The last few weeks coincided with Christmas, New Year and farewells so there were many opportunities for eating out.
This is a small plate of food from a buffet at a nearby large and popular restaurant. Food was a mixture of western and Chinese dishes. The first word in the restaurant’s name was “OK” and it pretty well identifies the food, not good, not bad, just OK. Attention to keeping the food containers hot would go a long way towards improving it. Prices were far too high for it to be a student haunt.
This was taken in a student haunt. It’s a potato noodle and vegetable meal in a cast iron bowl. Not only was it thermally hot but also extremely hot on the taste buds, the hottest I’ve ever had. Due to the height of the table and stools and the difficulty fishing slippery noodles with chopsticks I ended up splashing spicy liquid into an eye. Initially I thought my after dinner plans would need to be abandoned. Fortunately the chili quickly made its way through my eye and I was right to go to a New Year concert.
My favourite kebab cook. My kebabs are finished cooking and are on the aluminum tray to the far left. I finally extended my meal repertoire to include tofu which is on a stick and cooking on the hotplate. The round items are buns and many people have a meal of tofu and meat in a bun.
This is a well used pressing apparatus for producing sesame oil. It is outside a shop, and covered by a gazebo, in a street full of numerous permanent and temporary market stalls. It is a different street from that in the previous post.
A butchers shop in the same street.
A man rolling dough for a giant savoury pancake in the same street. One is cooking in the pan where the steam is rising. The green bucket contains prepared dough.
2 The dough is transferred by rolling pin to the pan.
3 The pancake is turned over using the rolling pin and a bamboo stick.
4 The cooked pancakes on the nearby table where they were cut and sold by weight. We bought two styles but I was too engrossed in eating mine to photograph it.
Exactly opposite was a man creating noodles from dough by stretching and shaking it.
An armful of noodles ready to enter the steaming pan.
One of the college’s teachers who, until recently had been teaching overseas at the behest of the Chinese government invited us to dinner in a nearby flash restaurant. We ate in a private room which is the norm, even in many of the cheap restaurants. Given the level of noise in the buffet restaurant which did not have private rooms I can understand the desire for individual rooms. On several occasions we had one when there were only three of us dining together. The container is my individual hotpot with a prawn cooking in the broth/soup which is also in the small white bowl. It was delicious. Once the prawn was eaten other food was added to the pot. The temperature of the pot was controlled by electronic controls in the table. Waitresses passed by periodically pressing the table and adjusting temperature.
The table with some of the food for the hotpots. The small bowls contained flavourings for the broth and the bowls soon disappeared. The rolled meat on the left is common for hotpots. It consists of thinly shaved fatty beef rolled and frozen. It is also available in supermarkets in kilo packets. More food including vegetables later appeared on the table. Waitresses were plentiful, quiet and observant. We ate in the same restaurant about a week later courtesy of other college leaders.
Inside one of the the restaurant’s corridors. It is a vast cavernous space underneath a nearby shopping centre. Recently one of the patrons was murdered by a man with a machete and another diner was severely injured. One of the local foreigners mentioned it at Christmas dinner. Reports in English on the internet were so garbled that I was able to learn little more.
The pot for another hotpot dinner at a student frequented restaurant. It was so popular that we had to wait for a table to be available. Heat was provided via a gas bottle and looked rather more stable and safe than one I’d had at a different restaurant a few days before. The crockery is provided shrink wrapped in individual serves. It is charged for as an individual item on the bill. Blue tubs sit outside restaurants and dirty crockery is placed in them to be whisked away for cleaning.
Some of the tubs, less than a quater of those available, of vegetables and other food available for inclusion in the hotpot. It was very busy so photographs were few and of poor quality. Diners picked thin metal trays and selected any food they want from that displayed. This place was unique in that it also provided fruit and some seed snacks for dessert and not intended for the hotpot. The student I was with chose meat. It was provided direct to the table in a plastic 1kg bag. I had no idea how 2 of us could consume so much meat especially when so many vegetables were also available. However, it all disappeared into and out of the pot. The fact that it was fatty reduced its real quantity. It was Christmas lunch and everyone received a small tree decoration.
Christmas dinner was roast goose and roast chicken with all the trimmings including baked dumpling, courtesy of the new teacher at my college. He likes to cook and had bought himself a proper oven so we got to sample a few of his culinary achievements.
A few days before Christmas the local educational bureau provided a dinner, entertainment and gifts for foreign teachers in the area. The dish above which looks like tripe didn’t receive any nibbles and we soon had it disappearing from the table. The plate of prawns which we were interested in was soon whisked away when it was only partly empty. Fortunately we didn’t make a fuss and it soon returned on a smaller plate. So many dishes had been ordered that the only way to make them fit was to replate food onto smaller plates as the meal progressed. A packet of cigarettes was also provided as part of the hospitality.
This is a plate of duck tongues. I tried one and while it tasted OK it was a bit too different for me or anyone to want it remaining on the table too long. One of the dishes on a flight home looked like 3 very tiny duck head and necks on a bed of shredded carrot. I didn’t taste them and the carrot wasn’t palatable either.
Some of the numerous other dishes on our table.
Peking duck with sauce and shallots on a thin crepe also available at the dinner.
Some of the dishes provided when two of my students took me to lunch after our last ever class. We were at a restaurant famous for dumplings. We also had meat dumplings and ones filled with spinach and egg. They ordered many different dishes and then took a ‘doggie bag’ of uneaten food. It is common to take a ‘doggie bag” of unfinished food from some, but not all types of restaurants.
This is a meal cooked by two of my ex-students. I only taught them for one semester more than a year ago, but one would visit me once or twice a semester. The other was much less competent and confident with English and very busy with other college demands. However, they worked together to make a memorable end to my visit. They had offered to cook me a meal for the previous night. They did but while I have recipes I don’t seem to have any photos. I was still busy cleaning out my office and tearing up papers and they insisted on helping me with it the next day. We had a couple of busy hours and soon it was meal time and they wanted to cook again. We went to the nearby vegetable shop where they purchased what they wanted and combined it with remaining items in my cupboard. If I’d known cooking would give them so much pleasure I’d have had them and any other interested students on a roster from the beginning. It was a delight to see them work so well together and to have so much fun doing something many people, including me prefer to avoid. They did have a noisy discussion about the need for one of the ingredients in the bean and pork dish, but it was just noise. Not all of their dishes were fully successful, but they were clever in creating tasty food from next to nothing and had lots of fun doing it.
