(Menu) Items of Interest

Before heading off to a three-day trip to Hangzhou (the city of gardens and teas) and getting even further behind on my blog, I should get a few things out of the way, so I can write about Hangzhou when we get back :) Needless to say, B. was struck down with food poisoning and a cold pretty much after he set foot in Nanjing. We still managed to explore a few restaurants (luckily, we can now order food for three :P)

• Durian pastry - simply awesome! Fresh durian is incredibly expensive. They usually sell it in small pieces, plastic-wrapped in the supermarket, but once my friend told me what I had bought was not soft and therefore not fresh enough and the other time we bought it it tasted like onion... so, I'm still a bit unsure as to how to pick out the perfect durian, but there are a few dim sum places that carry durian pastry, and these are simply to-die-for. If you never had durian, there's simply know way to describe the taste - or rather the smell. It's overwhelmingly intense, to the point of almost making you feel sick. But it manages to just scrape by the "offensive" and make it into the "delicious" category.
  
• Late night snacks and morning tea - I found out that the one Guangdong restaurant just around the corner has actually pretty decent tea and dim sum every morning - you just have to go there before 10am, admittedly, a challenge, but not so much with a jet-lagged guest around who's jumping up and down on my mattress at 6 in the morning asking to be fed :) This place is also open till midnight with the same kind of snacks. A rare opportunity for late dinner, usually all the restaurants close at 9.
• Beijing style pancakes - the new hype of street food. Imagine a big crepe (baked until totally dry and crispy - Montreal style :P), filled with egg, Hoisin(?) sauce, all sorts of pickled veggies and - most importantly - a piece of crispy fried dough. The whole thing is then rolled up and folded and is a crunchy as well as tasty matter. A few weeks ago you couldn't find a single vendor for this in Nanjing, now they're popping up everywhere! Competition already seems to have struck down one of the two on my street.
• Crawfish is now in season - the most popular version here seems to be the "13 flavour" cooking method, which definitely contains chilis, sichuan pepper and garlic, but I'm hard pressed to name more flavours... it didn't have the typical Sichuan taste though, the spicy-numbing was rather subtle.
• Pumpkin/squash stewed in coconut milk is always delicious. Even better - black rice stewed with coconut milk inside a pumpkin. Eaten in the "Great Nanjing Eatery."
  
• Garlic greens with duck liver (the kind waitress came back after taking our order to tell us that we had ordered liver! If we were sure that's what we wanted (the menu was only in Chinese). Well, given that I was able to understand her in Chinese, chances were pretty good I knew what I had ordered. If I hadn't understood her question, we could not have been helped anyways!)
• Our friend, the mysterious cabbage - usually it's a good idea to ask for whatever vegetable is in season and/or the local specialty, but after ending up with the same cabbage (some relative of kale but it has pink stems that emit a very pink juice) three times, even twice in one day, we might change this approach.
• Funky meat salad - imported from Sichuan, available on the market. Funky here means a variety of cooked, but cold, intestines, such as gizzards, tripe, tendon etc. that are tossed with chili oil, cilantro and peanuts and eaten as a salad. Surprisingly delicious!

That's all I can think of for now... I've been meaning to write an entry about the role of women in Chinese society, but I think the topic is weighing me down too much. That's one reason for the long silence. Sorry. Back to more food and travel soon!