Sunday, July 5, 2009

The good, the bad, the weird, and the really weird

This entire post, like much of my life, will be dedicated to food.

Latest grocery store purchases:
Thankfully, I'm getting better at supplementing my diet with local snacks. Clockwise from left: fruit chips, sesame rolls, almonds, dried peaches, dried waxberries (better than they sound), wasabi crackers, spicy crackers. In order of tastiness: sesame rolls, spicy crackers, dried waxberries, almonds, dried peaches, wasabi crackers, fruit chips. The peaches would be higher on the list if someone hadn't decided it'd be a wonderful idea to add salt while drying them. And the almonds would also be higher if I hadn't spotted MSG in the ingredients list.

The bad:


happiness comes cheap

The weird:
And then a few days ago, Jonathan, Tyler and I heard that this street in Wangfujing is famous for selling strange foods- naturally we had to visit.
And we saw:

For dinner, I decided to go with the following:
The seahorses were definitely a disappointment. Brittle, mostly hollow, and basically flavorless apart from the oil and hot sauce slathered on by the street vendor. I can't imagine many locals eating these with so many tastier and less expensive options nearby; the seahorses are probably there just for clueless tourists like me.

On the other hand:
There's nothing that screams "Fresh!" quite like your appetizer scurrying off to battle with other scorpions. Creepiness aside (or maybe not), these fellows were actually delicious. I don't think it would be accurate to compare scorpion to any other food I've tried, but I imagine some kinds of bugs would taste similar. The shell wasn't terribly hard, and there was more meat than I expected.

Somewhat miraculously, we're both still alive.