You Are What You Eat

Hungry?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, hopefully this blog will make up for lost time.  I'm going to attempt to create for you the eating experience of China.  The adventure begins on the street.  Since most restaurants lack the capacity to hold onto raw ingredients for more than a day or so - either due to less-than-hygienic standards for keeping food, or more likely the lack of space in the establishment itself - raw food is delivered daily or purchased in markets.  Many times, they give cooks the pleasure of killing your own, so frequently you'll see a chicken on your way to school and come back to find a substantially less living, naked thing in its place.

Dan Dan Noodles

Our regular restaurant

Very quickly, you find that every dish is prepared differently in different restaurants but you learn what places do what dishes and which way you like them.  One such staple is 担担面 known in the states as Dan Dan Noodles.  It's a peanut-based dish with plenty of numbing pepper, the source of Sichuan's notorious spice.
 

The origin of takeout

The place above also is good for Gai Fan, which basically means meat and vegetables on rice.  There are lots of different varieties of it, but the picture to the right shows my favorite - twice-cooked pork with onion.  It also demonstrates takeout at it's simplest: a disposable bowl in a plastic bag.  Another big hitter cuisine-wise in this province is what we in America have come to know as Kong Pao Chicken, that delicious chicken with chunks of cucumber, peanuts and (naturally) more numbing pepper.  Now while Dan Dan Noodles and Gai Fan are individual dishes, Kong Pao Chicken and most other dishes like it are served "family-style."

Beef w/ Peppers

 

Potato Straws; KP Chicken; Onion Beef

That is to say, everybody grabs some chopsticks and digs in, throwing a few pieces from the main plate into your own bowl.  Between the mainly oil-based dishes and all the MSG, it doesn't sound healthy, does it?  To give you some more glimpses of what we're eating here are some other dishes.

Street food

Now there are more restaurants than we could count and rather than learn each place's name, we elect to refer to them by defining features such as, "The red curtains," or, "The place outside of the west gate," or my personal favorite, "the one with the waiter so-and-so has a crush on."  But these restaurants tend to close early and to address this problem, there is street food.  Street Food is any and all meals coming from a tricycle stand or cart.  These can be miniature fried peanut butter and jelly pancakes, Korean BBQ, dough-based omelets, as well as sweet potatoes or pineapple skewers.  To the right is a sort of pork burger with lettuce and egg, delicious and cheap.


Now while I've given particular notice to the meat and the carbs, there are other food groups that need to be represented.  Tomato and Egg make the base for many soups and noodle dishes, sometimes served just by itself - not a big hit for me but a popular entre during family-style.  China has also introduced me to eggplant in fish sauce, a new favorite vegetable of mine.  And while the fish sauce is delicious, you'll notice very few pictures involving fish itself.  It isn't a lack of fish in the area, it's that fish come fully boned with tiny strands as difficult to swallow as to pluck out.

Family-style: a roaring success

Eggplant

Tomato w/ Egg

Lastly, I want to introduce you to my new favorite dish, my personal creation, 宫爆鸡蛋炒饭.  After much urging, I convinced a restaurant to make Kong Pao Chicken on Egg Fried Rice - a phenomenal mixture, (likely with double the MSG) that despite their initial doubts and weird looks, has brought the restaurant a few extra patrons - both, American and Chinese.  In the future, I'll hopefully have more to show you along the lines of food as well as some of the new discoveries that I'm making each meal.  Until then, thanks for reading.