Chinese Food Adventures

My food adventures did not end when I left Korea – I have had many opportunities to try new things while in Beijing in Liaoning province, and have added several new meats to my ‘animals consumed' list, including donkey, pigeon, and crocodile. Here are a few of the more memorable dishes that Scott and I tried.

Thousand year egg is an egg that is buried in clay and lime and left to sit for several weeks. The yolk turns a dark greenish-brown, and the white becomes a brown jelly. It looks awful, but it mostly just tastes like egg, surprisingly.


All the guidebooks say you have to try Peking duck while in Beijing, so we did. It’s really tasty! Slices of crispy duck are brought out on a little duck platter (and sometimes the head is thrown in, just for fun as well), and you wrap up duck, leeks, cucumber and sauce in a little flatbread. Quite nice!


At a little street market off of Wangfujing Street, we saw lots of interesting things for sale, including skewered scorpions and starfish. The scorpions on these skewers were still alive and wiggling away...

We were not brave enough to try these.

Another real treat was this delicious spiced garfish!

Korean Food Adventures, part whatever the part it is now.

I realize a lot of the food posts probably make it seem like the cuisine over here is all live octopi and anglerfish and things that are very unusual to the North American palate. While everything is certainly different, not all dishes are as extravagantly odd. Hushik nangmyeon are cold dessert noodles that I have heard are very common snacks in the summertime. There are really thin noodles, cucumbers, radishes, melons, half of a hardboiled egg, and sesame seeds. It is quite tasty and certainly nice at the end of the meal!



The noodles can be challenging to eat, however. Too slippery!

Ok, I need to include one more extravagantly odd dish. Can you guess what the spicy meat on the grill is? Hint: it’s not squid, as we initially thought....

...it’s pig intestines!

Bulnakchi!

I'll just let this video speak for itself.

Korean Food Adventures, Part 3

On days ending with a two and a seven, the Sagang Market just next to our motel hosts a farmer’s market. All kinds of rice, vegetables, and fish are for sale, as well as clothes, shoes, and garden or kitchen tools. I’m always amazed by the variety of fish available!

The fish comes dried, fresh, or on sticks. The red things are dates; we’ve had them in a beef soup (galbi tang) and the flavours actually went really well together.



Some of our food adventures have to do with the unusual product names for certain things around here. Our favourite commercials are for DK, which looks like Mountain Dew, and Pocari Sweat, which is an ‘ion supply drink’. Robin and I decided to give it a go, despite its rather unappealing name.

“I like sweat”? Well, bottoms up!


Pocari Sweat was sweet, but had a distressingly black pepper-flavoured aftertaste. We were not huge fans. But I guess at least it didn’t taste like sweat...

The Korean countryside.

Much of the area around Songsan is rural Korea, and almost every usable bit of land has something cultivated on it. The sun has never properly come out yet since I’ve been here, and as such everything always has this interesting misty or hazy look. On Sunday Robin and I went for a walk along one of the hillsides, on a road that kind of wound through a bunch of little farms.




There don’t seem to be any big ranches, but rather lots of small pens of cattle.



And of course, rice is everywhere. Every rice field has a pang lo, or white crane, although I have not yet been able to catch one on camera.

Songsan is also a big grape-producing area, and there’s a good chance that if you don’t see rice, you’ll see grapes growing instead.

The view from my hotel room looks out on a little vineyard tucked into an unused space, and across the road to the left of this picture is a little garden growing beans, peppers, cabbage, lettuce, and green onions. I suspect a lot of what I eat in the restaurants may come from very close by!

Korean food adventures, part 2

Dinners continue to be an interesting experience each night involving much gesturing and confusion and references to my slightly inadequate phrasebook. The dinner above was a beef and mushroom soup served with purple rice, kimchee, pickles, sesame battered beans, and some sort of turnip-like root vegetable. Very tasty! And also inexpensive – the total cost for this meal was $14 for the two of us.


Besides the anglerfish adventure, my favourite style of meal is galbi (this is pork, or tawe-jee galbi). The raw meat is brought to your table and grilled in front of you. When it’s a little bit cooked, the server holds it up with tongs and cuts it with scissors into bite size pieces. You then take a lettuce leaf (or any other various leaves, including sesame leaves which are my favourite so far) and load it up with sauce, shredded greens, pork, kimchee, or whatever else from the side dishes you feel like eating. Then you fold up the lettuce and attempt to fit the whole heaping pile in your mouth at once.

My favourite of the side dishes so far are the tiny fishes and squids! They are very salty and fishy tasting in the best of ways.

KIMCHEE! I think this is a very fun and sociable way to eat, and I’m actually surprised I haven’t come across any Korean-style restaurants that serve food this way in Canada.

Korean food adventures

So far I have enjoyed Korean food immensely, and there is a lot of fun to be had in not having any idea of what you’re ordering except for its price. Luckily I’m not a terribly picky eater so I’m usually satisfied with whatever I’m brought, and I haven’t found Korean food unbearably spicey.

Songsan has a raw fish street where there’s a bunch of seafood restaurants with buckets and buckets of live seafood out front. The octopi in the lower right corner were attempting to escape. There’s a huge variety of shellfish, including some huge mussel-like things that I’ve never seen before (in this picture, they’re the far left bucket in the middle row). Lots of crabs, clams, snails, oysters, squid, cuttlefish, and even some tanks with fish.

We tried one of these on Sunday and had a very inexpensive shellfish soup. Food is usually cooked at the table either at an inset grill or in a saucepan on a little table burner, like in this picture. Robin is slurping noodles. Eating noodles without slurping is difficult with chopsticks. Note also the presence of the ubiquitous kimchee in the lower right corner.



Here is another typical spread of food (before the main course even arrived) that we had on Monday. The middle dish was a curry pancake of some sort, the white rectangle in the back is a bean curd with soy sauce, and there was salad, mushrooms, cucumber soup, and kimchee.

Our main course was a spicy steamed anglerfish on bean sprouts, garnished with an octopus.

...and by steamed anglerfish, I mean the WHOLE steamed anglerfish...

Robin seemed somewhat discouraged when I pointed out that the fishy-tasting curly wiggly bits were probably its intestines. They did taste ok, although both of us kind of pushed them to the side after that realization.