Tuesday, April 17, 2007

I Don't Eat Chicken Feet!

Okay we had our first lunch today. We've been so busy sightseeing the last few days, we have never had a real lunch. It would suddenly be 4pm and we'd realize we had not eaten. We'd wind up just grabbing chips from a snack stand at whatever tourist site we were at. So today we decided we were not going to skip lunch. We were tired of fasting. We found a little place just outside the Lama Temple. We ordered two dishes, sweet & sour pork and braised chicken. The sweet & sour pork came out first and it was delicious. We were about half way through that when the chicken dish came out sizzling on a very hot skillet. It looked fabulous! However once the smoked had cleared and we got a good look at the chicken, we had second thoughts. Suddenly it didn't look so delicious. It basically looked like they'd chopped up a chicken and tossed it in the skillet. Not only was the skin still on it, but there were lots of bones and there were actually chicken feet in the dish. Yes, three/four clawed chicken feet right in the middle of our dish. Luckily it was grilled with some celery. We are usually pretty adventurous travelers, but neither of us had the courage to try a chicken foot today. We ate the celery all around the chicken and polished off the sweet & sour pork, along with some rice. We both left with full stomachs and no desire to order chicken for dinner later.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

lol - this brings back some memories. Hope you had time to back a couple of power bars

Anonymous said...

Any luck with the restaurant recos I posted? What did you see today? Where to next? Shanghai?

MJ

Anonymous said...

By the way, how is the air there? Here's an interesting factiod, probably not good for making friends in Beijing, unless you run into Leo DiCaprio, but nonetheless...from an April 25th NY Times article: "On any given day, the EPA says, 25 percent of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China’s coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China’s cars and dust kicked up by droughts and deforestation around Asia." Wow, that sucks.

MJ

Anonymous said...

What an amazing trip! I was blown away when I got back from Palm Desert last week and read that you were in China! How fun! That Chicken feet story confirmed it all for me. Happy I don't eat any of it.

NS

Anonymous said...

Good post.