#Reverb12 Day 15: Taste

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 15: What tingled your tastebuds?

What was the most extraordinary dish you sampled in 2012? What made it so magical?

It needn't be the most extravagant dish, just the one that knocked your socks off with its flavour, texture, aroma, freshness, colour, significance, timing… whatever. Relive the magic and help us savour it with you here.

This is easy.  We ate so much amazing food in China, pictures to follow, but on the first full day in Xi'an, we went to the Muslim quarter for dinner.  There were tons of street vendors, and since we like to live on the edge, we ate street food.  We followed all the usual rules about street food in a foreign country -- only going to busy vendors so the food would not sit out long, etc.  

My favorite food in 2012 was the Muslim quarter street food in Xi'an.  We ended up eating there about 3 times over the course of our 4 or so days in Xi'an.  But it was really one food in particular that was my favorite.  First, a couple pics to set the scene: 

I spent the first two trips to the Muslim Quarter looking for one food in particular that was listed in my guidebook but apparently hard to find.  It's called caijiamo (cai means vegetable).  Of course it was not until our final trip to the Muslim quarter, after I'd eaten a bunch of other stuff while searching, that I found it.  It was so good.  I was sad that there wasn't more room in my stomach for me to eat another. 

The way it worked was you picked your skewers of meat, veggies, startches, whatever. 

Yes, what appear to be frozen hotdogs were among the options.

The woman working the stand would fry some kind of bread that reminded me of a pita (kind of in the center of the pic below), and she would simultaneously cook up your skewers.  Then she'd put all the skewered food in this pan that was filled with red pepper and oil and she'd rub it around (the oil rub is right in front of her).

Then she'd dump it all into the pita and put it all into a baggie for you to eat like a sandwich.   

Probably one of the best things I have ever eaten. 

I almost don't like thinking about it because I know it's going to be a very long time before I make it back to China and get to eat it again. 

But honestly, I think a trip back might be in order just to eat that sandwich thing again.  Oh my....