好吃:Hao Chi

Since I've been asked recently about what foods from home I miss the most here in China, I figured I'd mention a bit about the dining and snacking situation in China.

I eat out for nearly every meal here: restaurants are so cheap that it costs about the same for me to cook at home as it does to eat out, and the Chinese food I can buy in a restaurant is much better than Chinese food I could cook myself. Though I'm actually pretty good at cooking Western dishes, it's impossible, unusual, or ridiculously expensive to get many of the ingredients I need. The things that are 找不到 (zhao bu dao, not to be found) in Shenzhen are herbs, spices, and some fruits and vegetables--there's no fresh basil or thyme here, though there's coriander aplenty, and things like cloves or allspice are only available in the foreign import shops, sometimes; artichokes and raspberries are as common as unicorns. A lot of the other common ingredients I'd use at home--things like canned tomato paste or corn, soup mixes, wheat pasta, BBQ sauce, 等等--sell at steep prices here (One can of tomato paste goes for about 8 元; that doesn't sound like much until you consider I can buy a large bowl of egg-and-tomato fried noodles for about the same price). So I end up eating out every night, unless Nersey and his family invite me to dinner or I cook to celebrate some holiday.

The good news about this is that the Chinese food I can get at restaurants is also much better than that I could get back home in the States. Sichuan, Xinjiang and Xian dishes are all spicy--really spicy; back home I'd tried dishes like Kung Pao chicken (here, gong bao ji ding) and been disappointed, but most of the Sichuan places that cook it here manage to make it both spicy and tasty, a skill that eludes most of the stateside cooks. Sichuan cuisine also has a lot of ma la dishes, made with little peppers so spicy your mouth goes numb while you're eating, that are high on my list. The Xinjiang restaurants make a lot of lamb dishes, a lot of noodle dishes, and some of the best barbeque I've ever had: at least once a week, I just eat food on a stick (lamb on a stick, chicken wing on a stick, sliced potato on a stick, mushrooms on a stick, 等等) all grilled with hot pepper and cumin. At the local Xian restaurant I've discovered a dish called 回锅冬瓜 (hui guo dong gua) that's some kind of spicy battered and fried squash; even though it's no longer on the menu, the cooks will still make it for me when the supermarket next door has 冬瓜 on sale.

I do miss some food from time to time, like meatball parmigiana subs, good steaks or gravy, but I rarely get long-term cravings for specific things. Probably the thing that's easiest to miss from home isn't the kind of food as much as convenience: for some extra money and a lot of time, I can eat, say, pasta salad here, but one thing I can't do is go to the supermarket and buy a pint container of pre-made pasta salad. I can buy a decent sandwich at Andes cafe or hunt around for thinly sliced meat at restaurants, shop for bread that isn't sickeningly sweet, take out a loan for some cheese and put together a decent sandwich on my own, but I can't just order an Italian cold cut sub for take-out. In fact, I can't get cold cuts: they just don't have them here. And cheese here is so expensive that I rarely even eat it with crackers, let alone cut it up and put it on a sandwich where I'll hardly taste it.

One thing I don't miss that much anymore is pizza, especially not now. Granted, living above a Pizza Hut makes it hard to miss pizza much, but a few months ago I was getting cravings for good pizza. (The stuff at Pizza Hut just isn't that good--not since the Arabian Nights pizza left the menu--and I'd been getting tired of it.) Ah, but 意想不到, a wonderful thing has happened here in Nanshan! Just as Pizza Hut rolled out its new Olympics themed menu (including the "World Conqueror Pizza")--Jia gave me a brochure for a new pizza place: Champion Pizza, whose incredibly perplexing website apparently hypnotizes people to make them want more pizza. Since trying it, I've developed an out-and-out addiction for it--an addiction largely fueled by the VIP cardholders' deal they offer: two ten-inch pizzas for 57 元. Compared to 78元 for a nine-incher at Pizza Hut, that's almost like getting free food.

So at the moment, the food situation here is pretty good. If anything I think more about the food from here I'll miss when I go back to the States. For example, there are a lot of good eggplant and tofu dishes here (yes, good eggplant, good tofu) that I know I can't get at home.