How do you know when you are eating real Chinese Food?

Pearl Milk Tea was my first taste of China! Well, of course I had Chinese food before, but 2001 was when an actual Chinese introduced me to something Chinese (pearl milk tea) that I wouldn't have tried/known on my own, and was right when I started to get interested in China.

Quick answer about the pearl milk tea: yes, it's everywhere in Taiwan. Most streets have a couple of tea stands, and a typical menu has around 50 different kinds of tea, hot or iced. Big pearls, small pearls, almond, mint (which I had yesterday--like mint ice cream, but with a straw!), vanilla, caramel, wulong, green, black, lemon, countless fruit cordials, and so on. Fantastic.

I've never noticed a chain called "Easy Way", but there are lots of chains based in different parts of the country.

;) I've been painting my place all day, so maybe the fumes have gotten the best of me!

you ok Brent?

You know you're eating Chinese food when you're in a state of satiety or when you want to eat more despite being full and being unable to continue eating. I feel so bad not finishing every Chinese dish that I've eaten.

That is so bizarre....oh well, sorry. I had written some history and other info. about "bubble tea", but everything I wrote after the characters does not show up in the post.

珍珠奶茶

Interesting...where did the rest of my post go????

Luke, the drink you're talking about is called 珍珠奶茶

Just curious about something to do with a certain phenomenon in Australia.. there are these drink places called "Easy Way", which are Milk Tea sellers.. It says on the side of their cups that is based in Taiwan and I was wondering if it is just a gimmick or whether it is actually an extremely common thing in China and Taiwan?

They have Milk Tea (basically Iced Tea with Milk) and then there's the "Pearls" which are jelly balls in the Milk Tea and there's other jelly "toppings" as well and all sorts of weird and wonderful things that, to a westerner, seem extremely odd. I've seen the Aloe Vera jelly drinks around for a while and always just considered them to be some sort of health drink rather than a popularised drink.. but I actually frequent these Easy Way places a lot now because the Sesame Milk Tea has quite a nice and unique flavour.

Any comments?

When your good Chinese friend invites you to her home and prepares soup of dried fish stomach and bird's nest which she swears are the secret to her beautiful skin and makes you drink every drop!

When your host serves "dessert" and you find various fresh fruit in front of you rather than something sweet!

briana, how about rice porridge and grease sticks for breakfast, rice and dishes for lunch, and noodles or hot pot for dinner.

This would vary regionally, but I think the Chinese also think of typical breakfast, lunch and dinner foods.

oh yah...and to join in to the theme..

when you can't really see a significant difference in the meals for breakfast lunch and dinner!! (like in America, we normally think of cereal and pancakes as a breakfast food, sandwhiches as a lunch item, and steak as a dinner item...in China, there isn't much significance to the time of day that you each a certain item! --not that i ONLY eat cereal for breakfast or anything anyway...but there's still that thought corollation going on...hehe

oh! and when dessert is eaten WITH the dinner!! such as cake with whatever other dishes they have! (that was a reaaaally weird thing for me! to mix up the sweet CAKE flavor with something such as gong bao ji ding!! weeeeird!! haha)

this list could go oooonnn & ooonn!!!

luzdelmundo- there are MANY types of jiao zi (dumplings)... most are categorized by the types of meat in them (ie: pork, beef, chicken, or fish) some places will give you the name of the meat as well as one other vegetable. My favorite jiao zi is "韭菜鸡蛋" (jiu cai ji dan) which i think in english means chives(?) and eggs. There are also different styles of cooking them. Usually when you order jiao zi, you will get "shui jiao" (meaning that it was boiled in water). My favorite is "zheng jiao" which is a steamed dumpling. You can also get fried jiao zi, (which is actually the most popular form in Hawaii--we call it fried wonton but of course it's different than the real chinese version!) In China, you would usually make fried jiao zi from leftover jiao zi... You could order them fried, but it didn't seem too common to eat fried jiao zi all the time... at least, not in Harbin. We only fried the leftovers of our other jiao zi for breakfast the next morning or something...ENJOY!! =)

When over the course of two meals you eat all of the following: Beef, chicken, chicken feet (that's definitely separate!), duck, frog, shrimp, fish, tripe (the lining from a cow's stomach), and other things you still don't know the names of. My midwestern-US family still can't believe the things I'll eat! :- D

yep, chicken's feet are like tiny dried hyper-anorexic drumsticks. :-). You suck on them in between swigs of beer. The good news is that if you belong to weight watchers, the point total for a pair of chicken's feet is only 3.

luzdelmundo, there is indeed not much to eat on chicken feet. I think it is more what they put on. They come with all sorts on spices on them and all sorts of ways to prepare them (cooked in soup, pickled, fried ? ... I am not so sure). And then you sort of gnaw off the skin of the chicken feet. It's the spices that make it tasty, definitely not the cardilage-like bone tissue of the actual chicken feet.

light487, I hope they were in fact Mandarin speakers. Around here most Chinese restaurants are run by Cantonese speakers.

