Chinese Street Food, Restaurant Food

slide-food-CROPPED-fish food-20131104-_ALL9590

Drying fish in a Shanghai ally

I am proud to say I eat just about any food.  If it is on a menu, I’ll try it.  As a young kid, I ate rattlesnake, squirrel, turtle steak, frog legs, kangaroo tail soup and just about any odd item found on a menu.  The squirrel and frog legs I hunted, which makes me sound a bit like a hillbilly, but it was fun as a kid.  I really looked forward to new foods in China.  However, overall, it was disappointing.  Despite us driving past miles and miles of red peppers piled high in the fields, the food was boiled and bland.  Boiled broccoli, boiled cauliflower, boiled bok choy.  Also, the Chinese do not differentiate between breakfast, lunch and dinner foods.  In the morning you had much of the same foods on the buffet the prior night.  Very few of the dishes were great.  However, I did get to add to my list of unusual foods, which included:

  • Camel tendons
  • Donkey Skin
  • Carp, full of bones
  • Pigs Ear, nothing but cartilage, what else?
  • Horse sausage

My main question was who got the good cuts of meat if in the fine restaurants they were feeding me donkey skin and camel tendons???

slide-food-20131104-_ALL9564

Quail on a stick

slide-food-street cooking-20131101-HALL9441

Outdoor cooks

No, I did not get to eat the above fish.  They were hanging in a Shanghai ally.  Oddly enough, I did not see any flies in these open air markets full of hanging food.

 

 

 

 

slide-food-20131104-_ALL9605

Fresh eels and frogs

slide-food-20131101-HALL9445

Pigs Feet ??

Many restaurants displayed their fresh food outside.

We were told this was a Muslim  market so I would not think these are grilled pigs feet, so I am not sure what they are.

 

 

 

slide-food-20131029-IMG_1716

Grilling lamb

slide-food-20131028-IMG_1678 copy

Chicken foot and beer

We actually ate at the restaurant which had this lamb cooking out front, next to the parking lot and basketball court.  So I guess our food was likely cooked here as well.

I chewed on the chicken foot just long enough to get the idea.  Next to the chicken foot is local brewed beer.  During our two weeks in the China mainland, never did we see a proper beer glass.  Since one cannot drink the water, we drank beer.  Hey, we did what we had to do…  Also, the beer was cheaper than bottled water, but not much stronger.  All beer was about 3% vs. the more normal 5-7%.

 

slide-food-cake-20131102-IMG_1890 copy

Happy Birthday Holly!

The birthday cake was for a nice lady in our group, Holly, not Horry.  The Chinese are good at imitation, but sometimes come up a bit short.  Apparently they saw a photo of a birthday cake and decorated it as best they could.  Those are not strawberries on top, rather they are cherry tomatoes.  Another error in imitation was serving tomato paste in place of ketchup with french fries.

slide-food-fish food-20131104-_ALL9590

One thought on “Chinese Street Food, Restaurant Food

  1. I read your list of foods that you ate in China at a Halloween party. It seemed to fit the theme. I’m sure a witch would add those items in her caldron. You ate everything except eye of newt. LOL

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *