It’s November now and this dish really hit the spot. It’s a combination of spring bamboo, mushrooms and assorted vegetables served in a bowl of some of the tastiest chicken broth I’ve had in a good long time. It really brought back memories of mom’s home cooking after a long cold day of playing outside.

Real authentic Chinese food is sometimes so dangerous as it more often than not brings fire to the table in the form of a small plate of napalm underneath a bowl of food, as was the case with this dish, but it’s also great to know that the food will be hot until you finish eating it. Somehow I can’t really see this style of cooking going over well in the all too paranoid safety conscious American society, but I’m certainly going to enjoy it over here.

I will certainly be hunting this dish down again, and it’s simple enough and tasty enough that I might even give it a try in my own kitchen.

Bamboo is such a very Chinese thing, from pandas to chopsticks it seems as though everything can be made from bamboo. There are a thousand different ways to eat bamboo, but this slow cooked bamboo with duck is one of the best I’ve discovered. The aroma is full flavored with hints of savory duck wafting up from the steam. The bamboo is soft yet still crunchy making it just the perfect texture to satisfy. The broth itself is sweet yet salty and bursting with flavors from the duck and bamboo. This dish is special, it must be simmered for long hours before ripening, but it is worth the effort. Find a local Yunnan style restaurant and be sure to give this dish a try, your taste buds will thank you.

This is pretty much a classic dish that you’ll find on both sides of the pacific. It’s a pretty common dish in China and nearly every American Chinese restaurant in the USA has a similar dish. And by similar I mean pretty damn close to the exact same.

You know the dish, tofu, egg, pieces of beef, etc. I won’t go into much more detail than that.

I’ve been on a hiatus lately but I’m gonna try to be a bit more regular, and not just in my posts. Gotta eat that fiber. Chinese New Year was a bit disruptive and then that damn job thing got in the way.

It seems as though more often than not when you go to eat out in China you also have to do at least a little cooking. Case in point is this dish of Yunnan Rice Noodles. The waitress brings around a tray of food stuffs as you can see in the picture, and soon follows up with a bowl of nearly boiling broth and noodles. The responsibility is yours to put all the stuff into the nearly boiling broth. Including a quail egg, a slice of raw fish, a small piece of mostly cooked chicken and a variety of other things. It’s important to move quick here and get the egg and raw fish into the broth quickly so that they have sufficient time and heat to properly cook.

After everything is in the soup, the real enjoyment can begin. By the time you put everything in the soup and convince the waitress to take away the empty trays, everything inside the soup is cooked and you can begin eating. You not to soft and not to firm, and there is a variety of goods in the soup. The brot won’t be disappointed. The noodles are done just righth is a slightly salty yet ever so tasty chicken stock with undoubtedly a month’s worth of MSG, but such is the price one must pay for that salty deliciousness.

Price is not bad either. Depending on the tray of goodies to throw in with the noodles a serving will run between 15 and 30 RMB. I don’t actually remember the price I paid but it wasn’t outrageous. One of these restaurants exists near the top of Grand Gateway Mall in Xujiahui and another resides in the basement of Raffle’s City. It’s a chain, but I haven’t found any other place to get Yunnan style food in Shanghai.

A soup that isn’t a soup. Shrimp, tofu, and veggies in this soupy broth. As it turns out the soupy broth is quite good and worth drinking, even though it technically isn’t a soup.

The food in and of itself is good. The tofu and shrimp are nice, a little salty, but extremely tasty. The big green leaves were spinach like in nature which automatically make it good.

I’ve never had this dish before, but I’d gladly have it again. The shrimp were a bit small and seldom discovered, but the tofu was plentiful and ever so tasty.

Mushrooms galore! I do love mushrooms and consequently this soup is mighty tasty. There are at least three types of mushrooms in here, I think there might even be four or five and that broth is phenomenal, I don’t know what it was made out of but WOW.

The one drawback is those little white MSG laden balls of fish, crab, and other. I’m just not a huge fan of MSG so anytime I can avoid it I try, if you feel the same way, you best be avoiding those little white balls. Think of them as round hot dogs made from fish or crab or something else. And remember in China feet, heads, gizzards, and the like are all delicacies so I’m curious exactly what is left over to make these little balls.