Everyone in America wants to really know how the food is in China. Is it like Panda Express? No. In fact, I'm sure any Chinese travelers visiting America would find Panda Express insulting.
My opinion: The food is incredible! I really could eat it (and use chopsticks!) all the time. I got pictures of most of the significant meals we experienced, but some were so delicious that I gobbled it down without thinking to take a picture! Noodles, rice, and vegetables really are a staple and, in Shangri La, it seems that yak meat is too. On the plane and in Kunming & Lijiang, we definitely had some exciting food experiences, and here are some photos of those.
This is not Chinese food:
This is simply airplane food. Definitely not my favorite eating experience, but doable. The bread had a sort of plastic taste to it, but the butter seemed to fix that. The rice was just fine (how do you mess up rice?), but the chicken kind of creeped me out. Hard to describe. China airlines was nice enough to feed us this strange tasting airplane food twice on our flight over, and once more on our hopper plane. So we were fed three times in an estimated 17 hours. The breakfast on our hopper plane consisted of some sort of seafood (for me) or chicken alfredo noodles with vegetables. It worked.
Chicken & Vegetable Mission
This was our first REAL Chinese meal! Our friend recommended this place to us in Kunming and, ignoring its hole-in-the-wall appearance, the food was delicious! They brought out a little platter with unidentified vegetables and roots on it and you were to dump the whole plate and any spices you wanted into the broth, noodles, and chicken. I added their spicy chili paste and it was incredible! The cockroaches on the wall could not lower my opinion of this little restaurant.
Do you think they gave me a big enough bowl?? Unfortunately for one of my fellow travelers, he ordered some seemingly simple chicken here and it came out cold and in weird chunks. But my other friends enjoyed their potato chips, white rice & fried rice, so it's full marks for the little Kunming restaurant!
Train Station Cream Bread
Before embarking on our 10 hour train ride to Lijiang, someone in our group picked up some tasty cream bread for a snack. Yum! It tasted like coconut bread biscuits and their tiny size was perfect for train snacking. Good find!
Peanut Drink
This cool little drink was like a sip of liquid peanut butter! Anyone who knows me knows that I am a peanut butter addict, so this was amazing. You can't drink too much of it because it's really filling, but it's so creamy & delicious that it's hard to resist. I wonder where I can find this in the states...
Chicken Rice Noodle Breakfast
Once we made it to Lijiang around 5am, we wandered out into old town for a while before experiencing a more traditional Chinese breakfast - noodles! And yes, this actually is chicken. It looks like beef, but it's little chicken cubes. Most of the chicken bits were yummy, but the noodles and the broth were fantastic. I never thought to have noodles for breakfast before, but I find it quite genius. This was another tiny hole-in-the-wall place, but it was very crowded and popular. Two little kids from another family shared one of our tables because there were so many shoved into the tiny restaurant. As you walked up to the doorless hotspot, a bbq filled with roasting tofu and some sort of green dumpling dessert covered in sesame seeds greeted you.
As a side dish to this wiggly breakfast, we were also served boiled dumplings. Dumplings - potstickers, dumplings, whichever you prefer to call them - are so delicious! I've always loved Americanized potstickers, but they were usually from a frozen bag and fried. Boiled fresh in China is much better (but the pan-fried ones we had later on in our adventure were just as scrumptious!).
Hot Pot
Now THIS was cool. In the center of a giant, round table sat this boiling pot of broth and meat. Meat: Donkey & Mutton (lamb). The donkey tasted like beef and the mutton was a little squishy. I definitely prefer the donkey. As the meal went along, all kinds of fascinating vegetables were added to the pot. Taro, lotus, potatoes, elephant ear fungus (mushroom), bok choy, lettuce, and a few others. It boiled and cooked until the veggies were all tender. It was all delicious!!
Each person was given a small bowl of this cilantro and walnut mixture. You were supposed to add some of the broth to it and then dip your meat and veggies into it. Cilantro makes everything taste better, so the combination was so flavorful. Definitely an experience to remember.
There were many other foods we experienced in these two cities - Chinese KFC, Chinese Pizza Hut, Naxi fry bread, Chinese yogurt with mango - and overall it was a tastebud-tickling good time. Why can't American food culture be this interesting?
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