In the last couple of days I have been on a long surburban bus ride, wanderered unknown streets, visited a beauty parlour/weight loss centre, hospital/doctors surgery and eyed food on display in streets. Sometimes I have done more than eye it. And I have taught some classes too.
Today is a picture story about food because I don;t know enough to write about it.
On Sunday I went to the vegie market beside the canal which I missed the previous week. This woman is making buns. This sort of set up is very common.
These 3 photos show a man cooking the food you see in the photo above. He worked like greased lightening to squeeze the dough through his hand & into the oil via a spoon.
The next shows the reult of the first cooking. It contains a dollop of brown sugar which provides the hint of colour.
This woman is kneading dough and making buns in these photos. She has small packets of what I think is tofu which are usually placed in the buns. I didn’t stay for the final result.
Above are two of the stalls along the canal.
The canal road soon reached an intersection with a large tree-canopied street filled with food and other stalls.
The photos are not particularly clear. However, the stalls they show are very common. The street is remarkable for the enormous deciduous trees which meet overhead.
This baked potato stall was on the corner of another large street. These stalls were very common a couple of months ago but this is the first I’ve seen for a while. On the other corner was a woman selling kebabs from a stall exactly like the one I used to visit and which then disappeared. She had the kebabs I like and we bought a couple. We were told the meat came from an ox. Hers didn’t taste as good as the other womans.
In looking for the bus stop we found another market street. The first photo shows a very elaborate kebab cooking stall. It is easily visible from many bus routes and I was glad to encounter it when on foot although the light was going.
Before we passed these restaurants and stalls we also passed to a man lying in his wooden bed on the footpath.
I took this photo months ago. It is here because I found the kebab seller. When we were near the college I went through the entrance to the residential area where I’d met Baby the dog and had a meal the previous day. The kebab seller had relocated there and as it was evening she was at work. We bought some kebabs but ate them before I could photographed them. She said they were pork. Theu don’t look like pork either. I’ve now had three opinions on their origin, chicken, ox, pork and I don’t actually believe any of them.
This and the remaining photos are from today. There is a street close to the college where market stalls, especially food related ones, abound in good weather. This is a common kebab stall. I’ve never patronised one as all of the meat appears to be manufactured and that doesn’t appeal.
This man has a very modern manner of cooking his pancakes. All of the others I’ve seen have been cooked over a drum. The one with green vegies inside it is usually pretty good although the last one I ate had little flavour.
More footpath food stalls.
Above is the stall on the back of a tricycle and the contents of the containers. The ones on the left in the vehicle are hot foods, the rest are cold.
Hotpot restaurants are popular. This one is setting up for the evening. It consits of a bowl of stock; sometimes two with one being very spicy and the other milder. They sit over a gas burner as here or are kept hot with parafin. Sometimes you get a pot to yourself and other places its a communal pot for the table. You choose various vegies and meats along with noodles to dunk and cook. Its a challenge to fish out the noodles with chopsticks.
This is the only stall with a queue. We discovered a couple of our students at the head of the queue so I got to sample the food. It is like a big pancake covered with sesame seeds, some green chives maybe and tastes a bit spicy. Like all of this sort of thing it is sold by weight. It is cut into small pices and sold in a paper bag with a very long toothpick implement as a utensil for eating.
You can see the bread on the scales and the toothpicky implement. It was quite tasty.
These were just some of the teas on sale.
Sunflower seeds, different varieties and sold for human consumption. They are extremely popular. They are larger than the ones I feed to my galah.
Pickled foods
Some sort of steamer, probably for some sort of buns.
Peking Duck stall. Now I know what it is I will return and try some.
waiting for business
Rice kebab in its cooking container.
Cook with the unpackaged kebab. It is dunked in the sugar visible on the tray. It tasted pretty good.
This photo is here in response to a comment. It came from the hole in the wall restaurant I frequented in Tianjin a month or so ago. I had eaten there a couple of nights and on the occasion of the photo I had entered and put my head in the doorway of a room off the hallway while looking for staff. A man was there eating something that looked pretty good so I told the newly emerged waitress that I’d have the same.
The photo shows what I received. It was cooked/kept hot with a small paraffin burner underneath. When I put my glasses on I discovered that the meat was crinkly and not the expected chicken.
I ate some of it and there was nothing the matter with it apart from not knowing its source. However, it wasn’t tasty enough for me to abandon my scruples so I picked around it eating the vegetables minus the equivalent of about 5 years worth of chili intake. My thought was that it had once been someone’s intestine. Not a good thought for an Aussie raised on muscle meat.
