Adventures in Eating

Ok, so, I really like food. I like to eat it. I like to cook it. I just like food. No, no, I love food. My adventures in eating here in China have actually been pretty tame, in my own opinion. The food is a little bit spicier than I am used to, and it also helped that I couldn’t read the symbols for what I was eating for most of my experience. I think the most interesting thing is that the food tastes different sometimes simply because the combinations of meat and veggies is different than I am used to.

The first realization that I have come to is this: I LOVE TOFU. The Chinese have this tofu thing DOWN. Let me rewind. Tofu made in America is (in my opinion) really gross. I don’t know what they do to it, but it’s gross. Tofu in China is usually homemade, and is delicious. They have also mastered the ways to use it. They put it in soups, they fry it (as in deep fried), they mix it with veggies. They cut it into large chunks and put some sort of delicious sauce on it, they pan fry it with chilies. All of these ways are delicious. Can I say delicious one more time? Delicious.

In China, everyday is a farmers market. You can buy fruits and vegetables off the side of the road. You can buy homemade tofu off the side of the road. You can buy homemade snacks off the side of the road (my favorite being the sweet potato chips). It is one of the things about China that I am really, really going to miss.

While the food in China is (usually) delicious no matter where you get it, nothing, and I mean nothing, beats a home-cooked meal. I tutored a high school girl for about 10 weeks last winter and my lessons happened to end right around lunchtime. So, her mom always insisted I stay for lunch. It was always delicious. A couple of times it was dumplings, as she was determined I would be able to make them on my own by the time she was done with me. Another time it was hot pot. Once it was a classic combination of tons of dishes, my favorite being cold noodles with cucumber, my least favorite being the chicken necks. They were just too darn boney. I think the best argument for home-cooked food though is; whether it is Momma Chen’s dumplings or the vegetable egg drop soup my host mom made (back in Shijiazhuan), it not only fills up your tummy, but it also makes you feel just a little bit more at home.

Admittedly, I will leave China in mere weeks having eaten a couple of “evil” things. I have probably eaten more, but, like I said, it was only recently that I was able to read the symbols for what I was eating. What can I say, ignorance is bliss. When I first got here, back in September, I along with a couple of friends went out to eat. The menus at Chinese restaurants are awesome. They are enormous and heavy, much like a coffee table book, and usually have pictures to go along with every dish. It is quite convenient when you can’t read the language. However, there are pitfalls. Something may look good in the picture, but taste awful. Also, what you ordered could arrive looking nothing like what it does in the picture. On this particular occasion it was the latter of the two problems, we ordered some spicy chicken. We ended up getting a whole chicken:

Another occasion happened on my friend Sara’s birthday. Her birthday falls on Christmas Eve. So a bunch of us foreigners plus some of her Chinese friends went out to eat to celebrate. When we sat down we were told by the waitress that if we wanted to order our own food it would take 2 hours, so we should just get the set menu. This was probably just a ruse to get us to order the expensive stuff, but we were in no position to argue. It was kind of fun, I had never even seen a lot of the food that was placed before me, and despite Richard saying “That’s probably penis” about everything, I tried quite a bit of it. There was one dish that was served, it looked like cold cuts, actually it looked like uncooked pancetta, and Richard exclaimed “Now, I know for a fact THAT is penis.” Now, sometimes Richard has the maturity/sense of humor equivalent to a 9-year-old so I just rolled my eyes and tried a piece. It was actually pretty good. It wasn’t until my third piece that I started to realize he was probably right.

So, I ate horse penis. And liked it. Whatcha gonna do.