Friday 21 September

Gan Su Restaurant with the outside
noodle boilers where I had dinner 

The noodle-maker drawing
noodles by hand

Things are settling into a bit of a routine now, and I taught the First Year classes for the first time today – they have had orientation for the last 2 weeks.

I am now teaching 5 days a week, 18 periods to 7 different classes. With the amount of class preparation required, and using 3 different textbooks, there is not a lot of spare time.

However the food adventure continues. I have been exploring some of the local restaurants and food stalls adjacent to the college. The evenings are full of the smells of cooking food and students carrying packages back to the dormitories.

The noodle-maker shaving
dough straight into the pot of
boiling water on the outside
of the restaurant

I have become a regular visitor to the Gan Su (near Xin Jian, western China) restaurant with the outside noodle boilers where I had dinner last week. This is mainly because they have photos of the dishes on the wall which I can point to – and of course their meals are great.

The very popular Kao Bin stall

There is one street food stall where they bake a flat bread (Kao Bin) in a type of tandoori oven. The soft wet pancake is stuck to the inside of the oven by hand,  and pulled off with long metal tongs when cooked a few minutes later.

They are very thin, and filled with a mixture of minced pork, a black preserverd vegetable, chilli, and dusted with chopped scallions (what we call echalottes or green onions). Because they are baked, they use very little oil and taste fantastic. It’s very popular and there is always a crowd waiting. Each one costs 2 Yuan, about 30c.

The cafeterias (both levels) continue to serve interesting meals. Although some I still haven’t attempted, like the mini snails, there are others which have been great.

It’s a bit like a lottery every day – you go and literally take pot luck. The other evening they had delicious small curried chicken kebabs (about 5 cm long) on a bed of steamed soya beans and a tasty shredded vegetable salad in a Vietnamese style (unfortunately including cucumber & corriander, two of my least favourite vegetables!).

Another selection from the breakfast
menu

The inside of the sesame ball

And the breakfasts. In this part of China the traditional breakfast is dumplings and they have an immense variety each day, not just dumplings, but other things made with dough such as pancakes and ‘pockets’. 

The photo shows another selection I picked up the other day – enough for breakfast and lunch.  They were: a scallion pancake, slice of a type of pizza, a wrap with potato noodles & vegetables inside, 3 mini baked dumplings with minced pork , a steamed pork dumpling and a sweet, deep-fried sesame ball. The sesame ball was made of a sweet clear glutinous dough (possibly rice flour) and sprinkled inside with some black stuff that I could not identify. Looked scary but tasted OK.