Okay, so I've been eating and eating these past few weeks, but not
blogging [this is Mike]! Ann and I are running off to a sort of
Shanghai garment district in a few minutes to pick up a strapless
dress she's had copied out of a magazine by one of the many, many
tailors here willing to do that, but before we leave here's a quick
food synopsis with a few pictures to bring you all up to date on what
I've been doing.
We'll start with a little street food, just as I did. I landed late
in the evening three weeks ago, groggy and jet lagged. Ann whisked me
home in a cab (through the heavy, humid Shanghai air) and I fell
asleep almost immediately. The next morning out we went for baozi
breakfast before Ann's class, and they were just what I needed. Hot,
fresh out of giant bamboo baskets gusting with steam, filled with
green vegetables and little bits of mushroom. Or with a chunk of
ground pork and a rich brown gravy. Or a less meat-ball like,
smoother mixture of pork and vegetables. Or, just today I had one
with meatball, gravy, and a little bit of vegetable mixed in, kind of
a compromise baozi. They come with all kinds of things in them, but
I'm only just starting to have the vocabulary to stray farther down
the menu, finally able to ask "what's that soup baozi up there" and
have a chance of understanding the reply (soup baozi always seems to
refer to gravy).
But there are plenty of baozi-like things with actual liquid in them!
We've had fried baozi a little smaller than their steamed
counterparts, I always call them guotie (pot-stickers) when I order
them but they use a thicker yeasted dough, that are bursting with
juicy pork broth (they've still got a little meatball in them, too).
There's a picture somewhere at the top of this post of a woman cook
grabbing a small bag of these for us fresh out of the pan. Then there
are xiao long bao, a Shanghai specialty, thin skinned steamed
dumplings with pork and pork broth. We've tried these at a number of
places and they really run the gamut on quality. They're the riskiest
thing we order: sometimes delicious (really only two places seem to
make excellent xiao long bao), sometimes inedible, mostly somewhere
disappointingly in between. There are even pot-stickers like we're
used to back home, but here on the street they come with that juicy
broth.
My favorite of the street foods, though, is the green onion pancake
(cong you bing). It's a deep fried disk of dough with green onion and
little pork in the center. Best when I can see them frying it (they
often seem to sit out in piles, cooling off and collecting local
airborne bacteria - generally getting less and less desirable),
they're piping hot and wonderfully crunchy.
Another suspect street food is kebab, which we see grilling above
ground outside of many of the subway stops. They're heavily spiced,
typically lamb, done in Xinjiang style: West Chinese Muslim food. So
far we've only bought this outside of our favorite Xinjiang
restaurant, where we can see that they keep the meat in an ice chest
and bring out trays of kebabs to refill it. At the subways the raw
skewers are just stacked up in piles. Dubiously. But inside, the
sit-down Xinjiang is Ann's favorite spot to eat. Our first time in we
got a lamb dish that came out on a tray with a flame under it,
sizzling and cooking as we ate. Another visit we had a cold spiced
meat (like one I've had back in the US), and Da Pan Ji - a chicken
stew - at Pete's suggestion. Peter and Elyn, my aunt and uncle who
live here, have taken us out several times and are generally a wealth
of information and local contacts. Xinjiang food is one of Pete's
favorites, too. Da Pan Ji is large and cheap, lots of chicken with
plenty of bones still in it, potatoes, and long flat noodles to soak
up the broth towards the end when the good bits have all been eaten
up.
Home style (Jia Chang) Chinese food is my favorite for eating out
here. There's Ma Po Tofu, a spicy tofu with plenty of hot, oily sauce
and numbing Sichuan peppercorns, Lazi Ji, which is chicken fried a
little crispy with lots of dried hot peppers, Fried String Beans (a
little crispy, a lot salty), all sorts of Chinese Greens cooked simply
in a light sauce with garlic (favorites this way are pea vines and on
choy), Bitter Melon (bitter!), Yu Xiang Eggplant, cooked soft in a
sauce with a lot of oil, garlic, ginger, and Twice Cooked Pork
(pictured here with Ann and a large bottle of Tsingdao beer). Also
lots of Tsingdao, which is cheap and comes in big 600ml bottles!
At one of these restaurants, I guess a little bit on the fancier side
- the chopsticks, bowl, cup and plate came wrapped in a sealed
plastic. At this place we got simple Chinese food for dinner, but
fancy, unusual drinks to go with it! Ann got a sprite that came with
a salty, preserved lemon in it! Surprisingly tasty. And I got hot(!)
Coke that had been simmered with ginger and lemon. Even stranger than
the Sprite, but I had been fighting off a cold and the ginger lemon
Coke seemed almost medicinal. It hit the spot.
There's a thing that fancy restaurants here do: they've got all this
seafood and really exotic stuff on the menu that looks strange and
totally unappealing. We tried a Hunan-style restaurant out of Ann's
guidebook, and almost didn't know what to order off the menu. It was
during one of Ann's many hurried lunch breaks between clinic and
lecture, and I had insisted that we try to find this new place. As
the walk got longer and longer Ann got antsy about making it on time
to lecture, and we both got hungry and a little grumpy. The menu
featured pages of seafood, a few dishes with bullfrog, one of crispy
intestines - I panicked, figuring it would be a bust - but we salvaged
the whole thing! We picked an eggplant dish that came out in a stone
pot, bubbling in its gingery sauce, good old Ku Gua, bitter melon,
that turned out to be a pile bigger than we could finish, and garlic
shoots and smoky bacon that Ann couldn't get enough of. The third
picture above (above? I don't end up getting to see the blog myself -
it all looks like an email from this end) is of this small feast. For
the curious: she made it to lecture with time to spare. Yay Hunan
restaurant!
