Chinese Food Daily Diary: Day Three

This is a week long series on the different Chinese food I eat on a regular basis. To start at the beginning, click here. I’m not including breakfast because I eat the same thing, yoghurt, every day so I don’t feel that a picture is necessary. I try to describe the ingredients as best I can, so you can get a good idea of what real Chinese food is like, but often times I don’t even know myself!
Lunch: Today is a quick lunch between classes at a restaurant right outside the front gate of the school. This place fills up and if you get here a little after noon you will probably be turned away for lack of seats. In fact, another teacher and I usually let our class out a little early just so we can get seats. (Shh, don’t tell our boss.)
This is a perfect example of a food that is so much better in China then in the west. I mean a hot plate of steaming white cabbage?! Yuck! But here they throw it in a wok (with some light sauce) add some other veggies and a little pork and the dish is delicious. I think much of the secret of Chinese food is cooking in a wok. The temperature is extremely high but the cooking time is very quick so the veggies don’t get soggy and mushy like cabbage often does.

You can see behind the plate of corn the remains of the cabbage dish. In China food doesn’t come out all at once. Instead it comes out as the dish is made so everything is pipping hot. Of course sometimes that means waiting 15 minutes after your first dish to get your next. At first I was annoyed by this system, but now I prefer it.
This is my all time favorite dish at any restaurant. It is beef and tomato with slices of green pepper. When you order a meat dish in China it is usually quite bony. Most people prefer to grab some meat, chew on it and spit out the bone. (My students said they like their meat crunchy.) I’m not a fan of that at all but finding a solid piece of meat, even a small ones, is difficult. That’s why I like this dish so much. The beef is full meat pieces with no bones! I order it so much they ask if we want it as we sit down.
We ran into some students during lunch too. There are over 18,000 students at the university and I only know about 300 yet I always seem to run into them!
Dinner: Back to the third floor cafeteria, and today I got a set meal.
The main part of the meal was 4 chicken wings. They were covered in a salty sauce that I didn’t really like that much. Also, to avoid chewing on the bones I tried to delicately pick the meat out with my chopstick. It didn’t work very well and overall the meal was a little disappointing. Also included in the set meal is tomato and egg soup, cooked cabbage and a big ‘ole thing of rice.