Eat like a local

So I’ve already covered Hotpot, but food in general here has been pretty good and I wanted to share some of our favorite things with you.

 Every morning I get these noodles for breakfast, and it’s gotten to the point that if I can’t get them… my day is a little ruined.  They are onion oil noodles and they have soy sauce, msg, green onions, and hot onion oil on them. I then add a healthy dose of hot pepper oil to it as well.  This is the breakfast of champions. To top it off, this day I got a pork bao. It is a pork sausage with some sauce stuffed inside a bun and then steamed.  It’s a little fluffy meat cloud of happiness.  Some days instead, there’s fried rice- but I didn’t get any pictures of that.

On really special days, when the stars and moon align, or for some other reason I can’t figure out,  they have dumplings for breakfast. Never for lunch, never for dinner, only very rarely for breakfast.  And if you come early- no dumplings, and if you come late- no dumplings. It’s small window-but when you get lucky,  heaven!

And the really cool part is- both of the meals pictured- cost me $1 USD. That’s it- $1.

This ^ is one of our favorite dinners. So on campus there is the regular dining hall, and then there is a Halal dining hall. This soup is from the Halal.  It’s a beef broth, with pieces of lamb, tons of noodles, and green onions and cilantro. All the red stuff you see is hot pepper oil I like to add to almost everything.  The guy who runs Halal has 3 little girls who run around campus- one is 9, one is 6 and one is 5, but in Chinese years. Here in China, you add the 9 months you were utero to your age. So Alex is 7 in the US but he’s 8 here in China.  Alex has made friends with them and they all four run amok and teach each other English and Chinese.

 Mark is such a good sport letting me use pictures of him for the blog- I really wanted to get a scale of how big the bowl of noodle soup was and how big the bread was, and this is what he gave me.

So with the bread and the noodles, this meal was a whopping $3USD.  And like the dumplings, some days when everything aligns and appeases the food gods, halal does kebabs, and they are good! They also take the lamb from kebabs and use it as a dumpling filling- so many good food choices at our dining halls.