[Pictures] All The Meals I Ate While In China - Page 3

My mom's old colleagues insisted that they take me to a big fancy restaurant and ordered a room all for ourselves complete w/ a service person. I didn't even ask how expensive the meal takes but It should still be with in spending power. I'll guess 500-600 yuan maybe, which is 80 dollars in the U.S. and that's very cheap.


I forgot what this is called T_T but it is a kind of generic cold dish that is served as appetizers in a formal meal. Normally a chinese dinner goes something like:
Cold mixed appetizers, Hot dishes with meat and vegge, Soups either after the appetizers or after the hot dishes, then some very sparse dessert because Chinese didn't know about the magical herb that is vanilla.
Anyways back on this dish. See the transparent part of the meat? Those are tendons of some beef muscle. A popular appetizer in China is "niu jian zi" which means beef tendons. When they're cooked and cooled they gain a slippery, chewy, and jelly like mouth feel. Complete that with a slightly spicy and sweet sauce and you have an easy, mouth watering dish. The tendons takes several bites to crush, so it lingers in your mouth so it soaks up the spices, and the chewing action with the spices promotes saliva flow, called "sheng jin" in chinese, which is exactly what an appetizer should do.
The small tomato and the cucumbers are for decorations but you can eat them also.


So what is this mysterious dish?!
Ants Climb the Tree
-Have you seen ants before or during a rain? They scurry their belongings and ferry them on top of trees as the rain flood their underground homes.
This dish is made with "fen si", which is a variation of rice noodle. "Fen" in Chinese dish are gel like starchy food made by crushing either rice or peas to a fine powder, and slowly cooked in water and sometimes add abit of catalyst so the molecules in these starches line up and group around the water molecule to form a jelly hydrate solid. For now I want to think of them as flavorless jello made of starch but mouth-feel just like a smooth jello with no powdery taste of starch at all. "si" means thin strings. So "Fen Si" together means somehow they managed to make these awesome starchy jells into thin noodle shapes, I have no idea how they're made but when you buy them at the market they come dry like spaghetti sticks but only longer and circled around the bag. Once you boil them they become springy and soft.
The fen si is added with "shao zi", which is basically some chaoed ground meat. shao zi is very basic in Sichuan dish and they show up in many dishes. They're easy to make(ima going to make myself a bunch at my apartment in abit so I can use them later). You get ground meat, either pork or beef, no problem. Notice there will be some fat in it as well. You put a some vege oil in the pan, just a little will do, to initiate the process. Heat the pan untill the oil is 70% hot, then toss in the ground meat. They'll sizzle and begin to cook, Chao them vigorously to separate the grains from each other, and the fatty meat should turn into oil to facilitate the cooking. Add salt now, for taste, and keep chaoing it non-stop. When the meat is almsot cooked(as in they're not red anymore but slightly white) you'll want to add soysauce(not too much or you'll drown it) for flavor and more importantly, coloring. Now it should look brown in color, and there will be some fluid because meat has waters in it and it comes out when you're cooking. Just keep chaoing it untill all the fluid evaporates, and add sugars while at it(not too much! It's just there to balance out the salt). And there you go. Very basic manuvers. What you could do with Shao Zi is limitless. Say you have a steam bread at some point, stick a spoonful of shao zi in it and the steam bread becomes comparable to burger. Say you want to make noodle, stick some Shao Zi in it and suddenly you've got meat in the moddle.
In this case, shao zi is made with fen si for a particular effect: When you use chopstick to pick the fen si out from the bowl, the shao zi sticks to it and came with it. So it looks like many ants trying to climb up a tree. Hence the name, ants climb the tree, or "ma yi shang shu" in chinese.


Red Shao catfish
-It is actually labled as "Classic Catfish" as it is a classic dish for this restaurant. I don't know the exact details of how to make this dish, but it is made with the method "Shao" so I'll explain how does Shao work.
Shao is a verb, much like Chao is a verb. Shao is when you first Chao the spices with oil (for those of you who takes Ochem you know many flavors only dissolves in non-polar solvents with heating so oil acts like that) When the flavors turn over into the oil, you add in the meat/fish/poultry and stir it for a little bit. You then add in water, enough water so it drowns most of the meat or poultry. Now you wait. The water combined with the oil/spice will slowly work their ways into the meat. The water will slowly evaporate and the flavor will get condensed and sucked into the meat. When the water dried down enough, you add in "dou fen" which is "pea powder". It's a kind of powder you can buy at the market that's used for a process called "gou qian". When you "gou qian", or add pea powder, much like "fen si" the powder will attempt to form a jell-like quality, but since you only add a little bit of such powder it will make the water sluggish and gooey, so the water, now full of spices, becomes an instant sauce. You then put everything on a dish and serve it. That's pretty much Shao process.
When you Shao a dish it is characterized by a heavy taste, as the spices have worked their ways into the meat and it's great for fish because fish meat does not gain flavors very well. I should mention Fish is never Chaoed because fish meat is so fragile if you were to chao it it'll fall into little tiny pieces. So Shao gets around that and let you put flavors into the fish.
So this cat fish is "Red Shao Catfish". When you see "Hong" or "Red" in Chinese, it means "Chili Hot Spicy" because chilis are red and they give a dish a red look. See how red this dish is? :D


Mixed Grained Buns
It's a steamed bread, but instead of the usual wheat, in this are corns, and bunch of other grains with wheat. So it tastes coarser to the mouth than the fine wheats. It is toasted in the oven so it gains a pretty golden look. I should mention that these buns are a variety called "wo tou" which means dented head. Basically if you look from the top it looks like a whole bun but if you flip it over it is hollow and bowl shaped. The bowl in the middle holds "la rou", a kind of ham that is smoked and wind dried in winter, and maybe some pickles. I am not sure. The overall purpose of that bowl in the middle is stuffing. You use the spoon to scoop out the stuffing and you stick them into the cavaties of these buns. In the older days these buns were stuffed with only pickles cuz people were poor. In SiChuan they were stuffed with pure chili in the older days as well.

There are some other dish I don't know so much about, but I'll post the pictures anyways:

Stringed Sichuan Pepper beef.
-See the fancy berry looking thing on top? That's Sichuan pepper. Lots of them, enough to make you uncomfortably numb. Look somewhere above in meal3 for a link or just wiki it.


Forgot what it's called but it was super spicy with (can you see it?) the sky facing peppers in it. It's cooked hotpot style and you can see the little stove beneath it working on some kind of solid fuel.


Stuffed Lotus ROot
-Lotus root, as you can see, looks like this:

See the little holes? They can be stuffed with sweet pastes of rice and goodness and becomes a fresh appetizer.