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 …

Let me tell you about one of my favorite dishes around here: It’s called “Hongshao Qiezi” – eggplant braised in soy sauce, or  you may also refer to it as “red-cooked eggplant”. You can order it in any of the restaurants around here, and it actually is quite a common dish. Usually, the eggplant is cooked together with tomatoes, some kind of onions and the sauce that gives it its special flavor. Combined with all the spices that Chinese cuisine is so famous for, this eggplant dish is quite a delicious affair, and very much liked among most of the foreigners around here!

I know we are pretty spoiled, getting our meals, usually three times a day, served buffet style. However, during the winter break, things change around here. Now we only get served two meals a day, brunch at 10 am, dinner at 5 pm. Brunch offers a rather typical selection of American breakfast items (they call it Western, though; but for me as a European, it’s not anything we would serve for a breakfast, lol): scrambled eggs, fried eggs, boiled eggs, bacon, sausages, fried potatoes, pancakes, french toast, blueberry omelet, and always a Chinese style porridge. On top of that we have toast, oatmeal, some sort of cereals, honey, yogurt, and jam. Did I ever mention I miss cheese? Well, anyways, this is nothing like the typical Chinese breakfast, but I hope to be able to show you more of that in the future! For now, I’m just saying: Bon Apetit!

It may not be a typical Chinese dish, but it certainly is one of the favorite meals in our foreign faculty dining hall for a lot of my colleagues: Chicken Parmesan. It’s one of the few times a week that our cafeteria is packed as everyone tries to get their share of Chicken Parmesan. I myself don’t care as much about the chicken, but I definitely go for the cheese that comes with it (though sometimes when I come to lunch too late the cheese might be gone already, as lots of people scrape it off the top of the chicken in an attempt to get as much of it as possible). Yes, cheese has become a treasured affair here, since it’s not part of any of the local cuisine and therefore isn’t readily available in the stores. It’s hard to come by and expensive when you purchase it, so yes – Chicken Parmesan Day is definitely “in” around here!