I'm being taken out to dinner by my girl tonight to an authentic Chinese mainland restaurant. I'll leave the toilet paper at home though... be interesting to see how things go. I'm a little bit too scared to actualyl try ordering in Mandarin but my ears will be wide open and listening to everything that gets said. :)

you are right gesang. Absolutely right.

light- youll be noticed all right. Pack away. :-)

Well maybe we should appreciate the paper isn't stored in the restrooms... maybe you'll be better off carrying your own little pocket pack :-)...

No question loving China RJ, i think the beeing different and appearing strange or abnormal things are the ones which will always rawaken my fascination!

Good to know for if I ever go to China... pack lots of rolls toilet paper... and by the sounds of it I can use the toilet paper for any purpose I like, including at the dinner table. :) I'll look like a millionaire at the table with my 4-ply, floral-printed, lavender-scented toilet paper!! :) haha

WY, GS,

I am usually not so fortunate as to get a "roll". I am usually presented with those little shirt pocket sized packs of low grade "kleenex". The kind that sticks to your face if you really need it. I guess these "convenient" pocket packs are popular for exactly the reason you mentioned - there rarely is any paper to be found in the restrooms. Nevertheless, I love China. Go figure.

wildyaks - at least when i had "hot pot" i was quite happy to have paper on a roll...need the whole roll with all that oil everywhere ;-)...

...when you DON'T get fortune cookies.

...when tiny shreds of bark-like meat float happily in your vegetarian(!) tang1.

...when you're served about 1 kilo of rice because you ordered several dishes to get a balanced meal, but somehow messed up during the ordering process

Two questions to the Chinese cuisine savvy: How exactly do you eat chicken feet (Judging by the looks of them I doubt that any part of them is edible)?

In which variants are those lovely dumplings available?

maybe "we" (the non-Chinese citizens) need to be educated on how to use the various papers?

Gesang, RJBerkiWhat's wrong with the paper on a roll (toilet paper) on the table? Do you ever see that in Chinese toilets? If there is paper at all in the public toilets there are paper dispensers and they tend to be more in the shape of what we might use for serviettes/napkins.... It's a strange world!

RJ, but thats the mystery of it...they DO sell all kind of paper towels in the supermarkets..maybe good PR explaining how and where to use would do it ;-).

I crossed the 40 jiao3zi barrier once (sorry no Hanzi on the work computer). It wasn't intentional and took the better part of an afternoon (plus a couple of big Hans Beers).

That was the day I learned about the liang (is it 4th tone?) as a unit of measure. I was a real newbie and on my own in Xi'an...great jiao3zi. I wanted 8 pork and 8 vegetable.

The owner asked: ni3 yao1 ji3 liang4?

I assumed liang was a measure word for jiao3zi.

(I think there are 10 liang to a jin)

There was quite a stir when 2 heaping plates of dumplings came out of the kitchen.

I went back to the place a number of times and always got a few laughs out of my mistake.

Rich, if you ask my wife, she will tell you that happened a long time ago. ;)

Also, wolson, just have to comment on your nice avatar of gears turning in the mind... yet what would happen if I were to throw a few new chinese characters into the gear there? ha ha... just had to visuallize it.

CRRRUUUNCH...ERRRCH....CLUNK.

In response to the first response to this post, to what light487 wrote, it is kind of funny that I was at a somewhat cheap Chinese buffet in the States (in Idaho), like $5 a person, and I saw they were serving chicket feet! I eat them, but not a big fan, but thought I couldn't pass up this opportunity to eat them so far away from China.

So as I was picking two feet out of the pot (they kind of looked strange, really red from the sauce or dye, but were chicken feet none-the-less) a woman saw me picking them out. She came up to me and said, "Are those really chicken feet?" I think I replied something like, "Uh, no, they are something else made to look like chicken feet..."

(How and WHY would you make something look like chicken feet?)

When you go alone to restaurant and can't figure out how many dishes to order:

In China unlike the Chinese restaurant meal in the US, every dish is ala carte. To get a rounded meal you have to order several dishes. I like to get some meat, some vegetables, some soup and a starch. That is the beginning a feast in China because every dish they bring will feed at least four people. The food is cheap and it doesn't cost you much but is seems to be such a waste.

