A favorite conversation topic in my family is food. We like to talk about food we’ve eaten recently, food we’d like to eat, restaurants we’ve been to recently, restaurants we’d like to eat at soon, different places where we’ve eaten, and so on. Generally, these conversations take place while we’re eating. So what do I eat here? Naturally, this is going to be a long post.
Mostly I eat Chinese food. And generally, I find that it’s not wildly different from Chinese food I’ve had in the States. Comparing Chinese food I’ve had in the U.S. and Chinese food I’ve had in London, I would definitely say American Chinese food is better and generally closer to food I eat here. Maybe this is because one, I live in Guangzhou (aka Canton), the genesis for almost all Chinese food around the world and two, I grew up in a city with a reasonably sized Chinatown and many a Chinese eating establishment. The biggest differences are the range of dishes (yeah, they have pork and green peppers and beef and broccoli, but also much much more), the variety of vegetables (not a lot of lotus root in America, nor such a wide variety of unidentifiable leafy greens), and the quality of meat (much better in the U.S.).
So, for breakfast, I sometimes eat at home, when I’ll have oatmeal, yogurt, and juice or fruit. The fruit here is quite good, but actually not substantially better than the States. Although, I did get my first taste of mangosteen here, which are impossible to find in America. I eat a lot of Mandarin oranges too, though sometimes they are green (more sour that way, but I like it). Sometimes I make myself coffee, but I drink much less of it than I used to. I don’t drink much tea yet.
Often I eat breakfast at the school cafeteria, where I enjoy fresh, warm soy milk, and a choice of three dishes. There are always tea-boiled eggs; I usually get one. They are hard-boiled in tea and the shells crack a bit, letting a yummy sweet tea flavor seep into the egg. Then I pick two bread dishes, either a piece of light yellow cake, a steamed wheat bun, a little red bean paste bun, a little peanut paste bun, a creamy sweet egg tart, or a savory steamed stuffed bun with onion and tomato. It all depends what’s on offer. At the beginning of the year they had corn on the cob, but they don’t anymore. They also always have big sticks of fried dough that the Chinese love, but I don’t care for.
For lunch I almost always eat at the cafeteria. For lunch we get rice, soup (that’s your beverage; most Chinese think it’s unhealthy to drink cold things), a green vegetable, two side dishes and a main dish. That’s too much for me, and I usually just get rice, green vegetables topped with spicy pickled vegetables, and two dishes. Some days it’s terrible—poorly butchered meat bits with lots of bone, salty sauces, weird slippery green veggies, bony fish, pickled things… Most days I find one or two things to at least eat a bit of though. And it is a chance to try new things, such as my first taste of frog, and a more tolerant stance to eating fish. Sometimes it’s quite good. Once they had a very good sweet and sour pork, and occasionally they do a nice gongbao (kung pow) chicken. My two favorite dishes are sliced pork with cilantro and spicy beef with pickled cucumbers. Also, they’ll occasionally have mapo tofu. On weekends I usually eat out with Lindsey at Clifford, or have leftovers or just some bread and peanut butter. My consumption of peanut butter has probably tripled here, given the lack of other sandwich options. It’s weird. I used to not even like peanut butter.
For dinner, I have lots of options. Occasionally I’ll eat in the cafeteria, since it’s free and easy. Sometime I’ll cook something, or eat leftovers of what I’ve cooked on the weekend. Also on weekends I often go out with Lindsey or other teachers. The Chinese really love “BBQ” as they call it, which isn’t really barbecue the way Americans think of it, but is a variety of foods on sticks fresh off the grill. You just pick anything you like (meats, seafoods, veggies) and they throw it on the grill. It’s still warm enough here to sit outside many nights and enjoy some BBQ and beer.
Most Mondays, a group of us from my school go to a nearby Hunan restaurant. Hunanese food is delicious. Lots of chili pepper, though it’s not overwhelmingly spicy. Some of it’s really oily, but a lot of it is dry-fried in the wok. We always get the same things when we go: dry-fried green beans, spicy oily beef with chilies, and shrimp-on-a-stick, plus some other vegetable, usually corn or eggplant. Also, we’ll occasionally get shrimp cooked in tea leaves or smoked tofu with bamboo and mushrooms. They have a very tasty apple vinegar drink as well. We’ll have about 5 or 6 dishes plus rice and beverages and the bill will come to about 30RMB ($4) each.
Another new kind of Chinese food I eat here is from Lanzhou, a city in northwestern China. They’re famous for their hand-pulled noodles. The noodles are great—very long and chewy and usually very spicy. They’re Hui (Muslim) Chinese, so no pork but lots of beef and sheep. They also make delicious sandwiches of wheat buns and spiced chopped meat.
One place we eat at a lot, Lindsey and I just call “jiaozi’s” (“dumplings”) even though its full name is something like Old Master Feng’s Dumpling Eatery. It has mostly Cantonese food, though dumplings and pancakes are mostly considered foods from the northeast. We love the eggplant and potato in brown sauce, the spicy tofu, the green beans with pepper, and above all I am totally obsessed with their jian bing. These are green onion pancakes, hot and chewy, that you eat with a little mix of vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil.
For non-Chinese food, there’s decent Western food (Italian, American, Irish, various other European) to be had in Guangzhou, and a fantastic Vietnamese place as well. There’s also a wonderful little Vietnamese cafe at Clifford with real sandwiches, good soup, and real coffee. The waitress’s name is Lina and she calls us by our Chinese names and we ask her questions about China and she brings us fresh starfruit.
I’ve not yet had Sichuanese hotpot or dim sum (Cantonese brunch-type meal), but I will tell you how it goes when I do.
Let’s see, what else… well, I drink a lot of beverages. I’m a big fan of coconut juice, “Nutri-Express” (a vitamin-fortified, apple-flavored milk), Wong Lo Kat (a canned herbal tea), the very cheap and tasty-enough locally-brewed Zhujiang beer, and of course bubble tea. Some places also serve hot Coca-Cola with ginger; very interesting, though I prefer it cold. Oh, and I eat lots of yogurt, on the hope that good bacteria in my system will help against the eventual bad bacteria I encounter. And I’m completely in love with pineapple buns, these sort of dry, sweet, soft buns, with crisp tops that almost never taste anything like pineapple. Once I ate three in one day. I also like sampling the various ice-creams for sale at my local corner shop. They have little frozen sweet milk bars for 5 jiao (that’s 0.5RMB, that’s about 7 cents) . My favorites though are either the red bean and chestnut or the black sesame.
I think that’s comprehensive enough. For now. :p
