[Pictures] All The Meals I Ate While In China

This is breakfast, the first meal I had arriving in Chengdu, China. Chengdu is my hometown and is renowned for its awesome food(Food in Beijing sux in comparison).
In this meal:
Salt/Seasoning boiled peanuts (top left)
-Peanuts boiled w/ salt and simple seasonings, then drained of water. Soft and gentle taste.
Steamed Breads (left)
-Classic Chinese food, comparable to bread in western culture, different that instead of baking the dough, we steam it.
Pickled long beans (green thing below the peanuts to the right)
-Not sure the real name of these beans, but they're in a long long and skinny pea case, and when pickled they gain a sour and refreshing, clear taste.
Pickled radish (red cube-things below the peas)
-Not the sweet soggy kind, those are gross. These taste somewhat like the pickled long beans, but crispier and a tad sweeter.
Hard Boiled Eggs
-You know what they are
Sausages
-These are not sausages you buy at the supermarket in plastic bags. They're home made. Grandparents buy sausage skins(cleaned out intestines of some animal fyi), and chop their own meat and mix seasonings, and stuff the sausage by themselves. Notice, the meats are NOT grounded in a blender, because that will lose the texture and mouth-feel of the meat. Instead they're only diced so to keep the same feeling as real meat. When stuffed, the sausages are hanged on a clothline to wind-dry, so they're almost always made in the winter, when it is cold and dry, to prevent spoiling. In older days, thieves will steal sausages on the clothline w/ a forked stick, so be extra careful!
These sausages go great w/ steamed bread. Stick some in it and chew. mMmMmmm...
Milks in the Bowl
-They're on the outside of the table
Pickles(bottom)
-I don't really know what vegetable makes these pickles but they're the most common in China. "Zha Cai" is what we call them. They're of a simple salty taste.

Second Meal, Lunch!
Sausage Again.
Boiled Long Beans
-The same long beans, now you can appreciate their long and skinniness. They're not pickled this time, but chopped to pieces and boiled and drained of water. They're then added with salt/soysauce/chili oil/some other things i forgot/ to make a fresh taste. The dish is not "heavy", as in heavy in flavor or oils, but light. So it is very good to eat in summer time when the air is hot and humid. Heavy stuff is for winter when one needs warmth.
Chao Mian
-I dunno what u guys call it, Chiao Mien or w/e shit. Yeah it's that, it's not fake chinese food, we actually eat them in China, surprise. I know some of how to cook it and I'll try to restate it here:
Boil noodle pasta style to 80% cooked.
Take noodle out, drain it of water(put it in a sieve), and rub a spoonful of oils on it so they don't stick to each other and become a pile of mess.
While the noodle cools, Chao(Chao is a verb, also know as "stir-fry" I think. Basically put little cooking oil in a pan, put in raw ingredients, and stir vigorously to create a fast, even heating. Unlike boil or fry, Chao will keep the freshness of the vege/meat as they are not over-heated, but cooked quickly to retain the flavors) some whatever, eggs, onions, sliced meat are common, also bell peppers are popular.
After you chao up your vege/meat, dump the noodles back in the pan and chao them together and mix nice. Serve hot.
Also you can add vinegars if you wish.

