The best cafeteria food ever.

So... since I returned from China (approximately a month ago) I have wanted NOTHING more than to cook every food in my line of sight (and return to China, but that's a different story for a different time haha). I decided I'd start this blog to keep y'all posted on my forays into the culinary world. I'm very new to cooking, and I'm a bit nervous. I just started cooking a few months ago in our basic food science class. We cooked all kinds of stuff, and I brought all those recipes home and remade them for my parents and just kept on cooking.  I can make some mean whole wheat yeast rolls, haha. To kick off this rockin' little blog, here's a brief recap in pictures of the fantabulous food we had China! These pictures weren't all taken by me; in fact, most of them were taken by my friends who were there with me. I was too busy stuffing the food in my mouth to take pictures of it.

This is from a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. We had our orientation in LA, so we spent the day exploring a predominantly Chinese part of town. Earlier that day, we also got a quick lunch from a little booth called Dim Sum Express: I had a steamed BBQ pork bun... pretty dang tasty for 93 cents! The meal pictured above was a 10-course feast... It was a monster of a meal, and the best Chinese food I'd ever had... until I got to China, that is. :) We also got a lesson in Chinese etiquette at this restaurant that proved to be very helpful once we made it to China.

Story time! When we got to Hong Kong we were shuffled to a bus station, but when we got there... we had missed our bus (and there were no more buses out until three days later, haha). So we decided to be hobos in the bus terminal. A couple of folks in our group walked down the block to the bakery and returned with this little guy! He was filled with chocolate, and he was very tasty (and adorable). Luckily, we were able to mix up our itinerary a bit and we took an alternate route to our city, so we were only pastry-eating hobos for a couple of hours.

Our first morning in China, we had these jiaozi for breakfast. They were at a modest little hole-in-the-wall cafe, and they were easily the best thing I ate the whole trip. I sincerely miss these little guys. They were served with peanut sauce and spicy red pepper sauce. I did like our supervisor and mixed the sauces together... delicious! We also had two different kinds of noodles with this meal, both with peanut sauce. At this point I was already down with Chinese food; the only thing I wasn't used to yet was not having a drink with my meal, but we always had water with us.

So here we are at a restaurant that specialized in Beijing-style food (aptly named "Northern Restaurant"). It was a swanky place, with a mirror on the ceiling that allowed us to take this picture. I wish we could have gotten rid of the glare spot, but we tried a couple times and either way--I adore this picture. That was a great meal... I think my favorites were the green onion and red bean pancakes. This is also where we met the principal of the school we were teaching English at and his wife for the first time. Awesome folks.

This is the first meal we ate at one of our elementary schools. The high point of the meal was definitely getting to try chicken feet. Even though I didn't like it, I'm glad I got to try something different. The mushroom soup was really good, too. This was the first non-restaurant meal we had in China, and it was really good. However, most of our meals didn't have this much meat. We usually had one meat dish, a meat and veggie dish, and the rest was all vegetables or bread.... the food just got better and better from this point!

We had a barbecue with all the students and teachers and school staff a few days before we left China. We had tofu, chicken, beef, squid, and meatballs. I think tofu was my favorite, it was thin and crispy after it had been on the grill for a while. We also had baby birds, which was... different. The kids tore those up, though. I couldn't bring myself to try one of the baby birds... but when I go back to China I'm going to be better about trying everything.