Lunch today was a pre-Christmas tradition. My beautiful, dearest, best friend and I always have Christmas Eve lunch together. Today was special as, for the first time, we were accompanied by one other. Her seven-year old son. After a long and bitter custody battle with her idiotic, ex-husband she now has regular weekend visitation rights (after not seeing him at all for over a year). Anyway let's not dwell on that. The boy clearly loves her and I have always known she loves him.
We went for a walk to places kids like to walk, then on to a restaurant for lunch. This place was called 秋香 - qiū xiāng which means Autumn Flavour. It is a type of restaurant which is pretty popular in China. You are seated then presented with a menu and a pencil. Then you tick what you fancy.
We chose:
秋香螺蛳土鸡 - qiū xiāng luó shī tǔ jī
This is very much a local dish. Go to the next city and they won't know what you are talking about. It translates as "Autumn Flavour Snail (and) Organic Chicken". Here, "Autumn Flavour" is referring to the restaurant name and to contents of the dish. It is the snails and chicken braised in a spicy soup containing garlic, chestnuts, peanuts, purple perilla, dried bamboo shoot* and fresh Sichuan Peppers. Normally it would have chillies too, but we scaled them back because of the kid, who doesn't appreciate them as much as we do.
*Dried bamboo shoot is another local favourite and is almost always served with any snail dishes.
Fresh SIchuan Peppercorns (retrieved from the snail and chicken dish)
清蒸排骨 - qīng zhēng pái gú
"Plain Steamed (Pork) Ribs" These came, as you can see, with taro and peanuts (also steamed) and a couple of lonely shiitake mushrooms. This was kind of bland for me but friend and son liked a lot.
板栗炒白菜 - bǎn lì chǎo bái cài
"Chestnut Fried Cabbage". Either an ordering mistake or an over-enthusiasm for chestnuts. I am going for the latter. (Actually, we didn't know there would be chestnuts in the chicken dish - they weren't mentioned.
This was served with rice which had unfortunately been mixed with corn. I hate corn with a vengeance, but friend and son love it, so they were happy. I went riceless, but was happy anyway.
Happy Whatever You Celebrate!