China, Part II: And now for something completely different.

Now that you're oriented (no pun intended) to our China trip, we can dig more into the food. Our journey took us to three fairly distinct parts of the East Coast: Hong Kong was farthest south, Ningbo and Shanghai more central, and Beijing up north. Not surprisingly, we ate different things everywhere.

We also ate different things everywhere. When I go to Chinese restaurants in America, I have a problem: I don't read much Chinese (I easily 10xed my character recognition during our trip), and I don't recognize the English descriptions of the dishes I like. So I usually end up crossing my fingers and listing seven or eight dishes I'd like to eat and hoping they're on the menu -- so far, I have a pretty decent hit rate. In China, my parents took care of all the ordering, so we were in good hands. Of course, while we enjoyed plenty of the classics, we got to try some very different foods I'm pretty sure I'll never find in the U.S. Today's post is a round-up of the most new (and unusual) things we tried.

Hong Kong

There wasn't much shocking in Hong Kong...delicious for sure, but overall mostly familiar. Searching my 1000 food photos (no exaggeration), I found this little guy, a black sesame glutinous rice dumplings rolled in peanut dust (at the Jumbo Floating Restaurant, where my grandfather used to take important clients to lunch):

We have only ever had them in soup before - these were delicate and had that wonderful nutty flavor from the black sesame.

Ningbo

We had so many dishes (and fishes) which I have no idea how to translate to English...my mom kept saying, anxiously, "I'm not sure you'll like the food in Ningbo," and we didn't understand what she meant until we got there. The food was delicious, don't get me wrong -- but when food comes to the table in Ningbo, it's often intimidating: benign-looking fish are filled with bones, and pretty much everything else has a shell (or two) you have to fight in order to get through to the succulent prize within.

Tiny freshwater fish (my cousin showed us a technique where you basically push the meat gently off the bones, lining up your chopsticks parallel to the spine/perpendicular to the bones; any other method was sure to win you a spiky mouthful)...Nick couldn't resist the progressive photos ending with a truly cartoonish -- if also a tad macabre -- head and tail:

Tiny snails:

The aforementioned "blood cockles":

(Evidence of) shell-in peanuts, shell-in shrimp:

But not everything was intimidating! We discovered a new dumpling which takes the best of a chashu bao/BBQ pork bun (a soft, fluffy yeast bread exterior) and a potsticker (gingery pork and cabbage filling, crispy fried bottom) and marries them into something called sang zin man tao, literally translated to "raw seared bread," AKA a rival so exquisite they could potentially dethrone xiaolongbao/soup dumplings from the top spot:

Shanghai

We zipped up the coast by train to Shanghai, where we ate our weight in xiaolongbao but also found some new dishes of interest....

An amazingly subtle and delicate sweet soup with fermented rice (slightly sour), mini black sesame dumplings and suspended gwai fa: a gorgeous, sweet golden-orange flower which was everywhere in Ningbo (the streets were pleasantly perfumed with their light scent):

And here are the flowers from the tree-lined streets of Ningbo:

A crazy-looking fried fish with sweet-and-sour sauce, which I took to calling "porcupine fish" instead of learning the proper name (oh well, another dish I'll never be able to recognize on an American menu). It's kind of like a bloomin' onion, except it's fish...they cut it such that when they deep fry it, it blooms into this glorious pouf of crispy spikes:

Beijing

Another high-speed train later, we arrived at our last stop. More to come on one of my absolute regional favorites, lamb hot pot, but the most exotic dishes we ate in Beijing were all at a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant specializing in Imperial-style cuisine. I had never tasted more interesting and curious flavors in Chinese cooking before; it was all served omakase (the chef sent out whatever he wanted) and tapas-style.

Cold appetizers (from left to right, top to bottom): pork belly, bonito-dusted cucumber, pickled carrots, wasabi napa cabbage, an electric green soy-based cake, poached chicken with some kind of sauce, and the dark horse, chicken liver mousse (I literally said, "Try the grey stuff...it's delicious!")

No joke, over 20 dishes came to the table (see fried fish photo below). Maybe it was because we had climbed the Great Wall that day and were exhausted, but we put it all away without much trouble. A few other highlights included an unbelievable, crispy-skin pork belly served over hot sticky rice with a perfectly balanced soy sauce:

A crispy fried fish (center plate; it was so perfectly cooked that you could literally eat the fins...and we did):

And for dessert, tiny, tart fruits poached in jelly (Mom and Dad said they were something like crab apples), a refreshing and crisp finish to our huge meal:

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We were so fortunate to try all of these amazing new dishes...we got over the intimidation factor pretty quickly and dug into everything with gusto. If I think back thirteen years ago to when Nick and I started dating, never would I have imagined how readily he would embrace this experience. As I said to him one night, "You know you’ve come a long way when the most familiar and comforting-looking dish on the table is head-on shrimp."