A Few of My Favourite Things !

Jian Bing - a thin, crispy crepe sparsely filled with an egg, some green herbs, brown sauce and chilli, fi you like it hot. Just fatastic and my favourite breakfast in Shanghai.

Having a breakfast of toufa with the locals

Hang your coat up and have a waltz in the square:

Throwing up your wishes and dreams:

Adventures in Shanghai - Part 1
Adventures in Shanghai - Part 2
Adventures in Shanghai - Part 3

Walking around Shanghai one evening we came across a place that was grilling lamb kebabs over a charcoal fire. We looked up at the shop frontage to see the shop name appearing in Arabic script next to the picture of a mosque. The music that wafted towards us along with the smoke was definitely Arabic although the workers looked just like extremely fair Chinese. Following some research, I realised that there is actually quite a rich Islamic heritage within Chinese history.

Towards the evening, long queues snaked across the street waiting for the lamb kebabs to come off the grill. Not wanting to wait, we just picked up some interesting-looking bread. The dough is mixed with pieces of lamb (chewy for the most part) and fat and baked into a fragrant flat loaf with a crusty exterior.

Next to the bread is an egg custard tart from Lilian Bakery, a franchise that has several branches scattered around the city. A connoiseur of egg custard tarts, A has decided that this is best one we have had so far and I am inclined to agree. The custard, which is wobbly and just eggy enough to lure me but not put A. off, is held together by a flaky pastry shell. Utterly divine!

Somewhere between a roti and a naan, this sesame seed-coated bread is fried in a large flat pan which gives it a crispy shell. We had a great version the first time then had a lot of trouble finding elsewhere. The second one turned out to be too soft and mushy to be enjoyable.

This is a Chinese delicatessen! Every second shop in Shanghai seemed to sell a variety of preserved and dried foods, biscuits and sweets, as well as herbal ingredients. Most of the preserved meat were vacuum packed in foil wrappers, making it difficult for non-Chinese reading people like us to determine what each contained - feet, chicken wings or tongue, just to name a few. This shop made it somewhat easier although I can’t imagine buying that porcine face mask. It reminds me rather creepily of Hannibal - eeeuughhh.

Adventures in Shanghai - Part 1
Adventures in Shanghai - Part 2
Images of Shanghai

Can anyone shed some light on what I was eating? Cos I have absolutely NO IDEA!

Further along the same bustling street, we encountered dessert of a different kind. The base, when we got to tasting it, was like claggy batter but the top was prettily studded with dried and glaced fruits and nuts. There was a HUGE and I mean HUGE line waiting to get a cup of this but my recommendation is ‘watch the guy making them - the pan is an interesting shape - but don’t go out of your way to try’.

Thsi vendor was making four different types of filled pancakes but I could only understand what two of them were - red bean and chesnut paste. My recommendation is ‘Skip these - sticky (undercooked?) and bland’.

These grilled scallops created the most heavenly smells and I would definitely try them next time.

Can you see the hand just to the right of the photo? Well, they weren’t too pleased with us taking photos. Maybe they thought we were about to run away with their secret traditional method of making these fairy floss-like sweet (I’m thinking, surely there is a less labour-intensive way).

Funnily enough, I saw a lady making the exact same thing in the exact same way in London’s Chinatown a week later. Too late!

Adventures in Shanghai - Part 1
Adventures in Shanghai - Part 3
Images of Shanghai

This was our first breakfast in Shanghai, savoury tau fu fa accompanied by a yu tiao and milky coffee, followed by a spicy noodle dish. Enjoyed the tau fu fa but I stuck to the hot weet version for the rest of the trip. The noodles looked great but were a little bland. The rest of the crowd were ordering yu tiao and siao long bao so this may not have been a speciality of theirs.

Going for a walk later on that day down Nan Jing Lu, we stumbled across an extremely busy little alley that had the most heavenly smell of food cooking. A detour was in order here and we came across some unusual and delicious foods.

We managed th snag the last of this batch of fried beef dumplings (not sure about name). Really delicious and the line of people waiting to get their hands on one was justified.

