Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Misery Loves Company

Chinese people are great. They are very proud of their heritage and extremely hospitable. When you combine the two, you end up eating out at some really cool restaurants. When I visited Chongqing (about 2 hours west of Shanghai by plane), the local engineers explained that this was the home of Sichuan food (spicy). I knew I was in for a treat. And that was true for 80% of the meal. Read on.


Clockwise from top left: (1)Rabbit with very hot peppers (Xin Yi explained as I grabbed one of the green-colored peppers, "Don't eat that!!!" After we were finished, I did try one and paid the price for several minutes.) Delicious was the rabbit though. (2) Green vegetable of some sort. Neutral flavor but good for killing off the burn from the green-colored pepper. (3) Kong Pao Chicken - Kong Pao Chicken originated here. It was quite different than the Americanized version. Very good.


My camera phone does not have the greatest picture quality so this picture of some fish soup does not really represent the colors present. Those are bright red peppers floating on the surface. The waitress skimmed those off before we started dishing out the fish. It was also very good. There were a couple of other dishes that I did not photograph including a pile of angus beef chunks with onion. I'm looking forward to visiting to Chongqing again except for this next item.
And then there was the proverbial "terd in the punchbowl". I can count on one hand the number of times when I had to turn down food that was put in front of me while living in China. And that's pretty good for a foreigner. And I did actually take 2 "bites" of this before I grossed myself out. I guess this goose foot is also very famous in this part of the country. Eating goose foot is one thing. But when I noticed the goose foot had it's webbed feet fully intact, I gagged. And when I saw my new friends, maowing down on the webs themselves, I nearly re-introduced my kong pao chicken to the dinner party.

And thus the title of this post. I really can't get the foot out of mind. A flock of them were chasing in my dreams last night. Ugh. Sweet dreams blog readers. Come again soon!!!

(Maybe I should start a stomach scale for the blog:
G - Good to read
PG - Pretty Good to read
R - Read at your own risk)


2 comments:

GloryBabies3 said...

I think I'm gagging just looking at it...shudder.

Emily said...

Wow.....