| The Real Chinese Food |
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| Chinese food is not at all like American Chinese food, things are not generally served with rice except in the school cafeteria. In fact rice is never served for dinner at nice restaurants or at banquets. Also we have not seen a single fortune cookie, egg roll or crab rangoon. Chinese food takes some getting used to, the meat is filled with bones and its often served with the head and skin still on. Pork fat, cow and pig stomach lining, snake, pigeon, jellyfish, and eel are all common dishes. Shrimp are served whole, complete with legs, antennae, and eyes. Fish are generally served with the head and skin still on. Often at restaurants you get to choose the fish (still alive in a tank) that you would like for dinner, same goes for turtles, frogs, eels and crabs. The school often treats the foreign teachers to banquets where they serve Chinese delicacies such as gelatinous cubes of blood, goose feet, shark fin, pigeon (with the head attached), whole dried fish, chicken stomach, and chicken feet. Bruce has become a fan of a raw beef salad that is shredded with carrots and cucumbers and mixed together with a raw egg and he also enjoys raw horse meat. But McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut are on pratically every street corner so its not all noodles and dumplings. When we are willing to pay the high prices, we can get any kind of western food from Italian to Greek to a steakhouse (even TGI Fridays and Kenny Roger's Roasters have restaurants in Shanghai). There are many all you can eat and drink (alcohol included) western restaurants that cost around $10 to $20. |
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| Dumplings are a really common food, people eat these for lunch and dinner. The dumplings on the left are fried and the ones on the right are steamed. Dumplings are usually filled with pork, but you can also get beef or vegetable filled. You can find people selling and cooking these on pretty much every street. |
| Chinese fast food |
| zhen qiu nai cha, is a sweet milk tea with tapioca balls. In the US it is also known as bubble tea. It is very popular among our students. You can buy it at most of the little fast food restaurants for a 2-3 yuan (25-35 cents). It is served both cold and hot. |
| Noodles are also a common, quick meal. These are la mian, you can get a bowl of these for about 3 yuan at one of the numerous noodle restaurants. A bowl of la mian has noodles, a chicken type broth, bok choy, beef, and cilantro. This is one of Bruce's favorite meals. |
| Eggs hard-boiled in tea are eaten regularly by people. They are commonly served for breakfast. These are also sold at a lot of the small little fast food type restaurants. They taste very similar to regular hard-boiled eggs with a tea flavor. |
| Noodles are also often made fried, chao mian. These are stir-fried in a wok with bok choy, chicken, and a soy based sauce. You can usually find a bowl for around 3-4 yuan. Lauren likes these alot. |
| Common Dishes at Restaurants |
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| Meals at restaurants are served family style, this means you order enough dishes for everyone to share. You have numerous dishes of vegetables and meat on the table on a lazy susan. Everyone has their own small plate and bowl and serves themselves from the dishes on the table. Usually you will have a rice or noodle dish, a couple vegetable dishes, a few meat dishes, and a soup. |
| Above are some common side dishes. The dish on the left is shredded celery with pork, the next picture is a Chinese fried pancake that contains spring onions, the second from the right is stir-fried bok choy (Chinese cabbage) and the far right picture is stir-fried eggplant in a brown soy based sauce. Other common side dishes are stir-fried spinach, stir-fried string beans, and spicy shredded carrots and cucumbers. |
| Peking Duck is a very popular and traditional dish. The dish consists of fried duck skin (right in picture) which you cover in a sauce (top of picture) and wrap in a thin crepe-like pancake (center) and garnish with strips of cucumber and leeks (left). The fried skin has very little meat on it because the meat is used in a duck soup that is usually served with the dish (pictured below). |
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| Chinese meals always end with fresh fruit, which is almost always watermelon. |
| Fish is also a very common dish, the fish is served turned inside out so that the meat of the fish can easily be grabbed and eaten. The head, skin, fins, and tails are left on the fish. The most common type is the fried sweet and sour fish (above left). it is served with pine nuts and peas. The picture on the right is another example of a inside out fish. Even though the fish is served basically whole, there are no bones in the meat. |
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