An aside on Kaiping eats

The most famous dish in Kaiping is the Clay Pot Rice, baozifan (煲仔饭). By the way, all my English spellings of the Chinese pronunciations are actually pinyin, which means they’re the English spellings for the Mandarin pronunciation of words. Mandarin is putonghua (普通话)! In Guangdong (广东), we speak Cantonese, or guangdonghua (广东话)!

Clay Pot Rice is made in a clay pot!

In Kaiping, Clay Pot Rice fire is fuelled by wood! You can cook the rice with a variety of meat, and you can mix and match, such as pork ribs with barbecue or Chinese sausage… but the most famous of all Clay Pot Rice ingredients is huangshan (黄鳝).

A public service announcement: huang shan fan (黄鳝饭) is not worm rice! It’s eel rice. I have a worm phobia, so I am still working up my courage to try this. But let’s all note that this is a fish, not a worm!

😭

My favourite of all is the Chikan doufujiao (豆腐角), or Tofu Quarters. There is a lot of variety in Kaiping Tofu Quarters! Besides tofu fried with fish meat, there are spicy and non-spicy peppers fried with fish meat. There are also fried sweet potatoes, taro, and wontons. They’re basically little snacks fried in pig lard on a big pan out on the street! If they don’t end up giving me a big stomachache, they make me break out. Kind of like hot cheetos. I love it.

After Tofu Quarters, you have to cool down with Grass Jelly, or liang fen (凉粉). This is the Grass Jelly I probably seem to be eating all the time. Grass jelly is … I think it’s made of a certain grass. And then it’s jellyfied. Eh, I’m not exactly sure what it’s made of. Anyways, so you have sort of a tasteless jelly, though it might be faintly bitter, and it’s chilled, and then you mix sugared water with it. It’s really refreshing. Fantastic for this weather and those who eat too much Clay Pot Rice and Tofu Quarters.

This picture was taken last week when Nana took us to go to Chikan by bike. As you can see, we had ordered Tofu Quarters with our grass jellies at the same time.

After our food adventures today, we headed back to Tangkou to have grass jelly… Grandpa Deng pulled out a tub of royal grass jelly that Rocky had bought awhile ago. We mixed honey with it.