typical lunch provided by our school. White rice, onions, and cabbage.

Living in the big city of Beijing did have its benefits. There were several vegetarian (and even a few vegan!) restaurants spread out across the city. Unfortunately, we lived on the outskirts of Beijing so getting to these restaurants was a weekend day trip (it takes a good 2 hours to get from one side of Beijing to the other). 

We tried a lot of different vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Some were great and a few were not so good. We ended up with two favorite restaurants where we were weekly regulars and three others that were decent that we would go to occasionally. I found all the vegetarian and vegan restaurants in Beijing on www.happycow.net. For directions to any of these and for a more complete list of veg restaurants in Beijing head over to Happy Cow.

 Here are the vegetarian and vegan restaurants that get the vegan101girl seal of approval!

The Veggie Table

Southwestern Bean Burger with Sweet Potato Fries and amazing coleslaw.

The ultimate winner of the vegan101girl seal of approval!!!! This restaurant was a light in a dark place and our savior when we were really struggling. We went here every weekend after our 2 hour Chinese lesson. I honestly don’t know what we would have done without this place. The Veggie Table was like a little slice (get it? cause there's a picture of a pizza below?) of home. 

Pizza, the crust is not gluten-free. I scrapped the toppings off. It was worth it. They were yummy...

This restaurant is all-vegan and serves international (meaning American) style food. We tried almost everything on the menu and it was all good. The most incredible yummiest dish was the Southwestern Bean Burger. I ended up getting this burger every weekend and thought about it all week long.

 Side Note: Many items on the menu are not gluten-free. When in doubt of what to get, please get the Southwestern Bean Burger (it will change your life and knock your socks off all at the same time!) and just skip the bun if you are avoiding gluten! 

Chili Spaghetti (not gluten-free). My boyfriend eats gluten.

Curry

Lentil Soup

Hummus (a bit on the oily side and didn't quite taste like hummus). Good, but not quite there.

Also be sure to try the lemonada drink which is a lemon/mint slushy thing. Oh my gosh. So good. Their chocolate peanut butter milkshake is also very good. So are their fresh pressed juices. And their hard cider. For heaven's sake, all their beverages are awesome!

Cranberry Juice and Apple Juice

Chocolate Peanut Butter "Milkshake"

Lemonada. A delicious lemon mint drink.

Jing Lian Zhai off Hepingli Street

This is our other favorite restaurant. It is vegetarian. It has a big picture menu which is great. We would regularly get fried lotus, bamboo, or the pumpkin soup. All delicious. 

Fried Lotus. Very Yummy. Probably not very healthy...

Bamboo. We love bamboo and ate a lot of bamboo while in China.

I think these are Chinese Sweet Potatoes.

 

Pumpkin Soup

An unfortunate example of ridiculously oily vegetables. Never ordered this again. Asparagus and mushrooms.

Xu Xiang Zhai near the Confucian Temple and Lama Temple

There are a bunch of vegetarian restaurants around the Buddhist Lama Temple (including The Veggie Table). This is a Buddhist-vegetarian restaurant with a big buffet of yummy vegetarian food. They have a large assortment of fake meats that are pretty good. The seating at this restaurant consists of these long giant tables, kind of cafeteria style, but much prettier. Be prepared to possibly sit right next to friendly vegetarian strangers.

Vegan, gluten-free Tiramisu cream thingy...in a dirty glass. Oh well. It was tasty.

My plate after scavenging the buffet.

Baihe Vegetarian Restaurant

This vegetarian restaurant is a bit tricky to find. It was totally worth the millions of years it took to find though. It has a nice atmosphere and the food is great.

Bamboo and veggies.

Vegan Hut

This all-vegan restaurant is also a slight challenge to find. It is all vegan though, so if you’re sick of possibly eating meat or dairy everywhere else you go, it’s worth finding. The food is pretty good. Sadly, I can’t find my food pictures from this restaurant. Sorry!

Golden Peacock

This restaurant is not vegetarian, or really even veg-friendly. In fact, there was nothing all that great on the menu, except the most delicious pineapple rice ever! I wouldn't recommend specifically seeking this place out, but if you happen to be in the neighbor, I would definitely pop in for some crazy good pineapple rice. This is the address: 16 Minzu Daxue Beilu, Weigongcun, Haidian District.

Pineapple Rice

There is one vegetarian restaurant that I DO NOT recommend. It is called Fairy Su and it is right next to the Lama Temple. The food is incredibly greasy and made me pretty sick.

Part Three of Vegan101Girl Go to (and Comes Back From) China will be out in a few days. I will be writing about what we cooked at home for dinner every night and what grocery shopping in China is like.

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

Climbing the Great Wall

I know, I know, I have some explaining to do. In my last post, I told you all that I would be living in China for a lot longer than two month, but unfortunately, life had other plans. 

The Summer Palace

Steven and I moved to Beijing, China in August and returned to the US in October two months later. Life in China was very very hard. It makes me sad that we decided to leave, but it was the right thing to do.

The Forbidden City

Several things happened that caused us to come to this decision. First, I got incredibly ill in China and was missing a lot of work. I was having horrible fevers/chills/sweats and the smog and air pollution was making me congested, I was having trouble breathing, and I couldn’t stop coughing. The air was unhealthy to breath and my lungs and throat constantly hurt. At one point, I had to go to the hospital. I was taken to the international wing, where I ended up standing in line for a doctor next to the jazz singer Patti Austin! So insane!

The smoggy sky is almost the same color as the fireworks smoke in the middle of the day.

Anyway…

It was also impossible to be vegan or gluten-free in China. Seriously, I had no idea. It was literally not possible to be vegan or gluten-free. There is no word in Chinese for vegan. We couldn’t even eat tofu, because in China, tofu is not seen as a meat substitute, it is seen as just another type of meaty texture. Tofu in China is cooked in meat juices/fat/lard. 

 

The only tofu we ate in China. It wasn't until afterwards that we found out tofu is cooked in meat juices.

On top of that, Beijing is known for its wheat products (of course) and everything had wheat in it. Restaurants could not comprehend our request that our food be vegan and this always ended with us being told they could only serve us plain white rice with bok choy or cabbage.

Pretty much every restaurant told us that this was the extent of their vegan cooking.

 The worst part was that all the food in Beijing is DRIPPING with oil. It was honestly disgusting. I took a lot of restaurant food pictures, but I’m too embarrassed to show you all what we had to eat. It was really frustrating, because many of the vegetable dishes would have been really healthy if they hadn’t been drenched and drowning in a lake of oil. 

Mushrooms and Bok Choy dripping in oil.

 

Eggplant and Green Beans sitting in a lake of oil.

Health is so important to me and between the disgusting diet and the polluted air, my health morals felt totally compromised and that made me very uncomfortable and anxious.

We were also having a lot of problems with our company that we were working for and the apartment we were living in. The company was being dishonest and lying to us about things. We were also witnessing some terrifying and inappropriate behavior at the school we teaching at.  

All these things were just too much. My passion is in veganism, healthy eating and living, animals, and the environment. That was all gone there. We were unhappy and unhealthy, so we made the tough decision to come home and start over from square one. We are now in the process of finding jobs that are meaningful and fulfilling and healthy. 

With all that bad though, there was some triumphant vegan good! Stay tuned for Part Two where I review and tell you all about the best vegan and vegetarian restaurants in Beijing.  

Our favorite bean burger from a VEGAN!! restaurant in Beijng.