A less gluttonous blog

Just a quick one so say if you'd like a less gluttonous report of my experiences in China you can have a look at my Celia's (my girlfriend) blog here: http://celiathetravellingbee.blogspot.com/
There's also archived blog material about last year in Hangzhou.

Dongbei Cuisine （东北餐）

                                Another hard week at work done and we were all hungry teachers and needed some sustenance, we were all fading fast. Luckily we had all organised to go to a north-eastern Chinese restaurant that one of my workmates knew. Off we went, up Bin He lu for the ten minute walk to the restaurant, whose name escapes me right now, although I’m sure I’ll go there again at some point, so check back for an update if you happen to be in Suzhou. The restaurant had a family feel, it was medium sized and the space was shared by the family that lived there, we had a sweet chubby cheeked little baby keeping us company on the adjacent table.

                                In any case, we sat down and perused the biblical picture menu. You need to be pretty good at choosing things when you’re eating in China because the menu is inevitably about half an inch thick and full of things you want. This is partly because they are almost always picture menus (pleasing for us westerners) and partly just because they seem to love food in China more than anywhere else I’ve been in the world. Perhaps you’re starting to see why I like living here. Dongbei is the area of China bordering Russia in the north east, think of places like Changchun (长春) and Harbin (哈尔滨), think of temperatures like -30C in the winter. The food here is of a hearty, meaty and often more wheat laden character; it involves lots of dumplings, hunks of meat and, to my absolute delight, stews. It’s very different from the sweet, fragrant Chinese fare we are used to in England, some of it is actually a lot more like northern European food. We ordered a lot of things, (hen duo dongxi-很多东西) of which I can remember a reasonable selection. The most notable dish was a simple dish of beef joints that Cliff (my Bahaman workmate in China-more confusing globalisation) suggested, seemingly knowing quite a bit about 东北餐. Now I don’t mean a joint as in a roasting joint, oh no. In China they bring you a pile of bone joints with plastic gloves so that you can gnaw them like a famished beast. As you can imagine I was in some sort of gluttonous ecstasy at this point.

                              After this we were presented with a dish of spicy wild mushrooms that were fried in plenty of oil, a prodigious quantity of chopped chillies nestling therein. There was a steaming plate of curious lemon chicken cutlets fried in batter, some incredibly spicy (chou la-抽啦) fried cabbage and enough dumplings （jiaozi-饺子）to feed a small army or a few hungry teachers. A dish of real note was the beef stew-lumps of beef with no bones, which is somewhat of a rarity in China, and potatoes in a delicious beefy stock, this dish is enough to make anyone who misses northern European food well up with pure joy. Finally they brought us a fried rice dish with a twist-it had bacon in it, well any savoury dish (and some sweet ones) is improved by bacon, so I was most approving. As a side order we had a pile of sweet corn fritters and some delicious thick pancakes. These sweet corn fritters seem to be available in almost all Chinese eateries of a certain stature, and this time they came covered in a dusting of sugar and sprinkles of the hundreds and thousands type. I know that sounds strange, but it works really well with the sweetness of the corn and the oily batter.  

                                                It is no inconsiderable compliment to the quantity of food served that I could not finish it. Yes, I was defeated by this meal, I was incredibly satisfied and, as I write this the next morning, I’m still not very hungry. The whole thing came to 320RMB (about £34), but thanks to some financial wrangling by our Chinese workmate Tiana we got it for 300RMB, or 50RMB each (so about £5.50). I asked her about how she got the discount and she told me she said we didn’t need a stamp (they always stamp receipts here), so I came to the conclusion we were probably involved in the kind of shady tax evasion that helps cash businesses thrive the world over. But who was I to argue? They had just stuffed me to the gills with delightfully hearty Dongbei food for a bargain price. All that remained was to go home and enjoy my food lull.

The Pizza Cone

                                Celia and I were out on 平江路 (Ping Jiang Lu) the other day and both had a bit of a belly rumble. We walked down a little side alley and stumbled upon a little shop that sold snacks of various varieties, but what really caught our eye was something that looked a little like a savoury ice cream. We’d seen pictures of these things before, but had never had suitable appetites to try them. Well this time the fortunes of appetite had smiled upon us and we went ahead and ordered one each, I got a ham one and Celia got a chicken one. We both bit into them and were not disappointed, a flood of cheese filled our mouths, followed by a more than adequate seam of hot pizza topping. The cone wasn’t really a pizza as such, just sort of thin bread, but the filling was actually really good, not Italian pizzeria good, but for being a 15 kuai Chinese street snack it was pretty delicious. Something I like about ham in China is that it’s called 火腿 (huo tui), or fire leg-so essentially baked leg. I always find the Chinese language pleasingly elegant in this way, it often gives very literal translations that sound quite amusing in English. Some of my favourites are: 电脑 (dian nao-electronic brain-computer), 电梯 (dian ti-electronic ladder-lift/elevator), 手机 (shou ji-hand machine-mobile phone) and 火车 (huo che-fire vehicle-I’ll leave this to you to work out, but suffice it to say Fred Dibnah would have liked this particular piece of etymology). Anyway, following my mildly Joycian mental diversion I decided I was still hungry and went and got a more typically Chinese pancake with egg, vegetable, pickley sauce and chilli. Delicious and the equivalent of about 50p. I highly recommend all the different kind of pancakes you can get on the street here, they are all tasty, delivering varying degrees of mouth-watering succulence. More on that later, thanks for reading and for heaven’s sake pressure your local culture to introduce pizza cones into its edible vernacular. 

Breakfast in Suzhou

The other night me and Celia introduced ourselves to the local street fruit peddler, a very bright and friendly man who was most impressed by our Chinese, as we were by his pointing at his goods and saying "apple, banana". We bought a pineapple and a pomelo (a sort of giant grapefruit thing) and went home to add it to our already bought dragon fruit. This morning I got up and decided to eat some fruit and cut up the pineapple and the dragon fruit and was so delighted with the results that I thought I should share it (see the picture below). The pineapple here is really sweet, much nicer than back home and about 80p for a whole pineapple. It seems to be the season, the streets are riddle with people hawking pineapples at the moment. I'm not complaining.