Chinese Foods

Hello. =)

Since coming to China I've tried a lot of different foods. It's nice since it's so cheap, but also because a lot of the menus have pictures so if I don't know what something is called, I can just point. ^_^

The main restuarant I eat at is the International Student Cafeteria, and it's also one of the cheapest and safeest since it's more regulated than the street food and some restuarants.

Most of the time, I order one dish and a bowl of rice. My favourite dishes are: Mala dofu, yuxiang qiezi, egg and tomato, green chili pepper and beef, lemon pepper beef, gulaorou, sweet and sour pork... Well there are a lot. mala dofu is the cheapest one and is a plate of tofu in chili and black bean sauce, qiezi is a really nice eggplant dish and gulao rou is a specialty of Hangzhou. It's another pork dish with a sweet chili sauce. I also often order bokchoy and gailan. =D

Another restuarant I go to a lot is the Muslim restuarant, although it tends to be quite a bit saltier. It's nice since they obviously never serve pork which is good for my friend Aly-Shah due to her religion.

They serve lamb and pepper 'pizzas' there. I call them pizzas since the meat and vegetables are served on a pizza style peice of dough, though it is thicker and spiced. It's served in some sort of salty brown sauce, and there is no cheese or tomato sauce on it. They also have a lot of pasta and rice dishes which are delicious! Apart from that we usually order potato shreds and gailan, both of which are better than the foreign student cafeteria's versions.

When my group celebrates some event, we often go to the Muslim retuarant to eat. They have one dish which is a huge pile of chunks of potato and beef on a cookie pan. It's a potato curry thing on noodles, although there is SO MUCH potato topping that the first time we did not even know about the noodles because we couldn't make it through the pile of potatoes. We've never actually been able to finish it though since there is so much and we order other dishes to go with it. =P

There are some restuarants I've been to off campus as well, most of which are near the campus or Trush-mart. They are all more expensive though. The dishes rarely exceed $3 Canadian, but it seems terribly expensive by comparison so we rarely go for treats at them.