Maybe not my personal favorite, but definitely very popular with my American colleagues is Macaroni & Cheese in our dining hall. It usually will be served on Monday nights, though we never know exactly, which Monday night of the month that happens. Macaroni and Cheese is part of the Western dishes that get served in our cafeteria along with many others.

Have I ever told you about my favorite dish? It’s generally called “Dragon Eggplant,” and it’s a sweet & sour dish. Basically, a whole eggplant is taken and cut into thin slices that are still attached to the whole. Then, the eggplant is breaded and fried in sweet & sour sauce, and lots of foreigners around here agree with me: it’s one of the most delicious dishes we can get!

I think it’s time to start talking about soups in my little Food Corner. They are not to everyone’s liking, and especially foreigners might easily think there is not much taste to them. That, of course, is a vast generalization, as there are quite some delicious soups in Chinese cuisine. Today, I’d like to start with the Sweet Corn Soup, though it’s not on the strong-taste side of the spectrum. It’s rather bland. Usually, corn is the base of this soup, and sometimes eggs are added during the boiling process. It’s slightly sweet in taste. Generally speaking, soups in China come towards the end of the meal, and not (like usually in the West) at the beginning.

Originated in Sichuan Province (China), Kung Pao Chicken (gong bao ji ding) is a very classic dish even in our local area. Diced chicken is its primary ingredient. Vegetables (carrots, cucumber, leek) and peanuts are added during the cooking process. Everything is fried in oil and chili peppers, and a special marinade gives the kung pao chicken its characteristic flavor. It is said that this dish is named after Ding Baozhen, a late Qing Dynasty official of some political influence in both Shandong and Sichuan Province.

I have another very delicious dish for you today: Eggplant with pork and potatoes. Add green peppers, fry everything in the wok, and there you have another tasty dish. It’s on the savory side of Chinese dishes and quite common in these parts of China. Anyways, posting this picture kind of makes me hungry, and maybe it can whet your appetite for Chinese cuisine as well …?

Another very common dish around here are the sliced spicy potatoes that are fried in soy sauce. For this dish you take uncooked potatoes, and cut them into thin slices, much thinner than fries. They are thrown into the wok and fried with oil and salt, and usually you add some green peppers and some of the hot red peppers, and of course the soy sauce. Though the name says spicy potato, it doesn’t really taste that hot. Unless, of course, you don’t pay attention to sort out the red peppers. Those are really spicy, though there are many Chinese who enjoy eating the red peppers, too!

Wednesday nights is pizza-night in the foreign faculty dining hall. Two kinds of pizza are usually served, one of which is chicken pizza. It doesn’t come with any tomato sauce as base – which isn’t unusual around here, as there are various kinds of pizza that are served without the red sauce. The chicken pizza, however, comes with a generous layer of cheese on top, which makes it my favored one of the two on Wednesday night.

Fried beans are a very common dish around here. Fried in oil, they come with or without sesame seeds, and will be served either cold or hot. Depending on how much of the spicy peppers are added, they can be quite spicy, too, but usually they are not very hot. In many restaurants, they are part of the menu for cold dishes, and usually will be served early on during the meal.

So, those of you who’ve been following my posts for a while now know that we get our food served in the foreign faculty dining hall. And there’s always a little battle going on. It’s because of the Ketchup. Usually, every table in the cafeteria is stocked with a bottle of Ketchup. The problem starts, when the bottles start to get empty. The dining hall staff won’t start handing out new bottles, unless all the Ketchup is gone (if they wouldn’t do that there would be a multitude of half empty bottles). So, when the bottles are about to get empty, people start collecting Ketchup from the other tables. Many times you can see one table with a collection of up to 10 empty bottles, all turned upside down to get the last little bit of Ketchup out. Otherwise, there will be no new Ketchup for us. Usually by that time the staff gets the message, and that’s when we start to get new Ketchup bottles from the staff. The other day, however, when I …