Live Wire Blog

Food, food and more food

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Karen Pojmann
Category: Mizzou in China

GUEST BLOG

Move over, Andrew Zimmern

No reservations? Weird food? Pssshaw. Get me on the Travel Channel.

For those of you who don’t spend all your free time watching American cable, [“No Reservations” and “Bizarre Foods”] follow men all over the world as they try interesting/weird foods while learning about that country’s culture.

Tonight I ate: snake, silkworm, chicken heart, banana puffs (like donuts, mmmm) and … SCORPION! My friends ate: seahorse, sea snake, cow stomach and cicada — all of which I was too wussy to attempt. A long day ended with a second trip to the night market downtown, outside of “Times Square China,” or, as I’ve learned to call it, Wangfujing. We made sure to get there early while the vendors were in full force, hawking their goods.

It is mostly interesting fare on a stick, but there are burrito and gyro type things filled with lamb and beef and bok choy as well. You can barter for your food, but once you reach a price, you need to give exact change because most will then just give you two kabobs instead and refuse to give you change.

My system was: Watch Matt eat it on camera, hear his description and see the level of grimace, and then decided whether to help finish the stick. Although the chicken hearts were my idea and purchase, I still let him go first. My camera ran out of batteries before we got to that point of the trip, so I will steal Whit and Eric’s pictures for you to see my proof of awesomeness. -Allison Bennett

That’s too much!

Ever seen the “Price Is Right” and their game “That’s too much!”? Well, that phrase took on a whole new meaning the last couple of days. We had a very special dinner with the President of Renmin University and the newly arrived students from University of North Carolina, who will be joining us for the Olympics. They began the meal with speeches from each of the dignified guests and then began to bring out the food. Now, the normal Chinese dinner is a family style, where you are at a round table with a huge lazy Susan in the middle. All the bowls and plates are in the center, and then you take from each whatever you want. So they bring some cold zucchini sticks, and some gelatin sticks, and some kind of nuts, and beef braised in soy sauce, and chicken soup with cabbage (with bone still in it), and peanut chicken with legs and such included…Peking duck. Spicy chicken with thin green peppers that look like green beans (not good surprise). Stuffed green peppers on a bed of sunny-side-up eggs. Flat fish with veggies. Whole shrimp with the antennas still on. Some kind of corned-like beef with a lot of fat. Rice, of course, though at the end of the meal. Fried bread knots with green onions and oil. Summer squash. Sprouts and greens. Finally for dessert, watermelons and grape tomatoes (how those work together I’m not sure). THAT’S TOO MUCH FOOD! One of our Chinese friends said that if we were six to eight Chinese people, the food wouldn’t have piled up in the middle as it did (we only ate about half the food). -Laura Dotson

To view photos and comments from the reception, check out Beth Arouais’s after-dinner blog post.

What’s for lunch?

I have a feeling that I am going to have a lot of blogs about food. So far no two eating experiences have been the same. On the day we were touring newspapers, we ate at a very expensive “Western” buffet that cost us each 100 Yuan ($15); because of the size of our group we were given a 50 percent discount. It was a very fancy hotel restaurant with chefs and everything. “Western buffet” just means that it is a buffet. Overall, the food was not that good and definitely overpriced, although I was glad I got to try a cold squid salad. For dessert they had ice cream: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, green tea and carrot. I tried the latter of the three and was pleasantly surprised with the green tea ice cream - not so much with the purple carrot ice cream. -Julia Shuck

Tastes like home

The best part about today was lunch. We went to a four-star hotel where there was a huge Chinese-American style buffet. I ate vegetable spring rolls, sushi, fried rice, macaroni salad and banana bread! It was the first time I have been full the entire trip, so I really enjoyed it! Since it was monsoon raining outside tonight, a few of us decided to order pizza from Domino’s. It tasted just like it does at home so it is nice to know that at least that is available if we don’t feel like pig liver or fried eel! -Paige Hansen

American food, made in China

This entry in Lindsay Toler’s blog for the Dallas Morning News describes the Chinese take on American chains such as McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.