Food, glorious food!

This will not be the last of my food posts. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why I've waited so long to talk about this, except for the lack of photos and breadth of experience.

Anyway.... as we all know, I like to wander around a little bit. The other night, my wanderings brought me to a market. I won't call it a "night market", because that has connotations of deep-fried scorpions and roasted snake meat that this market was entirely lacking. But it was a market, and it was open at night, unlike the one that's across the street from the hotel where I'm staying.

(Vegetarians beware... The next few paras have descriptions of some of the animal-based foods I saw. Nothing too out of the ordinary for US palates, but if you avoid certain counters at the supermarket, you might want to skip ahead a bit.)

The market was reminiscent of an indoor Farmer's Market -- of course, not like the one at the Ferry Building. This was in a large warehouse, with fruit stands, vegetable stands, prepared food, and so on. In the two markets like this that I've been to, there are fruit and veggie stands in the front, and making up most of the middle of the area. Along the sides, there are vendors selling sausage, noodles, and bread (usually batter-based buns or flatbreads, often fried and occasionally stuffed). And in the back are the butchers and fishmongers. As I wandered into the back of this particular market, off to the left, I saw mounds of shrimp, live crustaceans (crabs reminiscent of East Coast blue crabs and some kind of flat, pale crayfish), and six or seven varieties of fish, all of them smelling sweetly of the water, eyes clear and gills pink.

Not for the first time, I wished I had a stove here to try cooking some of this stuff. Fortunately, I had already eaten, so I wasn't tempted to figure out some way to do it anyway.

The butchers are likewise impressive. Ribs hanging from the top of the stand, other cuts -- including variety meats -- on the counter below. Like the French or the Italians, the Chinese will eat everything but the squeal. (Or cluck, or moo, or what have you.) It's impressive, the lack of waste, and since chicken heads are pretty sparse in the meat department, they're remarkably cheap.

Of course, in a country where labor is still almost free, the cost of producing food is also insanely cheap.

(Okay, I'm stopping with the graphic descriptions of meat.)

It's possible, in fact quite easy and economical, to eat from street carts at least two if not three meals per day. These are nothing like New York street carts, except for the portability. I've seen everything from pre-prepared food held in a cooler (or just out in the open!), to buns steamed over boiling water, to food being fired in one of two full-temperature woks, and everything in between. Between the easy availability of bamboo charcoal to the portability of gas, it's possible to cram just about anything into a cart the size of two side-by-side shopping carts. I've even had (for breakfast) a fried egg, pickled vegetables, and sauce on a bun baked a la minute in a kind of Dutch oven. Most things are wrapped, of course, to go. This means a nigh-infinite number of thin, cheap plastic bags and food that usually has bread wrapped around it, but I've also seen soup go out in a bag, or (for eating nearby) what looks like a storage bowl, wrapped in a plastic bag to save having to wash constantly.

Getting other prepared food is pretty simple, too. Like I mentioned above, the market near the hotel has cold salads and sausage in addition to the fruits and vegetables and so on. Tonight for dinner, I had yu xiang dou fu (fish-flavor tofu), which is actually made without any fish. It was pretty decent -- on a par with the average-quality Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area, only, you know, for 7元, a little over a dollar.

Of course, there's always the supermarket nearby -- Carrefour, that famous French chain store. It's generally a good place to get fruit, though the street markets are pretty reliable for local food -- don't try to find dragonfruit, or even a banana, but apples and pomelos and jujubes (zao) are everywhere, even on the street. And corn is ubiquitous, even roasted at one of the aforementioned street vendors. Same thing with sweet potatoes, or maybe yams -- I'm not a botanist, I just know that they smell tasty and sweet roasted in a big barrel filled with charcoal.

Before anyone asks, I've already tried durian, I like it, but it's a pain to eat, and a bigger pain to find someone to eat the ginormous thing with you. I'll stick to the lesser culinary challenges, like whether or not to eat the membranes of a pomelo. Speaking of which, I have to mention that the pomelo here is nothing like the beast we get in the US. My past experiences with pomelos in the US have been less than satisfactory -- start with a fruit about the size of your head, and wind up with an edible portion that is about the same size and flavor as a grapefruit, only a little more bitter. Here, pomelos have relatively thin skins, so you end up with a sweet, unique-tasting snack for three or four. And the membrane is so thick, you almost have to peel the fruit out of them.

I still haven't had much experience with a proper restaurant. Maybe I'll find a way to work that out soon with one or another of my fellow interns. More when that happens.... or when I have pictures.