When ever you pick up your glass to sip a drink, someone raises theirs and challenges you to"Gan bei!"

In the US, I have a habit of eating a little and drinking a little. In China, it seems people drink very little with their meal unless... and then it is more drinking than eating!

When your host spoons food on to your plate a second time because you were polite and ate the first big helping of something would avoid on your own:

At one meal, my host put a quater of a fish onto my plate. It was horrible: it was the muddiest fish that I have ever eaten in China. My hos tthis was a famous fish from the Yangtse River. I normally like fish in China but this was so bad even the Chinese weren't eating it. But I respectfully ate it. When it came around on the lazy susan a 2nd time he again puts another quarter fish on my plate. I would much rather eat sea cucumber that this damn fish!

Henning,

At least the Chinese dont eat those eggs containing embyos, do they? What do they call this in the philipines? Balut?

I love the dumplings also. Im sure I have at least approached the 40 dumpling limit. I especially love the xiaolongbao. I call them "dragon balls". As an aside, I just heard the other day that Andre the Giant (the wrestler) once drank 110 beers before dinner and then had wine with dinner. He weighed in at 500 lbs, but still an achievement. As a beer lover, I thought you might appreciate that.

And to follow up on gesangs comment - why are there no paper towles or legitimate napkins in China? I do get tired of wiping with tissue paper. They seem oblivious to this deficit. I am used to it now but it was one of the smaller culture shocks. Maybe we could start a paper towel business in China. I wonder if they would sell.

when you hope the fruit comes fast because you can't eat any more!

I am going to far too many hosted banquets. I can never tell how much food is going to show up on the table. I try to be polite and eat a little of everything but at some point it just gets to be too much! The waitresses keep piling the dishes on dishes.

when the jaozi never stop coming:

In Shanhaiguan, North of Qinhuangdau, (yes, I know everyone knows where that is, :) ) we had lunch at a very good Chinese restaurant. I was with my Teaching Assistant who is Chinese and handled the ordering. When the jiaozi came at the end of the meal, they were huge, bigger than your fists. And they kept bringing them to us. Henning, if you can eat 40 regular sized ones, you might get to 15 of these!

when the orange juice for breakast is hot:

Speaking of chicken feet: At Wuhan, my hotel was on the campus of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. This was a classic Chinese hotel: in the dim sum area at the head of the buffet table were these these plates in steamers with something I took for perhaps breaded fried meat... I was wrong! They were chicken feet and they were very good. And yes, the orange juice was hot!

Ahh, henning, my respect for you (already very high) has just increased 100-fold because of how you wrote about your wife's cooking. So nice!

我没说谎。

最可怕的是第一次吃过饺子只吃十个就抱了。

不过我妻子的饺子的确是太诱人 。。。欲罢不能！

henning ah, 真的嗎？四十個饺子！你真的吃了那麼多嗎？

...when you are getting scared because you just have passed that 40-饺子-barrier which according to the laws of physics can by no means be crossed by a human being...

rjberki: I had the "drunken shrimp" also - in San Fransciso (where we stayed with Chinese friends). It was pretty bad, but believe me the chicken embryo I had several years later was a lot worse.

Correct ratio above to 1 to 4

Meat - bone in - chopped to bit size.

Ratio of Meat to veggies - 3 or 4 to 1.

Sauce - light - usually oil based (often with soy sauce) - does not over take the above. Key starters can be onions, garlic, ginger.

Seasoning - depends on region of origin.

怕不辣

If there is toilett paper placed on the restaurant table, sometimes in funny colourful dispensers... (which is most likely not to be found in the toilett (if there is one)(in the same street)).

When your hosts order food that they expect you to eat but dont touch themselves: eg sea cucumber

Think i first saw a bowl of chicken soup looking back at me in China.

when you think, " Gee, I've never seen rice that color before...and in that shape!"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/azerdocmom/2372314035/in/set-72157604313412786/

when you realize that Bull "whip" is on the menu and you pray you havent already eaten it.

when you notice the antennae of the lobster at the table are moving back and forth and you have only had 2 beers.

when the "drunken shrimp" you are about to eat are still swimming in the alcohol.

when they give you clear plastic gloves with which to eat goose feet the size of human hands drenched in orange colored sauce. UH, more beer please.

when people can tell that you have eaten 火锅 (huoguo hotpot) because of the smell your clothes are emitting

When the chicken is swimming in blood

When you can't see the meat for the bones, or you can't take a mouthful of fish without choking on a thousand bones

When you have plate with fried chicken feet, you know you are eating real Chinese food. :p