This is a tonghulu display stand. If you see one of these, you have to pull over and get one. Tonghulu is essentially a skewer of hawberries that have been pitted, cooked, skewered, and rolled in melted sugar with sesame seeds. This tasty treat is especially exciting because hawberries are fairly tart, and are a bit intense to eat by themselves. But once they are soft and sugary they are delicious. Each skewer costs 2 Yuan. That's 32 cents. Can't miss the good deals. They make tonghulu with different ingredients like tomotoes, grapes, potato thingies, kiwis, and more, but none are as good as the hawberries.
Here's Alicia lookin' cute with some tonghulu.
This is something we discovered just last week. Our adventure in discovering this food was fun because the cooking area and eating area were very dark and we could not see what we were eating very well. Luckily, it tasted delicious. According to our survival book, this dish is called choamien, or in other words chow mein. This dish of noodles cost 7 yuan: just over 1 dollar.
These are the dudes that were cooking the noodles for the chow mein. Don't let the flash from the camera fool you, there was very little light available. Fortunately, I took a picture at the perfect moment for you to see what is happening here. If you look closely, each noodle is being hand-carved out of a slab of noodle dough. These guys are so fast at carving noodles, that they are halfway done with the next noodle before the previous noodle even has time to think about it. The noodles fly straight off the slab into a huge pot of boiling water and are ready to eat in about 3 minutes. That's fast food.
This is a dish that we've only found from this one guy near the shopping mall. He takes some noodles, adds an egg, some red sauce, onions, cilantro, chops it all up, and puts it in a bowl. It's a tasty snack for 3 yuan: roughly 50 cents.
We often eat the previous snack with a meat-filled biscuit. It's a flaky round pita-thing that comes with your choice of unidentifiable meat and spices. Although I've never had a meat pie, I imagine this is very similar. This biscuit runs you 4 yuan; thats roughly 50 cents.
I know we've showed you something similar to this in a previous post, but this is a different guy. He cooks your choice of vegatables and meat that have been prepared on skewers. We always load up on potato slices, mushrooms, zucchini, cabbage, and tofu-wrapped mushrooms and green onions.Every once in a while I will splurge and get a stick of chicken, (at least I think it's chicken) and he puts it in a bun that resembles a large english muffin. Alicia likes to see it as her Chinese Taco because she is so desperate for mexican food. He fries them up on his mobile grill, conveniently located on the back of his scooter and slathers them with oil, sauce, and seasonings before sloppily smashing it all between the buns. Two of these tacos runs us 10 yuan: about a buck sixty.
This dude always has piles of grilled orange meats. We've never purchased anything from him. We just like him because he always laughs when he sees us, and we laugh when we see him. He looks like the perfect guys to be grillin' all day every day. Keepin' it grilllll.
This is also something that we never purchased, but we just want you to know that this gigantic fruitcake is not an illusion. We had to beg the lady who was gaurding it to let us take a picture. I don't think she understood what I said, but she finally gave in when I told her she would be famous in America.
Someone was selling bundles of red chilis on the side of the road and the color of the chilis was so vivid that we had to stop and take a picture.
Although this picture may look a little creepy, I am enjoying the broth from a very cheap and large bowl of lo mein. We stopped in at a little restaurant in the Muslim community of Cangzhou and just pointed at whatever the people at the other table were eating. It was a lot like eating chicken noodle soup. It has cilantro and a few small pieces of meat. It was fascinating to watch them make the noodles for lo mein. They are cut and stretched minutes before cooking, and stretched in such a way that they noodles are one continuous strand of never-ending awesomeness. It makes the noodles so much fun to eat. A large bowl costs 5 yuan: about 80 cents.
As a parting note, it is important to remember that this sign, which is prohibiting spitting, is a very necessary warning in China. You have to keep careful watch of where you are to avoiding stepping into the line of fire.
Here is a quick video tour of just one of the many chinese food alleys. Feel free to watch it 1080p to get all the nitty gritty details.
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