Food on the Road

I decided not to give a blow-by-blow account of our time in Xi'an and Pingyao. Instead, how about some images that made our trip memorable...

Like these pomegranetes that were everywhere. Stalls on both sides of the road for at least a mile. Every table, every booth, every person had pomegranetes for sale. Back home they were a delicious Christmas treat. We may have eaten far more than our fair share.

Nut brittle. Made on a tree stump and pounded with a huge wooden mallet, folded with a wooden scraper, and pounded again. So delicious, we didn't mind remembering we saw a few bees on the sticky mass before the pounding began...

If it's fall, it's time for candied fruit on a stick.

And finding a place where noodles were served everywhere was heavenly. Kneaded, sliced, boiled, and mixed with unknown ingredients, it was a bowl of wonderful.

Pulling candy that is sweet sweet sweet, yet has no sugar. Just honey. It tasted like those Bit-o-Honey candies I used to toss out after trick-or-treating.

Dried fruit wagons in the Muslim Quarter offered up a treasure trove of sticky sweet (and yet healthy) treats.

No need to actually try everything you see, though. Some sort of...bun, I guess, filled with...something, and then steamed...just too many ellipses in that sentence for me to give one a try.

Maybe a cracker like thing instead. Made on a beautiful carved mold, they're sold as-is or filled with a mixture of sugar and sesame seeds and then baked on a griddle. Yummy? Well, not a lot of taste, but cheap and excellent for tiding you over until the next great thing...