Food

I’m sitting here on my bed writing this, munching through a packet of chocolate biscuits and I am thinking in a vague fashion about food as you do when you’re tucking into biscuits. On a day to day basis, I have claimed breakfast for the West, gastronomically speaking – I tend to have oats, sultanas and a chopped up banana with yogurt and a cup of tea. I have to say, I don’t know what an authentic Chinese breakfast consists of, but from the look of the stalls I pass walking to work big pancake/omelette with tomato and spring onion crossovers and dumplings seem to be the way forward. The other morning our opposite neighbour knocked on the door and pressed a bowl of beans on me, so I’m thinking it’s the same kind of thing they/we eat for lunch and dinner. I’ll stick with fruit and my oats for the moment I think.

We’ve got a kitchen, but we’ve not got to grips with Chinese cooking yet so at the moment I tend to get my lunch and dinner from the aforementioned stalls. Charlie has used our kitchen to great effect - he cooked the most delicious meal for us and Andy; there was an egg and tomato dish, untranslatable green veg with garlic, shredded potato and aubergine with coriander, spring onions and chilli and a chicken dish with loads more vegetable in it. There was rice too, and he did it all with one pan on one burner (and the rice cooker). Chinese cooking is something else I must learn because there’s no way I can go back to English takeaways now – the real thing is just too good and everything I’ve tried to make so far has been practically inedible!! Rice and noodles two meals a day isn’t as monotonous (yet) as I was expecting, I suppose that’s because there’s loads of different dishes to try so it’s not like every meal is the same and anyway they’re easy enough to avoid if you don’t want them. I also made my peace with not being able to have a decent sandwich until I get back to England, so I’m not really craving Western food...

Having said that, McDonalds and KFC have become a treat and I am suitably ashamed of this. KFC has to go (screw you Colonel!) but McDonalds I might keep for emergencies because there’s only one in Handan and sometimes you just need some beef in your life. They’ve stopped doing curly fries now (I <3 curly fries) so there’s less of a draw, but it’s still novel because Ronald McDonald is still around. It’s like they rounded up all the old Ronald stuff when they went on a health kick and banished him East for tubbifying my generation. I wonder if there are more social rejects of the 1990’s hiding out in China? Oh yeah, MSG and tracksuits.

ANYWAY, I digress. My favourite place to eat in Handan is over the road from us in the lean-to diner behind the market where we get chow mein or egg fried rice, or the new dish I tried that was a kind of hot noodle soup. A local bloke was having it so I tried in my best Mandarin ‘我不要米饭，我要这个谢谢.’ “Wo bu yao mifan - wo yao zhege, xiexie” which is: ‘I don’t want rice, I want this one thanks’. Well. It actually was more like ‘bu mifan, jay-ger’ (not rice, this one) but the above is what I should have said; I panic a little bit when it comes to full sentences in Mandarin because even if I know what I should say, I never understand the response and it’s embarrassing to be constantly saying ‘wo bu mingbai’ (I don’t understand). I’m working on it though because I desperately want to understand and be understood. Andy and Charlie say I’ve got an ear for the tones and I can listen and repeat like a performing monkey...one of these days I’ll earn some myself some metaphorical peanuts by stringing something cohesive together! I’ve started trying to learn with online help and we’ve got a Mandarin teacher now so soon I’ll bust out my Mandarin skills on the couple who run the stall and they’ll be so relieved! They’re really sweet and patient with our fumbly attempts at ordering food. I prefer sitting out there and eating with the locals but because the food comes in bags in the bowls (to save on washing up I guess) more often than not when the three of us go, we bring food back up to the apartment.

The market and the foodstalls open and close at meal times, you can’t really go any old time and not everyone is there every day so it’s a delicious lottery. At different stalls you can get deep fried chicken strips or pork, dumplings – boiled, fried or steamed (for lunch today I had fried dumplings which were amazing – 好吃!) and omelettes, there are various prepared vegetable and tofu places, there’s a sweet potato and corn on the cob lady, a dude who sells crab and in behind all that is a market where you can get more vegetables, fish and meat (both live and/or prepared) than you could shake a stick at.

There are two different supermarkets which we go to: one is Walmart, but that’s not very interesting so I won’t bother telling you too much about that. The other one is under the lake in the park (!!!) You go down some escalators to get in there and the first time we went they were playing Kiss from a Rose by Seal and there was a stage with girls dancing on it to advertise a kettle (!!!) You can literally get anything inside and (sadly enough) it’s one of our leisure activities to go and push the trolley round and see what randomly flavoured things and bizarrely named products we can find today. I had the best intentions of trying weird things like chicken feet, but I’m afraid they just look too much like the severed feet of a chicken (surprisingly…) so I’m compromising and trying funny flavoured things instead. Dragon fruit or chocolate teeth grinding stick anyone? No? How about some cool refreshing lemon flavoured crisps?

I’ve been experimenting with different kinds of tea too. I’ve mentioned before that we inherited a box of Earl Grey but we also got some bags of tea that are only labelled in Chinese, so I’ve been working my way through them. Here are my findings:

Mystery Tea #1 –

Dry Smell – citrusy but a bit musty

Wet Smell – warm and vaguely citrusy

Taste – quite lemony but sort of perfumed… maybe it’s a bit old? I should probably get a new bag of this.

Rating – 3/5

Mystery Tea #2

Dry Smell – odd… nutty maybe?

Wet Smell – feet?

Taste – vaguely nutty still but I’m not convinced by this as it looks like rehydrated walnuts or a weird mushroom or mould. God I hope I’m not accidently drinking mushroom water.

Rating - -1/5

Mystery Tea #3

Dry Smell – familiar but unplaceable

Wet Smell – green and herby and lemony

Taste – ah! It’s green tea. No idea which specific kind, but it’s nice. Woo!

Rating – 4/5

  

Mystery Tea #4

Dry Smell – potent!

Wet Smell – flowery and fresh – jasmine?

Taste – yep, jasmine. It’s fragrant and actually I really like it, which is a surprise because I’ve never liked jasmine tea before.

Rating 5/5

More exciting tea trying another day J