One of my favorite types of food are sweet and sour dishes here in China. This one gets a zesty twist to it, since it comes with an added lemon flavor. Quite a delicacy. Usually it’s accompanied by rice and other side dishes.
I’d known them as decorative accents before, but ever since coming to China, I’ve learned that parts of the lotus are considered a side dish here, and actually can be pretty delicious. They have a crunchy bite, have a sweet flavor, and usually are prepared in the wok, frying them in oil – sometimes with, sometimes without any other additions. Oh, and here’s the latest photo for the challenge this month: Photo Challenge Day 19: Something Orange
While sweets and treats in China often are quite different from what we are used to in the West, some of the goodies you can get here can make quite some delicacies. There are lots of bakeries here that sell all sorts of little snacks – from cakes and pies to cookies, to various other sweet treats. Today, I allowed myself a special treat and went to a bakery around the corner to get this piece of cake for my afternoon snack, and though it didn’t taste exactly he way I wanted it to (after eating half of it, I felt I had enough), I’m still glad that certain things we do not have to give up when living in China!
Here’s another pretty typical side dish that you can get at most restaurants around: broccoli cooked in oil and salt, plus some sort of egg. Our guess is that this was quail egg, so yes, in China you can get more variety than just the typical chicken egg!
Well, I while ago I promised you to post a picture of our new dining hall. It has taken me a little longer, but I finally managed to get a photo at our BBQ dinner last Monday. Fact is that our dining hall now is twice as large as it used to be, and it has undergone a real upgrade: cushioned chairs, sofas, and lots and lots of tables of varying sizes and shapes. The only thing some of us do miss are the big round tables where we used to sit and get involved in grand conversations. With the new setting, it’s more difficult to involve more than four people in one conversation. But then, you can’t just have everything, right? I’m sure, rather sooner than later we’ve forgotten all about those large round tables!
Cold side dishes are very common for almost any kind of restaurant in our area. Usually, the various dishes are displayed, and people pick and choose from what is offered. Often you can combine two or more sides that will be put on one plate. This particular plate was a mixture of pieces of tofu, green beans, steamed carrots and boiled peanuts.
The cafeteria opened again for the foreign faculty, after they’d been shut down for the summer break due to all the remodeling that’s going on. I don’t have a picture yet (though I’ll update you once I remember to take my camera), but I can tell you that the new cafeteria looks a lot like an upgrade to the old one. Of course, right now everything is still somewhat under construction, which means it’s only half done, but it’ll be presentable once it’s finished – that much I can tell! I myself still have to cook a little more to finish all the produce I still have from my month of cooking, but I’ll enjoy that extra freedom before diving fully into the meal schedule again!
The cafeteria on campus, which normally provides us foreign teachers with three warm meals a day, is closed over the summer break. This means that lately I have been cooking again, and I’ve been enjoying that rather rare pleasure. For dinner, I decided to give myself a treat and have a light German dinner, with homemade rolls (as bread in China usually is sweet, which German bread usually isn’t), cheese, meat and some vegetables. Yummy!
We haven’t had the food corner in a while, and since my time in Hong Kong wasn’t all too long ago, I thought, I’d share some of the culinary goodnesses we got to enjoy there! This was a dish that we had the day we went to the escalators and stopped by a Pizza restaurant. Italian Food in Asia, that’s what it is!
Here’s another very common dish: meat, fried together with onions and carrots. It comes with a delicious sauce, though I can’t even tell whether it’s real sweet and sour, or just one of the two. In any case, it is a very popular dish around here and often ordered in restaurants, and served in our cafeteria several times a week.
