I will forever dream of the lamb/lamb fat skewers at the first open-air Muslim restaurant across from the entrance to Carrefour in Kunming's main shopping plaza. The grillman there seems like an independent contractor, unaffiliated with the family operation that buzzes around him and unbothered by the shoving masses angling to place their order. You can get skewers from him for one kuai each.

Watching the skewer man brush the skewers wiith oil, douse them generously with a powder consisting of cumin and crushed chilis, and rotate them over his table-top gas grill over and over again while your stomach growls is nothing short of mesmerizing.

My favorite is the alternating combination of lamb and lamb fat. Grilled and spicy, the fat positively melts in your mouth in to a greasy, meaty slick. So good. I of course balanced the meat/grease intake with some grilled dofu squares which have a hard casing and slightly sour taste. These too are of course brushed in oil and covered in spice mixture.

I ordered a 3 kuai bowl of noodles from the same restaurant.

You could choose three different kinds of noodles; I opted for the "rice noodle rolls". The preparer would reach for a giant roll of cooled rice flour dough, and lop 1" segments off the end. The mini-rolls that ended up in the bowl unfurled as flat noodles as the dish was mixed together. Added were pickled scallions, peppers, vinegar, sesame oil and healthy dollop of a chunky peanut sauce. The resulting sauce is salty, sour, and spicy -- a blistering contrast to the soft, doughy noodles. I ordered this many, many times.

To accompany my meal, my friend ordered a bottle of an only-in-Yunnan beverage -- orange drink with bits of pulp floating in it. The pulp didn't so much float as it was suspended in the liquid, reminding me of Orbitz, a funky experimental beverage that debuted (and failed) when I was in college.

The drink was sweet (obviously), and nothing special. The pulp was kind of disconcerting.

Another day, another take on noodles -- on a walk through Kunming's Flower and Bird market, I opted for a dish with similar stylings but a different base. Instead of rice flour roll noodles, this vendor simply took a blob of dough and hacked it into haphazard jagged pieces.

I don't know if these actually qualify as noodles, though they play the same role as noodles. Also in the mix is pickled spicy cabbage (not unlike kimchi, though we were thousands of miles away from the Korean peninsula). And yes... the white stuff is weijing, or the dreaded-by-some MSG. By the way, I read something recently that MSG allergies are completely psychosomatic. Anyone have any opinions?

The aforementioned grilled dofu I had on a stick can be had on any number of Kunming street corners, usually by purchasing it from someone who is balancing a charcoal grill on the back of a bicycle wagon.

Again, I found it a bit sour, and the casing was a bit dry. Though Kunming's population seems mad for it, I wasn't thrilled. The dipping sauce was tomato-y and sweet and hardly dynamic.

These last discoveries were my absolute favorite things. For two kuai, you could have a plate of these babies, which are nothing more than rice pancakes cooked paper thin and wrapped around minced dried mushrooms. I could have eaten plates of these. I do love mushrooms of all kinds, and the earthy, chewy goodness of these was heavenly.

There's so much more to Kunming and it's food. I've barely scratched the surface here.