Foxy Pot

I haven't been a big fan of hot pot ever, and since the last time I had it in Beijing, I promptly got sick and spent the next week with the bandage the size of my face taped to my chin, I haven't had the best associations and thus haven't sought it out. But it's good for groups, I guess, so I can forgive our outgoing Korean class rep for organizing our class lunch around it.

To their credit, they tried to keep the meat out of one side (why the spicy side?), but it all basically ended up together. Nicely rolled goat meat strip pyramids were the restaurant's specialty.

Meat pyramid goes in the broth. Other things that can be cooked in the hot pot: lettuce, napa cabbage, rice noodles, glutinous rice noodles, glutinous rice strips, wavy french fries, slices of lotus root, mushrooms, tofu skin, shrimp balls ("For Hester! Oh, you don't eat those either? Would you mind telling the whole class why you are a vegetarian?"). Once the items are cooked, you can dip them in a sesame paste sauce, to which you've added, hopefully, cilantro, peanuts, x-tra aged stinky tofu, vinegar, soy sauce, and broth from the hot pot. An additional non-hot-pot-specific item also came to the table: a basket of rolls, some of which had been worked over in the deep fryer to a golden crisp, which you could then dip in sweetened condensed milk, which they called honey. (china's poor man's...)

Haunch - Love, in my favor

These meat rackets are usually sold (at more sophisticated joints like Carrefour) in a carrying case that suggests you're off to the courts.

chestnut epilogue

One of my first on-street purchases was roasted chestnuts. According to my host family, you can also eat them raw, but they taste like a bitter raw nut, and are much better once they've been roasted. My school party also served them boiled, which basically tasted the same as roasted, except the shell was harder to crack open. And it's tough enough anyway to do it without smashing the chestnut inside and making it impossible to get out. Today I finally snapped a shot of the lady at the corner fruit stand roasting them. As per uzh, they go in a oversized tilty wok filled with hot black sand and are shoveled around until they are ready. They smell amazing. Sweet and smoky.

It's not cooked

My understanding of the process fell apart very early into the explanation of how song hua eggs are made, but it involves soaking them in something, wrapping them in something, and then leaving them to sit for 2 months. The name (which I think translates to cedar frond) has to do with the snowflake-like designs that appear on the egg post-jellifying.

When you buy them you remove the woodsy coating and peel the shell off. The egg white tastes like nothing-jelly, and the yolk is just chewy. We ate them dipped in a garlic and vinegar sauce. However, you "can't eat these often", says Host Mother, since they are on the list with 1,000 other things (stinky tofu, oranges, cheese, etc.) that cause inflammation, esp. in the throat.

communist noodles all share the same broth

stinky tofu, rounds 2 and 3

host mom scoffed at my stinky tofu story and experience. she belittled the kind of stinky tofu i had scavenged, and therefore went into wild stinky tofu mode. the next day for dinner we had fresh stinky tofu. when I asked how it was made, host sister was like "don't tell her or she won't want to eat it." this comment allowed to me infer the meanings of words I didn't understand from listening, like "ferment unrefrigerated for 2 days" and "mold". Another 2 or 3 days passed, and the next, most aged tiny specimen of stinky tofu appeared at the table - a ripe 2 months! The weird (though it shouldn't be surprising given the process) thing about these tofus was that they both tasted like one of the moldy cheese types. the second was golden and creamy like that one norweigan cheese, but the first just had the consistency of silken tofu, with goopy strands of you-won't-want-to-eat-it.

continued colorless consumables

1) Dried mongolian cheese, tastes like the candy that I've found in my grandmother's ancient treats-cupboard. Host family figured it was "just like the cheese you have in america, no?"


2) Not completely colorless, but mostly warm oily pastry-cake weakly filled with peanuts, sugar and black and white sesame seeds.


3) Free appetizer soup at a restaurant. it was 100% what you would make fun of chinese food for being, all stereotypically water and cornstarch. flecked with small scraps of tofu and baijiu (see #4).

4) Bai jiu - I didn't know how to wrap my mind around classifying this. It is a sweet, watery, alcoholic delicately glutinous rice.

reaping what i've sown, academically

Yesterday I accidentally ate at the stinky tofu restaurant. I saw the characters for 'tofu' outside and decided I could use some protein, since breakfast is either rice flour or wheat flour. As soon as I got inside, the waitress disbelievingly asked me if I was here to try some stinky tofu. This, too, is a regional specialty. I ate dutifully. If you think about it too much, it tastes like BO, but in a handsome sweaty male kind of way. Plus, they give you a sweet sauce and/or a spicy sauce, which makes the experience more palatable. One of the girls who worked there, was super excited to talk to me, and asked me how I liked it.

I asked her "how do you make stinky tofu?"

"well, first you put it in stinky water."

"what's in the stinky water?"

