Reacquainting Myself With Chinese Food

A very high proportion of Chinese that immigrate abroad are from the Guangdong province. As a result, most Chinese food found overseas and especially in the U.S. has Cantonese undertones. I have been deceived all these years with flavors I thought to be universal in Chinese cooking. However, in the Hebei province, I might as well be eating in Russia or some other foreign land. It is so different. Everything is almost always a little spicy, seasoned or pickled cold dishes are common, wheat (noodles and bread) dominates over rice, hearty dumplings are often eaten as meals, and peanut sauce is as much a staple as Cantonese soy sauce.

UPDATE [5/17]: Below is lunch at the English teacher's office. The dumplings all have different  fillings like egg, rice noodle, and mushroom or celery and pork.  You can also request different colored skins just for kicks. The tin dish contains spicy eggplant.

Hot pot or xia bu xia bu is one of the more popular dishes that peanut sauce goes well with when mixed with garlic and cilantro. 

To be honest, I'm not a big street food person, but it is easier to order for me since I can see exactly what goes in to it.  I have still had some disappointments though, so I stick to the basics.  A typical late breakfast for me is usually fresh soy milk, man tou (a flavored bread roll), and a baked sweet potato.

Of course there are snacks too. These are candied crab apples and other fruit.

 These fresh apples at the market bear the mark of their orchard.  I thought the sticker was pretty nifty.

There is also a small population of Islamic Chinese in Qinhuangdao which I suspect might also be Uighurs.  I stumbled across them because they run some of the cleaner dining establishments that serve laghman or lamian in Chinese which means "pulled flour".   They go light on the grease and hardly ever use MSG.  Plus, it's amazing to watch while they pull a block of dough briskly in to perfectly formed noodles to be stir fried with a light topping of vegetables and meat.

Although by the coast, in Qinhuangdao red meat is an important staple to most meals. When my parents visited earlier in April, my mother had a hankering for lamb which is a common livestock in Hebei.  Below lamb slices are served lightly battered and fried with hot sauce and mustard.

At Shanhaiguan we stopped to get skewers of chicken, lamb, and beef tendon. To the right is a cold dish of almonds, cucumber, and tomato.  The soup in the forefront was a deliciously new combination of risotto-like dough pellets, egg, and tomato.

At first I tried to avoid Western food, but now I actually find it interesting to see the Chinese interpretation.  Below is a European inspired buffet establishment that brews it's own beer and also incorporates the Brazilian table-side meat carving service.  However, they don't have the red and green signal piece so you have to make sure to tell severs to skip you when you're stuffed or they relentlessly fill your plate.