Food Adventures in China

This post today is about one of my favorite topics, interesting food.  And the food in China was definitely interesting!  The food in Nanjing and Shanghai was not at all like the Chinese food we get in America.  And I like the Chinese food at home.  Houston has a very vibrant Asia Town filled with lots of Asian restaurants.  The Chinese food in Beijing was more like the Chinese food that we are used to at home.  But when we ordered Mongolian Beef and Kung Pao chicken in Beijing, they were not at all like the ones at home. 

I am usually adventurous with trying new foods, but in China we had to be super-adventurous.  Some of the more different things that we had were:  duck tongue, duck feet, duck liver, fried duck bones (after they cut up the Peking duck, they fry the bones and bring it back to your table), duck blood, duck head, eel, turtle, lotus root, fried whole crawfish, "stinky tofu" (the actual name), marinated eggs and others that I can't remember.  I did not try the Wanshan pigs feet at Zhouzhuang Water Village outside of Shanghai.  It looked like feet.  I would have liked to try a bite, but not a whole thing.  Also, at the wedding, there was soup with an uncut special chicken which had black skin and black bones.  The sight of it was unappetizing, but it was probably good.  There was a dessert in Beijing that looked pretty, a white cone with a drizzle of fruit sauce over it.  The white cone was actually mashed potatoes, made slightly sweet by the drizzled fruit.  I think that I was the only one that liked that one.

I decided to try the duck tongue because supposedly it was the former Empress' favorite dish. She ate it 3 times per day.  The odd thing about how it looked is that it had these long curled things at the tongue's end.  I guess it was the ligaments that attached the tongue to the jaw. But when I tried to bite off just a tip and couldn't, I started pulling on it and the tongue stretched, just like in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.  At that point, I couldn't eat it.  :)

Here are some pictures:

 Here I am trying to eat it and the tongue starts stretching:

Here is a marinated quail egg:

This is the duck head, unfortunately, I did not get a picture of my friend eating it.

These were the pigs feet that we did not order:

A basket full of greens with cute little footprints:

I can't seem to find the picture of the duck blood, but here is the Duck liver:

We had several variations of lotus root.  This one was on a stick in Shanghai, street food:

 

One of the many numerous courses of foods that we had:

Pork belly:

Breakfast with a steamed bun shaped like a pig:

 

The dessert that I mentioned with the mashed potatoes and fruit:

The Peking duck:

Finally, Baiju!!!

Next blog:  Street food!