This is Lunch
Sugar-Vinigar-Rib(top)
-As its name suggests, it is a sweet/sour dish. Not like the orange chicken in Panda express, because orange chicken is shit compared to this majestic ribs. The ribs are first cooked to halfway done, then marinated with salt, cooking wine, ginger, and garlic. Then returned to the pot with some other things I didn't pay close attention to... some kind of watery mix of water, vinegar or that sort. The soup base is then slowly cooked and evaporated as the meat collect the taste. Finally some sweeping coarsely cut green onions are tossed in for finish.
Light Chaoed tube-vege
-I dunno what it's called in English but this vege has stem which is hallow and resemble a tube. It is tender for the mouth with a nice springy taste. Chao dishes are quick fix, they are fast and for this tube-vege it is perfect because it perserves the freshness and the springyness. If you were to boil it the vege will become old and hard on the mouth. Thump garlic with kitchen knife first: Basically peal your garlic, put it on the cutting board, take your knife(the cleaver, very commonly used in asian kitchen as it is so versatile and quick, picuture reference: http://www.japanesechefsknife.com/images/Img546.jpg) take the knife sideways, and thump the garlic like how u thump a fly w/ a fly swatter. The garlic will flatten and break on the surface, but not fall apart. Garlic juice will flow out better now. Chao the vege w/ these thumped garlics on the pan, and throw in some salt and you'll have it.
Sounds easy right? But the fire intensity, the quickness of the shovel and the stir, and the timing are all essential to a good Chao dish. Even though the procedure is easy, to make it cooked AND still fresh(paradox in itself) is a hard art to master and takes alot of experience. Personally I feel western cooking is a science, with precise measurements and well planned procedures. As long as you cook by the book your success rate is high. Chinese food, even the most basic ones is an art. There is a simple set of basic procedures and that's it. You have to do it by experience and intuitions, and make adjustments as your ingredients will be different from time to time.
Cold-Mixed-Chicken(bottom left)
-This dish is so hot/spicy even I sat there dripping mad salivas and gumping down beers to quench the spiciness. How do you cook it? I can maybe lay down the basics:
First take chicken, cleave it down to little chunks, boil till cooked, drain water and let it turn cold.
While chicken cools, prepare the sauce, it is made of chili-oil, sichuan_Pepper, soysauce, vinegar, dou-ban (maybe, not sure. fyi dou-ban is soy bean with chili, fermented for abit and tastes spicy/sour/salty) and some other things I am not fluent with. The dish is served cold, and the chicken is mouth-watering(cuz of spiciness) and smoothly tender, it slides down your mouth.
Rabbit Dice(bottom right)
Dice here means not the play thing, but a dice looking or a dice sized piece. The rabbit meat is first diced to dice size, then these meat dice is marinated with cooking wine, ginger, and salt. They are then Chaoed in the pan with copious amount of sky-point-pepper(these peppers when grown and bear fruit, all the pepper points to the sky, and it is renowned for extreme hotness). Needless to say, I got spiced silly by this meal and had to down much beer(yay i'm legal to drink beer in china wee) and pepsi.

This is Dinner folks, HOT POT!
Hot Pot is a traditional SiChuan way of eating. You boil a big pot of spice, called di-liao(translate to English it means bottom ingredients, because they're the basic soup base of this mixture) is boiled untill it bubbles, then raw ingredients are thrown into the boiling pot. A short while after when the pot boils again for awhile, those thing have been cooked. You proceed to fish the cooked goodies out and eat them. Since it is so hot/spicy, I normally dip with traditional vege-oil + crushed garlic mixture. The oil will cover the pieces, thus shield some of the spiciness so I don't drop dead. How good a hot pot is depends greatly on the quality of di-liao, and the precise make up of a good di-liao is of great secrecy of a Hot Pot restaurant. If you eat at a Hot Pot restaurant that wishes to protect this secret, they'll let you take out the food AFTER they've been cooked, but they will not let you take the di-liao home.
The raw goods on the table are, as you can see, too many for me to enumerate. I'll name a few popular hot pot dish though.
You'll commonly encounter these:
Cow stomach: they have a nice bouncy, crunchy and slicy qualities to it, very nice to chew on.
Sliced Beef: Basic thing
Sliced Mutton: Sheep meat is nice, some are treated to block the "mountain smell", the pungent smell that come with wild animals.
Lotus Root: Didn't think it's edible huh? But Lotus is awesome. The flower for look, the leaf for wrapping(In older days Grandma told me, the farmers all have a stack of dried up lotus leaves ready to wrap poultries and other goods), the root for eat, and the seed for snack/medicine.
Potatoes: Better get the crunchy and not the smooshie kind. The smooshie kind will melt into a pulp inside the hot pot and never found again. The krispy kind will able to hold untill it's well cooked.
Meat/Fish Balls: Various kind of meat balls are popular.
Tofu: There are many different varieties of Tofu, some of the more sturdy varieties are popular in hot pot. Some of the porous varieties will really soak up the flavors.
Cabbages, other veggies: Eventually u'll order these because u get tired of the meats.
And alot more, because hot-pot can cook virtually anything that's thinly sliced or in small chunks, a lot of things can be thrown in and cooked, so it's very versatile. My uncle owns a hot-pot restaurant, and this meal was in fact at his place, so for free yay! Uncle used to own an internet cafe, and when I talk to him about gamings this time, he told me "I don't think of gaming too much now, all I think now is how to make a killer di-liao"
:D

This Meal is Lunch again, I ate it at a restaurant with my mom's old colleagues and their kids, which is about my age. Since it is a restaurant, the dishes come one at a time, and so is my pictures.


