As I continue to struggle with Mandarin, one of my most prized possessions is a homemade laminated card featuring the English, pinyin and Chinese characters of commonly-ordered dishes.
The card, a gift from a veteran foregin teacher, has already served me well on a number of hungry occassions. When I'm not in the mood to drag out the phrase book and lookup various food words, I just hand the card to the proprietor of the local eatery and point to the dishes I want.
What's on the card? Well, there's "egg and tomato", "spicy shredded potatoes", and "sliced pork and peppers". And then there are my two favorites -- eggplant (qiezi) and sauteed green vegetables (qing cai).
I used the card again for lunch on Sunday in Hukou, a small city 20 minutes from Jiujiang. In search of Poyang Lake, we had ended up in Hukou and were escorted to the grounds of Stone Bell Hill (Shizhong Shan), a beautiful old temple. Following our adventures, we were starving.
I love green vegetables in China. Unlike at home, I always want to eat them here. I don't know why -- maybe it's their leafiness. Or their crunchiness. Or the fact that they remain delicious while retaining their natural nutrients. I think this is because they are sauteed in cooking oil with garlic (as opposed to being steamed). So, qing cai it was!
I love eggplant too. I adore that its velvety texture readily adopts whatever silky sauce it has been cooked in. Though this particular preparation, with finely diced pork, is a quite oily, a bowl of fluffy rice absorbs the oil quite nicely. Today's order of rou mo qie zi (eggplant with meat sauce) was a bit salty, but nevertheless delicious atop our giant rice bowls.
Posted by Astrid at October 17, 2004 05:46 AM