Chinese Food: What did I just eat? (Part I)

As of late you've probably heard a lot about Chinese food and its safety--with headlines like "China to Execute Chief Food Inspector" and "China Shuts 180 Food Factories." While these headlines portray the dire food safety situation, at least it shows that they're working on it...they better, with the upcoming Olympics. Putting safety aside, even with my improved Chinese vocabulary I still often walk away from the table asking myself, "What did I just eat?" To me it really doesn't much matter--there's only two distinctions I make: "delicious" or "tolerable." I'll eat about anything (If you read my blog last year you know I ate stewed bullfrog--tasty, but not much meat and a lot of bones).

So in this post I want you to just see what Chinese food is all about. Of course you've got Beijing's renowned, "Peking Duck." Every weekend us classmates go on an outing. Last weekend it was to eat Beijing Duck (Peking=Beijing). There's no doubt in my mind I ate an entire duck. If you've never had it, it's mostly the crispy skin of the duck--a little oily and fatty--but excellent. You wrap it in a thin lotus leaf pancake with slivered Chinese onions and a sweet dark sauce. And of course it comes with a steep bill.

When we went the other night, not only did we have multiple ducks at the table, but we had other side dishes, and by "other dishes" I mean "20 dishes." They just kept bringing them--it was incredible. After trying one dish (2nd picture) I thought, "Pretty good, tastes like French fries." I asked my friend, only to find out it was actually fried winter melon! This is the way to eat fruit! Call up my younger brothers!

Other than Peking Duck, the staple ingredients of most Chinese dishes are: WHITE rice (you won't find any pork fried rice here), noodles, egg, beef or pork, eggplant, peppers, tofu, potato, tomato, lettuce/cabbage, an assortment of other vegetables, and of course MSG. Also, a standard snack might be a cucumber (which they eat li

ke a banana), a watermelon--extremely popular, or some processed sausage thing (pretty much like SPAM). Sour milk, while not my preference, is big

over here, and their regular milk is particularly awesome, because you don't have to refrigerate it. Of course, I do anyway, but most Chinese prefer their milk lukewarm.

Thus usual lunch dish (at least for me) is the one in the 3rd picture, which has white rice, chicken, a sunny side egg, and some random veggies...does a body good. My favorite dinner dish, which is pretty expensive ($2.50) is fried pork in a sweet sauce mixed with peppers, and pineapple...and of course a small bowl of rice. The plate's made for 2-3 people, but I usually tackle it myself.

And as my mom will be happy to know, I'm LEARNING TO COOK Chinese food (the picture is proof). Every student is allowed to choose as many extracurricular classes as they want, from "Chinese Calligraphy" to "Kung Fu" to "Cooking Chinese Food." So, being the huffing fatty that I am, naturally I chose Cooking. The first class we learned how to make eggplant, but with pork. You create a pocket out of the eggplant slice, and then insert some pork. When taking a picture, in Chinese, the equivalent to the smile-creating "cheese" is "eggplant." (pronounced "chee A zuh") Thus, when we took this picture on the right, we had the funny coincidence of saying "eggplant" when we were cooking eggplant. That was probably a very confusing explanation for something you don't think was very funny to begin with. What am I doing?

Anyway, the next week we learned how to make a cold cucumber dish (uggh). I skipped the end of the class to go with some friends to see Transformers (in English), which was amazing. Hope that gives you a better idea of what Chinese food entails. The next post will be a continuation of sorts...I know you're on the edge of your seats.