Local food

Tonight after a long afternoon-into-evening outing in Yanqing County at the Longqing Gorge Ice Festival (post forthcoming with many dazzling pictures), we drove into Yongning Town for supper at someplace familiar. We ordered our usual dishes, but when we asked for 炒饼 (chao bing) they apologized for not having any. The waitress offered instead what sounded like chao kui le.  I looked puzzled, even after she pointed to the characters 炒傀儡 on the menu. I put them in the Pleco app on my phone. The pronunciation provided was chao kui lei . When I read this the waitress laughed at me, correcting me with her original pronunciation. After she took our order I shared the translation with Randy--"fried puppets or stooges." He laughed.

This is what she brought. Little doughy potato dumplings, almost like gnocchi, cooked with peppers and carrots. It was a decent starchy alternative to chao bing.



When we got home tonight, I googled 炒傀儡. I was sure that either the menu had a misprint or I misread the characters, missing some small stroke that would turn 傀儡, meaning puppet, into something that really meant potato dumpling. I immediately found one Chinese blogger who referred to 炒傀儡 as a Yanqing food. That made perfect sense to me as we were in Yanqing county. I'll be watching for it on menus in Changping, to see if it is truly a Yanqing-only side dish. Changping and Yanqing are less than 30 miles apart, both within the (yes, expansive) Beijing city limits, and yet have distinct accents/dialects and possibly distinct cuisine.