So, I get to eat authentic Chinese food everyday for lunch. The JCI joint venture, called JARC, (Jinxiang Automotive Roof Trimming Company) and the GM joint venture, called PATAC (Pan Asian Trim Automotive Company) provide breakfast, lunch and dinner to their employees.
As an employee of JARC, I pay 2 RMB (roughly $0.25) for each lunch. I assume breakfast and dinner are the same. Overall, the food is good especially when you consider that for a 1 dollar, I eat lunch for a week. However, they definitely stress quantity over quality.
Lunch consists of one large bowl of white rice and 5 smaller bowls. The typical offering for the bowls is:
Bowl 1. Meat (usually chicken, pork or fish). It should be noted that they include the bones/fat. For example, when they serve fish, there is often a tail hanging out the bowl or a pair of eye sockets starting back at you. A little un-nerving for some but all good fun for the boy in me. The challenge is eating around the bones with chopsticks. It is as difficult as it sounds.
2. Something that looks like a meat but turns out to be tofu or bean curd or some other mystery substance. This bowl always gets me because it appears to be some juicy beef morsels in a barbecue sauce. I'm always rudely awakened to a soft, gooshy wad of tofu or equivalent.
3. A vegetable - often bean sprouts, spinach, or a noodle
4. Another vegetable - often some veggie that I've never seen before
5. Bowl of soup - eggdrop or a mystery soup that I can't define
Often, I ask the people that I work with what the food is. Frequently, the response is "I don't know the english word for that". That kind of answer always drives me to what I really wanted to know in the first place and I ask, "Well, is it an animal? Was it running around the neighborhood last week?" In China, I've been told that the Chinese make "efficient us" of the animal so I'm always wondering what I'm eating.
Bottom line is that I'm really blessed to have a "free" lunch provided each day.
We've heard wonderful things about the food in Shanghai. On Saturday, we decided to give it a try on our own (Aimee and I were hosted several times for Chinese food when we came to visit). Fortunately, most of the restaurants have full color menus that make it really easy to see what you're asking for. We packed sandwiches for the kids so we could order as we wanted. Here's what we got:
1. Teriyaki Chicken, they were cut into strips.
2. Fried noodles that were packed with vegetables, sauteed onions, and pieces of beef
3. A "hot pot" that had seasoned beef and lots of vegetables on a bed of rice.
4. Fried pork dumplings with soy and sweet/sour sauce.
It was really good and we look forward to trying more soon.
And so Panda Express, Wok In Wok Out, and China Inn are quickly becoming a distant memory. Our only disappointment is that they don't serve crabmeat rangoons here. In fact, my colleagues have never even heard of them!
The pictures are of our day out Saturday. We'll get Christmas stuff up shortly. Hope you and yours had a great Christmas! We shared our Christmas tradition of watching "Elf" with the kids. Anna especially appreciated the idea of putting syrup, M&Ms, sprinkles, and crumbled pop tarts on your spaghetti for breakfast.
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