One of the things I love about China is that we eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables! One of this things that is so annoying about China is that I can't find much in the way of frozen foods!
There is a small fruit and vegetable market just outside our courtyard. I can buy zucchini and carrots twice the size of what I find in Canada. Broccoli comes in the winter, potatoes and onions (red and white) are available most of the year round. Celery and eggplant (3 kinds) are abundant.
I can get apples, oranges, and large bunches of bananas.
Pineapple and strawberries and mangos show up sometimes during the spring and summer.
We also get pommello - thing gigantic grapefruit but not as bitter.
There is a small fruit that, when translated, is called Dragons Eye, not overly flavourful and the pit is rather large for the size of the fruit but it's something different to have on occasion.
There are a number of leafy green vegetables that I don't know how to translate. A lot of them look like spinach just lighter or darker, smaller or broader.
There's something called "bitter vegetable" which the lady in the shop advises not to buy!
There is one vegetable that I still can't figure out. It has a stem about 8 inches long and 3 inches thick - looks kind of like a broccoli stem but much firmer and then shoots into leaves at the top. The stem, not the leaves, is meant to be eaten, not sure what you do with it other than fry it (of course!).
One of our favourite vegetables, hmmm but it might not be a vegetable, is what might be called Garlic Shoots in English. If I'm right about the name and translation, it's the green shoot thing that grows out the top of a garlic bulb. These grow to about 18 inches or so in length and are great fried up with any meat!
While it is wonderful to have access to so much fresh food we rarely eat it raw because of the amount of cleaning required. Have you ever tried to get bugs out of a broccoli or cauliflower! Not easy and it's pretty gross to bite into a broccoli and find a little green work laying in the fork of two little broccoli branches! Therefore salad is also usually out of the question, it would take me close to an hour to make a tossed green salad.
I buy eggs at this same little whole in the wall place. No coolers, no fridge, cement walls and one light hanging from the ceiling. Once home, the eggs sit on a little shelf in the unheated part of the kitchen. I stopped putting them in the fridge about 5 years ago and so far no one has gotten sick!
We haven't gotten adjusted to all the available snacks in China so I do a lot of baking. But we have grown accustomed to some things. Dried dofu (tofu) for one. Available in many flavours such as curry, chicken, roasted meat, spicy, and really spicy! Or something called Zha Cai (no good English translation!), which I think is pickled mushrooms or pickled vegetable roots of some sort. Dried yak meat is a favourite - think yak jerky and you'll be close! Seeds and nuts are also a favourite but the nuts are a bit pricey these days.
Dofu/tofu is something best bought in a restaurant only because I still don't really know how to cook it well. It's available in soups, fried dishes, fairly bland or super spicy. Tofu can be either rather dry and firm or wet and wiggly. If ever you come to China be sure to get a whiff of something called 'stinky tofu' often cooked out on the streets!
Oil! It could have it's own category here. I'd guess that most families go through 4L of oil (that's the standard size bottle of oil here) in less than a month. When we had a house helper I would hid the oil bottle and set out a small 2C container that had to last her a week. More than once I found her using my olive oil (bought for a dear price from the import store and used only for a few recipes!), which I didn't hide, because she'd run out of the normal oil before friday!
Back to baked goods, the sugar here is not very refined, the granules are quite large, for sugar. At the local grocery store I can buy brown sugar which is very dark (still has a lot of molasses) and includes ginger and dates ground into it, or donkey skin and some other kind of medicinal thing! The taste isn't so bad as long you don't know what's in it :) Just recently we've found 'normal' brown sugar at the import store for a reasonable price - d I can get brown sugar at the import store - so it's a bit pricey but better than buying it efinitely worth it! I also buy baking powder at the import store. Generally people here don't have ovens and don't bake so just about any baking thing is a specialized item. The baking powder is a cheap $7Cdn for about 3kg! Great price but surely it could come in slightly smaller tins!
Cereal isn't a Chinese thing, yet. So we can buy it at the import store but usually it's rice crispies or corn flakes. We eat oatmeal probably 5 out of 7 mornings a week! I've yet to see a toaster in the shops but we have a toaster oven which takes too long to use as a toaster! Incidentally that's okay since we make our own bread. Most bread in the stores are either too sweet or have raisins tossed in them. Honey takes up almost a whole aisle, jam takes up less than one shelf and only sometimes can I find peanut butter. PB and J doesn't happen all that often for all of those reasons!
Fresh milk isn't really a Chinese thing yet either! I have 4 1L cartons at the moment and a box of 16 little bags each holding about 1C. The milk is called UHT milk (ultra heat treated - so it doesn't really go bad but it anything healthy in the milk has been killed off too!), is usually 3-4% mf (though little 200 ml skim milk boxes can be bought), and tastes gross! It has a shelf life of 6 months! That's just wrong somehow. Usually we can find low fat milk which is a 1% milk.
As an alternative for breakfast, youtiao (pronounced 'yo' 'tee-yow'), is made fresh in the morning at the side of the road from about 7-8am. Translated, this local breakfast is called an 'oil stick'! Along the lines of a donut but much more oily and about a foot long. When fresh and still warm they don't taste too bad!
Noodles of one sort or another are the standard lunch fare: long and skinny, long and fat, long and broad, or postage stamp size. A large bowl of soup costs about a dollar...when we first came to China they cost just under 50 cents. The soups are delicious and the noodles are freshly made. Sometimes we pick up baozi instead, "bow (as in what a dog says) - zi", which are steamed buns, about half the size of a tennis ball, filled with some combination of meat or eggs and vegetables. The kids love these things and can eat about 8 each! They can be dipped in a soy sauce and black vinegar mixture.
There is much more to local cuisine but we haven't ventured into the likes of pickled chicken feet, deep fried tentacles (from some animal) on a skewer, animal intestines, and chicken heads!
Come back soon, I'm working on my first few adventures of this year with spring clothes! Surprised that can even be a topic?! So am I, but worth a few chuckles for you I hope :)