"oh, we don't actually know. We get that from somewhere else."

er kuai / er si

I think I've found KM's equivalent of the Beijing jian bing (and by equivalent I just mean something that I can like as much and costs ten cents for someone to make for me on the street). They take a white sheet of glutinous something (about the size of a piece of paper. it's made from rice flour), and then they put it on the grill. Then they smear it with hot sauce, sweet-salty sauces, various small pickled vegetables, and fold a long deep fried donut into it. Er kuai. it's everything you would want a clogged artery for. I told host mom that I had eaten one - and apparently it's one of the regions street-food specialties - and so then then next day she made me breakfast out of er si, which is shreds of the white rice wrap thing, cooked and then served in milk. colorless breakfast.


she also gave me a moon cake (fall festival fast approaching!) made directly in the cigarette factory (?) near where we live. The moon cake had a dried egg yolk in the middle that was surprisingly saltily crisp and a nice complement to the overly sweet and gummy rest-of-the filling.

On a side note, puppies in a shoebox on the bus

a taste of muslim

I mostly ate here so that I didn't feel guilty taking a picture of the nans propped outside. I didn't even get one to go, since I was full from my chef boyardee-style noodles (which must have had a couple CCs of MSG in them, because I left reeling on a total high). Next time I will be allowed to take the egg/tomato/pepper/onion noodle topping and throw it on a sesame-crisp nan, which will be the ultimate culmination, for me, of the XinJiang food offered in this wee shop.

the first cheese.

goat cheese fried with broccoli. I think it doesn't taste much different than it looks, so hazard a guess. This is a regional thing, only in the SW of china (and Mongolia, says host mom) do you bump into this sort of thing. It's, comparatively speaking, pricey when paired up against a standard vegetable dish, but had a nice gamey and homesick flavor.

I've been missing out

Clearly, if this is what "deep braised pork intestines" are truly like: a tightly rolled crepe cut into bite sized pieces, deep-fried and then soaked in a salty-sweet sauce? Can anyone verify this for me? I'm still hoping to make it back to the Yu Quan vegetarian restaurant for a full hairy crab, whole roasted chicken and various eel and tripe fineries.

I can come home now

Because, honestly, I've accomplished the only thing that mattered to me in China. After school, I came home to discover that host mom had prepped vegetarian dumpling filling (Chinese leeks, mushrooms, egg, ginger). This was all new to her, and she had to repeatedly check in with host sister's boyfriend about what would go into a vegetarian dumpling in the days previous. She also couldn't help herself but talk about how meat dumplings are "better" and "the best". Anyway, here glimpse the process and the host mom. I seriously schooled her with my dumpling folding. Look how pretty they are! and they were f*ing delicious, with the cilantro, scallion, soy sauce, ginger, chili oil sauce that we smothered them in. I got the leftovers for breakfast. Have I mentioned that the dog eats a portion of exactly what we eat for dinner? it's absolutely shameless.

would the combination prove more than the sum of its parts?

The other day my host sister came home raving about a dish that she had tried at a restaurant that was tofu cooked in milk. She was incredulous: ''If I hadn't gone out to eat how would I have known about this interesting and delicious dish?" So host mom promised to give it a try, but it tasted just exactly like it sounds like.

out to eat

When my host sister and her boyfriend showed up unexpectedly for dinner, host mom was embarrassed that she didn't have enough to feed everyone, so we went out to a restaurant down the street. This is my dream come true, because I get to try a hundred different things that I wouldn't even begin to know how to order.

First (in lower left - and this picture is sideways, sorry), was the very thinly shredded potatoes that were fried to a crisp and topped with a kind of duck-egg chunky sauce. this was ultimate junk food. As was the "Indian Flying Pancake" (aditi?) which was basically a thinly fried bread that had just a hint of banana inside. Awesome. Lastly in this photo series, and the most awesome, was the "ba bao fan" (eight treasure rice), which had a bunch of different sweet things mashed in with glutinous rice and then pan-fried with an egg into a pancake-omelette type food.

not cucumber

I was absolutely starving, and walked for about an hour trying to find somewhere that sold vegetarian dumplings, but they simply aren't done here. I eventually found myself in a below-ground (but open-air) food court that was confusing and scary, and tried to order something that looked like it had cucumbers in it (from the picture board). Instead, the large freedom-fry shaped things are actually the "noodles". I think they are made of rice flour. This wasn't the worst thing in the world, but it didn't have the fiber I was looking for. Everything I eat has been permanently lodged in my gut.

smart jews eat latkes

I ate this Sichuanese latke at the same lunch in which my host mom called Sichuanese people "the jews of china", since they are so smart and can endure hardship. This week host mom, host mom's sister, and even the proprietor of the restaurant enjoyed repeatedly speaking of the intelligence of jews, americans, and exchange students.

this was not delicious

but I thought since it had beans in it, it might count as "nutritious." They take a paper cup and fill it with ice cubes, then dump the ice cubes into an ice grinder. then they top it with about 8 different things, 5 of which must be beans, and then pineapple and watermelon. It would have been okay if they stopped there, but then they drenched it with a sick strawberry syrup. I heard her explain to the man behind me that this treat was "like ice cream." This treat was not like ice cream, especially since I avoided the ice with my first-world sensibilities.