From Mandarin Classes to Chinese Food!

When I studied Mandarin, a couple of years ago, I had to read dialogues in that language.  Among the topic of the conversations, perhaps one of the most interesting for me was food.

Reading dialogues in Chinese, there were always mentions to exotic foods that caught my attention. In that time, I was living in Venezuela, where there were options of Chinese food, but not that many to include the ones I was reading about in my Mandarin classes.

Now that I live in Toronto, Canada, I started to taste different kinds of food. When I visited Chinese restaurants, I found foods different than the ones I knew from South America.  But then I started to search for those foods I read about before.

Time and a better knowledge of Toronto allowed me to find at least 2 of those traditional foods from China.

One of them is called东坡肉 (Dōng pō ròu), also known as “Dongpo Pork”. In the page http://www.cultural-china.com/chinaWH/html/en/History147bye580.html explains that according to a legend, under the leadership of the poet Su Dongpo, who was also a local official in Hangzhou, he ordered to cook some pork. By mistake, pork and a rice wine called白酒 (Bái jiŭ) or烧酒 (Shāo jiŭ) were cooked together. The flavor was so good that this dish remains until today as one of the traditional foods from Zhejiang Cuisine. Below is a picture of this dish that I found in Toronto. 

Another dish is香酥鸭 (Xiāng sū Yā) or Crispy Smokey Duck. This is a simple but delicious dish from Sichuan Food (川菜 = Chuān cài) Below, a picture of this dish can be seen.

This dish is related with the Beijing Duck, 北京烤鸭 (Bĕijīng Kăoyā). More info can be seen in the Internet