Steamboat-style meals are also available. Great if you want to pick and choose.

We saw these siao long bao stalls everywhere and the great thing you could always see a small huddle of workers, with disposable face masks on, moulding these. The dumplings then went straight into the frying pan. How much fresher can you get? Sold in portions of four, the trick to eating these was to make a small bite into the skin and allowing the very hot steam to escape then slurping some of the juice out before eating the meaty part. HUGE queues everywhere for these! I think the Shanghainese must literally live on these dumplings. (Warning: Don’t get the ones on the streets immediately outside the ‘Old Town’ area though as you pay tourist prices for inferior food).

Lots of smoke coming from these portable barbeques:

…more soon…

Adventures in Shanghai - Part 2
Adventures in Shanghai - Part 3
Images of Shanghai

So, I was walking down Edward St towards Brisbane’s botanic gardens early on Thursday morning. Other than the suits heading to work, it was fairly quiet on the city streets so I was quite surprised to come across a corner that was buzzing with a subdued energy. Four tables in front of a pub were filled with diners and across the road, there were two lone market stalls with a crowd of people milling about in front.

Odd, I thought, that there were only two stalls because that kind of market would surely not attract many shoppers. As I crossed the road and walked past the diners, I noticed that not one had a breakfast dish in front of them. Moreover, these patrons were just that little bit too shiny to strike me as being ‘normal people’.

Yesterday, I got on the plane to head home. I was presented with a Courier Mail newsaper only to come across a story about this. Well, that would certainly explain the spiffy-looking extras…

We only spent 1.5 days there but I think we manage to fit an admirable amount of food in during this short period! On our first night, we visited Guerney Drive. It was pouring with rain so we wandered through the shopping centre next door until the skies let up. As soon as the rain eased, we were out of the shopping complex and in amongst the stalls. Good timing because we managed to get seats just before the crowd descended.

We started with Assam Laksa, one of A.’s favourite dishes, and boy was it good. Fantastically sour and spicy, the only thing it was missing was the black sauce - what’s that called again? We also tried a cuttlefish salad (Ju Hu Eng Chai) and I cannot recommend this dish highly enough - I just couldn’t get enough of it!

Of course, after reading so much about Poh Piah, we had to try this as well. Nyeh, wasn’t the greatest poh piah that I’ve had. A little on the soggy side.

This was washed down with soya bean milk, which we kinda had to order whether we liked it or not because the tables belong to that stall. Good thing that we did like it. I was told off at another table because I didn’t want to order freshly squeezed fruit juice and the guy grumbled that I couldn’t just sit there and not order from them! Ooops!

A. decided that he couldn’t leave without tasting the satay too so here’s the picture.

We came back to Guerney drive another night, after spending a couple of days in Langkawi, and ordered the Assam Laksa from another stall. This one did come with the black sauce but A. thought that the Laksa from the first stall was better.

The ice kachang served in Penang is also slightly different, made more decadent with the addition of ice cream. The one you see here had peanut icecream. Yum, I love ice kachang. I used to just eat the shaved ice sweetened with rosewater and evaporated milk from the top and leave the other stuff at the bottom of the dish for dad. Naughty, huh? I didn’t like all that red bean, corn and attap although the grass jelly was okay. Now, I’m happy to try some of it but my favourite part is still the flavoured ice.

One of my other favourites is Ban Chang Kueh, a pancake sprinkled with crushed peanuts and sugar. I had a really hard time tracking them down both this trip and the last, especially the thin crispy ones, so when we came across this stall selling Apong Manis and Apong Balik, we got a serve of each. The Apong Manis just consisted of batter spread very thinly over the little wok so it’s very light and airy. Didn’t love it. The Apong Balik was better though and I think it was filled with corn and coconut.

A. loves anything with peanuts so we tried these thingys as well. I cannot remember what they are called although I’m sure some Malaysians could help me out with this. We really liked this version cos the pastry was really thin and it was choc full of peanuts (makes it sound like a Snickers bar, doesn’t it?).