China Part 16: The Food Journey Continues in Huizhou

I don't have a pic for this post so lemme take a pic from my previous post as a placeholder.

Like before, we've been having dim sum for breakfast and it was my Grandma meeting up with her friends. But it seems that the plans changed again. My stay kept extending. Instead of 3 days, it ended up being 6 days so I got an extra 3 days. Normally I would think "great!", but it was really the same every day. I was bored to tears meeting relatives and new people that really don't matter in my life. Food was my only motivation.

It was decided that we would be meeting up with a bunch of my grandma's friends. They have known each other since they were kids. They were now grandmas of their own with grandchildren. During breakfast, they laughed and talked a lot. I think it's great and secretly I was a bit jealous because I couldn't do the same with my friends. There was one thing I noticed that these grandmas had in common. They have enough money to live on and to spend freely. They were healthy and independent. Almost everyone had some sort of nice jewellery and nice clothes. My grandma stood out almost too much. She wore very plain clothes and she never liked wearing jewellery. That's just the type of person she was. Yet everyone keeps telling my mom that back in the day, it was my grandma that led the rest of them up the mountains to cut grass.

You would think they would settle for meeting for breakfast and ending the day like that. Instead they decided that immediately in a few hours that they will all have lunch together. We went to this place called 古仔小海鲜 which I will translate to Gu Zai Seafood. Aunt Lin came with us and did most of the ordering for us. Gu Zai's is small, but the place is really clean and nice. It's actually a great place to eat with large groups of people. The food may have been on the oily side, but it could easily be removed. It was really tasty and the grandma's didn't seem to fear the fat. There was nothing that they refused to eat. They just ate and laughed some more. Aunt Lin ordered about 11 dishes which i can;t even remember anymore.

I enjoyed myself another offal soup, this time it was goose blood. It's really local and there's no way I could eat it back home in the States. There was a sweet and sour pork, deep fried and doused in sauce. I think there was roast goose, clams, sweet potato greens and more seafood. There was one dish that had a hell lot of Chinese red shallots. It was a waste to leave it so we took it home to use it for dinner. By golly, do those shallots taste good. They add so much pungent flavor like garlic and spices. It's the best companion to soy sauce. Again it's something I cannot find back home.

On the following day, the pattern resumed. Dim sum for breakfast while meeting new people. Today's guest was Mrs. Zhu and her daughter. Mrs. Zhu was my grandma's teacher and it was a surprise to us that she was Toisonese like me. The conversation was long in which I spent most of my time eating. Occasionally I caught snippets of the talk. Mrs. Zhu was what you could say a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Because she was a teacher, it was decided that one day she needed "correction" like many other teachers. Mrs. Zhu recounted the hard times and the metal stress she endured which eventually resulted in poor health and miscarriage. It was terrible and I'm glad she made it through in the end. You can tell she never gave up on education because her daughter is also in the field of education.