Ha! Too bad you can’t read any of it. I know the clever ones will quickly jump to Google Language tools to get some sweet machine translation action going on, so I’ll save you the trouble by posting it below. You’ll notice that it seems to start off well, but as with all my creations, things quickly go south.

My favorite Chinese dishes
Now I do not have a favorite Chinese dishes, but I have a favorite type of cuisine. I think China could very good barbecue is good some West dishes. Last year I came to China. After a night to a bar, my friend introduced me, a simple food. Immediately I really like the. It’s still a little bit of fresh taste very hot. Many foreigners do not like spicy food. But I like spicy food because my mother is Burmese she done me a lot of spicy dishes. Another reason why I like barbecues… Very cheap. I could go in the restaurant barbecues, food, drink beer and only spent 20 yuan. Barbecues in Canada is also very tasty but too expensive.

When I eat barbecue I never buy: 10 Series lamb, five strings of meat, two strings of garlic, a bread, and a bottle of Tsingtao or Gill. Occasionally I buy: String potatoes, pork Series, and rice. Rare Series with my children I drank pot liquor. I know your thinking, you think I am crazy. On! I am crazy.

When I and my friends eat barbecue, we have to the same restaurant. I just do not know its name, but there are very good food. Because there Qingdao Olympic Therefore, the government should close down the restaurant. They think that the restaurant too soiled. Wrong! They are not clever. I think this restaurant no problem. You! The barbecue restaurants continue to open the door because they increased.

I heard barbecues from the Xinjiang best. I do not know if my information on or wrong, whether I intend to Xinjiang to eat there very famous skewers infants. I ask you to join!


Funny thing is, most people don’t actually eat them, just the act of giving them is part of the tradition. In fact once upon a time some enterprising individuals repacked some old mooncakes from previous years and sold them anew. They would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for some meddling foreigners who happened to eat them only to later to be found dried and curled up in the fetal position off Hong Kong Road. Moral of the story, if Chinese people don’t eat it, neither should you. A good idea would be to bake some of your own fake mooncakes and carry them around with you this time of the year, and when you’ve found yourself in a situation where people are expecting you to eat pull the old switcheroo.

So today being the mooncake festival, I’ve decided to combine two important chinese traditions, fireworks and mooncakes. Unfortunately, I don’t have any fireworks, so my microwave will have to suffice. You’ll notice that there are two Chinese characters formed into the top. They roughly translate to “xiang chun” which in your English equates to a surgeons general’s warning about cancer and other ailments. What begins as an attractive looking hockey puck slowly transforms after being bombarded by the nuclear rays of my high powered microwave. After 5 minutes of a internal searing, the little plastic dish the cake came in has melted flat and there’s plume of smoke billowing out of a rupture in the center. My apartment now smells of vaporized ass death. Here are some pics.

Some would say I have to much time on my hands. I would disagree, in fact I don’t have nearly enough time to conduct all the microwave-pastry experiments I have lined up. You can’t argue with science, or ironically, death.

The greatest thing about this whole mooncake worshipping deal is that no one is around, the city I’m in is as dead the body in my freezer. I assume all the Chinese people have gone out to the country to some big pit for a ritualistic mooncake burial.

Another interesting yet pointless fact: I wrote this entire post on my cellphone while waiting for my steak and noodles in a deserted restaurant. Also I made the whole thing up, except for the part about me traveling back in time and saving all the puppies from the Titanic. Oh, and that 50 cent mooncake really did get incinerated.

Tonight, I went on a date with one of my friends to Hot Pot. I have never been to such a restaurant, even though I’ve heard many a rave about how good this style of cuisine is. While no one is really certain where the hot pot concept came from, most scholars agree that it was likely the idea of some enterprising (read: lazy) chefs who decided it would just be easier to make the customers cook the food themselves. I dined at a Sichuan Hot Pot restaurant, which has it’s own unique style, or so I was told.

Hot pot cuisine consists of…..a hot pot. You go and pick the food you want to cook from one room, then the waiter brings a pot to your table that looks like a volcano surrounded by a moat. You cook the food in the moat. Sounds pretty simple eh? In theory, it would be quite simple, except for the westerner, the choices of food leave a little to be desired. Our picks were:

1. Mutton
2. Mini-Squids
3. Ink-Fish Balls
4. Gelatinous Duck Blood
5. Tripe
6. Finger Shellfish (that was just my name for them, cause thats what they looked like)

I would like to point out that these were the most appetizing things I could possibly select from the room with all the food. You know you’ve got a wealth of options when Duck Blood makes forth most viable plate. According to my friend, this was one of her favorites.