Sugar-Vinegar li-ji
Li-ji is the two strings of muscles running along side of your spine, known for its tenderness. This dish is very popular in the states, you can find them in a lot of express chinese food restaurants. Panda Express' orange chicken is a variety of this, except with orange taste added and is chicken not li-ji.


Husband-Wife leaves
That is my best translation lol. Leaves here means not leaf of a tree, but a thing that has a shape of a leaf. This dish is a meat dish, and the meat has been sliced thin and large, so they look like leaves. The chinese name, fu-qi-fei-pian, translated rigidly becomes "husband-wife-lung-leaves" suggest that it might have something to do with "fei" or "lung". However, the lung is not present in this dish. "lung" is in fact an euphemism for "discarded", because they share the same pronunciation in Chinese. Therefore, this dish is originally called "husband-wife-discarded-leaves".
Story goes that when the husband and his wife opened a restaurant, they're so poor that they could not afford to buy beefs. So they went to the butcher house to pick up all the discarded pieces by the butcher, and cold-mix them together to make this now very classic and famous dish. In this dish contains cow-stomach, and cow-scalp, something not commonly eaten unless in this dish. The scalp is transparent and white, and sports a crunchy and crispy mouth-feel. The sauce that this dish is in is similar to the cold-mixed-chicken in the previous meal, in another word, super hot/spicy. It is also popular in recent time(2,3 years for now maybe) to add peanuts or crushed peanuts to the mix for extra kicks.


Water boiled Beef.
Don't let the name deceive you. It says water boiled, something neutral taste right? Wrong! This is spicy as hell. See the red thing? That's half an inch thick of hot chili oil floating on top of this dish, and every piece of beef you fish out gets coated in it and will hot you through the roof. However, the beef is very very soft, tender, and silky. I don't know how they do it. Normally when you cook meet by boiling, the meat loses fluid and becomes dry and harsh, however, the art of water-boiled beef is in the water boil. They mastered the art of water boiling so the beef is cooked and retains its raw tenderness. In this dish, normally the meat is on top, and on the bottom a bunch of veggies. In Chengdu it's wo-sun, a long slender green vege, in Beijing due to the lack of wo sun, it substitute with cabbages.


Back Pan Meat
It is pork. Boiled untill done, drained of water, then come back again into the pan for chao. Hence the name, Back Pan meat because it comes back again to the pan. The classic ingredient in this is garlic-shoot and dou-chi. Garlic shoot is the wild looking green thing you see in this picture. They tastes like a cross over between garlic and green-onion, and milder than garlic in terms of the pungent garlic taste/smell and sweeter. It compliments well with the dry coarse texture of the meat, deliberately over-cooked by cooking it twice to have a chewy hardy quality. Dou-Chi is the dark pea shaped dots in the picture, they're salty and has a particular tastiness about them. They're made of soy beans and soy-sauce I presume. When I was young I enjoy eating them a lot, so my dad would reward me one of those if I was a good boy and eat all my meals(I ate very little and was so skinny back then) and he'd reward me with one dou-chi. He kept saying "Evan here's your reward!" that for the longest time I thought Dou-Chi is called Reward, and when in first grade my teacher said she'll reward us with cool eraser if we study well I was so confused "wtf they make eraser out of dou-chi?!"

sneak preview!

Woah?! What is this? What's the story behind it? How do I make it?
Stay tuned for next update !! ^_^

Footnote1:
For those who are saying the portions are huge it's because they're eaten by a family. Meal 3, 4 are eaten by at least 6 people and meal 5 is eaten by 5 people. Something I should mention is that in China the dish is set in the middle of the table, and you pick out w/e you like w/ your chopstick. I'd imagine it's different from western style where they serve each person separate dishes in a personal plate and you only eat what you ordered.

Footnote2: