Have I mention the food in China? I have been spending most evenings wandering the streets of Nanjing looking for interesting street food vendors. Most of the afternoons, however, the corporate hosts take me to try the different regional dishes and traditional favorites.
Today, for instance, I finally had a chance to try fermented duck eggs at lunch. These eggs (according to my host) were only buried for a few months before being dug up and served.
I had eel yesterday (by pointing to something swimming in a tank and insisting that I wanted it) but have no picture of it. I do have pictures of the Beijing Duck we ate for dinner a few days ago. The bones left over from the preparation are served either fried or in a soup. Since we had two ducks, we had the remainders served both ways.
I was surprised to find out that Sweet and Sour Chicken is an authentic Chinese dish.
As is Kung Pao Pork and Sesame Chicken. We also had Mo Po Tofu several times for lunch and dinner.
A fish dish or two was present at almost every meal.
And, of course, we had veggies.
As I mentioned, following my nose through the streets of Shanghai and Nanjing has also been extremely fun. There are lots of variations on the dumpling to be found as well as various ways to cook a noodle and deep-fry dough.
The most interesting meal, however, was the one I had tonight with Lu Bing. The rest of the team from America has returned to Shanghai, so Bing and I went to the Fuzi Miao – the Old Confucius Temple – to do some shopping. Bing suggested, tentatively, that we go for a traditional Nanjing meal and I jumped at the chance. We went back and forth trying to find the right term for a meal that involves offal, duck blood soup, funky tofu, an egg cooked in tea, pickled vegetables and periwinkles. I think we call it “country” cooking in America, though that is not quite appropriate in this case since the dishes are notably old-school “city” cuisine.