Luckily the mutton was decent, not great, but decent, especially when combined with the peanut butter and vinegar sauce you dip everything in. Yes, peanut butter and vinegar made it taste better. The minisquids were very chewy, so I avoided them after the first. The fish balls were kinda gooey, but I don’t really like eating fish, and I definitely don’t like eating balls. The duck blood was actually the sleeper, it tasted like a salty tofu, so not bad, but knowing what it really was brought down its flavor rating by 120%. I don’t eat friggin tripe. I only had one finger shellfish because there was too much brine in its taste, it’s eyeballs were popped out from being cooked, and I kept imagining them talking to me saying “EH Guv’nor!”

So here’s what I think about Hot Pot. Me cooking unknown seafood items is like playing Russian Roulette. But instead of a quick and painless demise, there’s a chance one of these shellfish fingerlings turns my stomach into a scene from a grindhouse flick. Not good. As such, I devised a clever set of strategies to deal with eating at these restaurants.

Avoiding Certain Death at Hot Pot Restaurants

• Order a large bottle of beer, and down said beer as fast as possible for courage.
• Continuously comment to your date/friends on how delicious the food is, and that you’ve never tried such “interesting” dishes before.
• Eat the mutton and side dish of noodles, and only after they’ve been dunked in the boiling water long enough to sterilize the 20 different strains of salmonella breeding on them.
• Inquire about the dishes people are eating at other tables even though they’re eating the exact same thing as you. While your friends are trying to figure this out, try and take as much of the other crap food and sink it in the pot like the freakin Titanic. Lucky for you the pot is deep, and everything but the fish balls deep six.
• Take a large leaf of lettuce and cover the fish balls. When someone asks you what the hell you’re doing, make up some lame excuse like the fish balls’ flavor is photosensitive, or they need sleep too. Pray that they forget they’re there.
• “Che Bao Le” Means: I’m full, lets get out of here before the finger shellfish start reciting Macbeth.
• Once your friend(s) are out of sight, hit the nearest McDonalds like a fat kid for the first time.

More pictures after the link.

Bubble bubble toil and trouble.

This isn’t tofu.

You can have any dish you want, as long as I don’t have to eat any of it.

I think the fumes from the Volcano were getting to me.

Jack’s Steakhouse, as it is called, appears to be a pretty new restaurant in an area full of other newish restaurants. The place is clean, and when you walk in you’re met with a gauntlet of “welcome to here” from the small platoon of staff crowded at the entry. After a quick perusal of the menu, I was satisfied I could afford it (the most expensive dish is a t-bone steak at 140RMB). I decided on a fillet mignon for 95RMB.

From my somewhat but not entirely limited experience eating beef in China, I have a theory that the chefs use Martian death rays to cook the cattle. I’ve come to this conclusion from ordering pieces of meat medium rare, and receiving the likes of a blackened shriveled turd on my plate. Sometimes I wonder if the chefs cook the meat right in the grill, and it gets to the point where they just randomly grab pieces of carbon to serve out. Fearing the worst, but also figuring that this is a steakhouse and they should have some kind of clue as to how to cook a steak, I decided to order what I normally order back home: rare.

My fears were not unfounded. The waiter brought me back a nice thick looking chunk of meat, with some pasta, and a less than straight heart-shaped fried egg. The waiter then asked if I wanted some peppercorn sauce, which I foolishly agreed to, because he then proceeded to try and drown my steak in a sea of black dotted grey goo. After parting the sauce like Moses, I began to cut into my steak and noticed that it started to bleed. A small stream of bloody juice came out from the cut. I cut it right in half, and the with the exception of small force field about a quarter inch around the steak of properly cooked goodness, the inside was completely red. Thinking to myself that they may have gotten it right, I cut a small piece from near the middle and proceeded to devour it. Wrong… The meat wasn’t cooked, in fact it was still cold. If this part of the cow was it’s mouth, it would have still been mooing. Because I had cut the thing in two, and it was doused in sauce, there was really no way for them to take it back to the kitchen and recook it. Also knowing that Chinese service follows are very steep curve, where generally they are very good, but if you get picky things go from bad to worse, I decided to take my chances with the abortion on my plate. I ate around the outside, and tried to eat the pasta that wasn’t doused in the cowjuice.

My overall experience at Jack’s Steakhouse in Qingdao was decent. The service was above par, the environment was clean and new and the prices were reasonable. The cut of meat itself wasn’t the greatest, but for the price you really can’t expect to get Chris Ruth’s quality here. I’ll say that I would definitely go back, providing I don’t die from E.coli first. I’ve included an asstacular cameraphone pic of the carcass.

On a side note, I found out that Justco has Pocky’s which are the best chocolate covered nut sticks in the world, and much better than the knock off Pepero’s that seem to be all the vogue here. Also, what is it with Milk here? I can understand that Chinese people really don’t drink it, but when the freshest milk the store carries expires tomorrow, and the older stuff……..well now you know why so many people get sick here. Thats my story and I’m sticking to it.