Adventures in food..

So I consider myself a fairly adventurous person and not a wimp about most things. Rural China has challenged that perception in so many ways. One of those ways is the food. Cui Guo Hua likes to have me try new things, which works out really well sometimes and really not well at all sometimes.

The other day we ate these big black worms. Well they were black because they had been roasted but they had a crunchy outer shell and were white and soft inside. The insides were the consistency of tofu with very little flavor. I ate two of them and was not totally disgusted but would probably not order them again.














One of the favorite dishes here is chicken soup. Basically, you put a large bowl of chicken meat and chicken broth over a flame in the middle of a table and then order all the things you want to put in the soup separately. The waitress brings out little plates of raw potatoes, tofu, cabbage, carrots, radish, onion, noodles, etc and you throw them in the broth and fish them out when they are cooked to your liking. The chicken that they put in it is prepared by taking the feathers off of a chicken, but leaving the skin on and then marinating it and then taking a cleaver and chopping it into pieces and throwing it in a bowl. So the pieces of meat contain, fat, bone fragments, cartilage and pieces of lots of different organs. One of the great treats is the chicken head. When you look down into the soup the only parts of the chicken that are really identifiable are the head and the feet. I have not worked up the courage to eat the head yet, but I will.














I guess it is a very western thing to not want to look into the eyes of the food you are eating because I am always surprised when the fish comes out still intact with the eyes looking at me. This place is a barbeque place where they bring out different types of meat on skewers and you roast them over coals that are in a hole in the middle of your table.















So breakfast is one of the few things in my life that are currently completely out of my control. I live with the Hui family and either Mr. or Mrs. Hui prepares my breakfast and they call me in at about 7:40 every morning to eat “zaofan.” I trudge with dread to the kitchen to see what awaits me. Sometimes it is great. There is ”porridge” that is the consistency of oatmeal and I think is more like cracked wheat or something. It has no taste but is hot and great for breakfast. They choose to flavor it with salt and vinegar. I usually eat it plain. Other mornings we will eat sautéed onions and bell peppers and meat. They are all dripping in oil. We also eat a lot of seafood, the type that are little sea creature (you can tell by the taste) that still have their feet and eyes on them and you just watch them swim around in your soup. Breakfast is usually very salty and very oily. It is definitely an adventure. Sometimes we just have steamed bread. They are balls of bread the size of a baseball that you put in a steamer until they cook. Nobody has ovens around here so that is how they cook the bread.