Over the weekend, while biking to Shanghai's Silk Market, Jacob and I got lost in a maze of side streets. This was a side of Shanghai visitors seldom see. We rode past a few "free-range" chickens (with feet leashed to a pole, to prevent straying) pecking on some dirty lettuce. On the other side of the road was a scene that would never pass American health inspection, but which made my heart skip a beat.

Open air duck roasting! Now, I think Peking duck is a neat art form, but the elaborateness of the preparation, ordering, and eating gets tiring after the 20th time. Some days you just want a crispy, juicy duck without the fuss. For example, one you can pick up while whizzing by on a bike.

So what does the inside of the metal inferno look like?

Inside the drum, nude-colored ducks were neatly hung around a circle of flaming charcoal. 

The skin of the pre-roasted ducks appeared to have been lightly boiled, if only to remove the feathers. Some scallions and garlic cloves are stuck into the cavities. According to the duck stand vendor, the roasting takes only an hour. Then, he hangs the just-roasted ducks in his little wooden stand, behind a Plexiglass case, and sells them for only 12 rmb a jin (about 1 pound).

Travelers to Shanghai sometimes expect to find a vibrant street food scene that's on par with that of Bangkok, Singapore, Chengdu, and other tropical or subtropical Asian cities. But because of a northern-ish climate (despite the Beijing tendency to think of Shanghai as "the south") and a culture that prefers indoor eating, good street food is hard to find. Zhongshan Lu has a few lamb skewer vendors, but is mainly a tourist trap for shopping and glitzy lights. Yuyuan Bazaar, home of the over-hyped Nanxiang soup dumplings, is just a tourist trap, period.

One place is Shanghai that locals actually frequent is the Muslim market in northern Jing'an, held only on Fridays after prayer service at the Huxi mosque. Starting around 11am, vendors set up their stands of cooked lamb, nan, dried nuts and fruit, and Arabic DVDs. Not to disparage Han ethnic culture, but sometimes it's nice to plant myself in a spot where the locals don't look or speak like the 1.3 billion majority.

Xiaolongbao, those glorious steamed dumplings with a meat and soup filling, have migrated far beyond Shanghai and gained a cult following. Meanwhile, another obsession-worthy Shanghainese specialty has remained a local secret.

Shengjian bao, they call it here. Think of it as a fried version of xiaolongbao. Well, a bun, really. A soup bun that is pan-fried until the bottoms are just crisp and the sesame seeds and chives on top meld into the crunchy casing.

When I come to Shanghai I get my shengjian bao from two places. One is in the French Concession, a 3-minute walk from where i usually stay. The baozi aren't spectacular, but they're great for a cheap lunch or hunger fix. The other is the venerable and endearingly misspelled Yang's Fry-Dumpling, just north of People's Square and right across the street from another cheap-eats institution. If you eat shengjian bao only once in Shanghai (or twice, or thrice), do so at Yang's.

Chowing down on shengjian bao is trickier than on xiaolongbao. First,the thick crunchy casing is such a good insulator that the soup is still piping hot 10 minutes after you sit down. Burnt tongues are common, but worth dealing with.

I recently took a much needed break from Beijing and blogging and headed to Hong Kong. Oh, how I missed good Cantonese food.

Upon my arrival in the hot and muggy city my uncle gave me two suggestions for food.

"Do you want to go to a nice air-conditioned dim sum parlor, or an outdoor dai pai dong where we'll sit on hard plastic stools and be insanely sweaty and uncomfortable?" Given that I had just been through an ordeal that involved missing my overnight train, buying an over-priced same-day plane ticket to Guangzhou, bussing to Zhongshan to see my parents for a night, then bussing 4 hours to Hong Kong, I decided to postpone roughing it to another day.

The next night, after two long showers and lots of sleep, I was ready for some cheap outdoor grub. The term dai pai dong in Hong Kong refers to open-air food stalls (though it's easy nowadays to find indoor ones). Diners sit at folding tables on cheap plastic stools, eat from cheap plastic plates and bowls, and enjoy no break from the ever-present humidity in Hong Kong. That said, the food is often delicious, the atmosphere quite rowdy and social, and most importantly for my uncle, smoking is still allowed.

Okay, maybe "love" is an overstatement.

Not long after I filmed the Donghuamen Night Market segment with CBS (but before it aired), I was contacted by KGW, Portland's NBC affiliate. Stephanie Stricklen, the correspondent, wanted to shoot an odd street food story for the Portland area, and of course, I obliged. (According to an online pole, viewers had insisted she try scorpion.) She was also excited to learn that Jacob is an ex-Oregonian, and thus his appearance in the segment.

This KWG clip which aired on August 19th shows both the Donghuamen Night Market and the slightly less tourisy Wangfujing Snack Street.

I always thought that if I ever tried eating bugs, it would be on a dare, for a ton of money. Then last weekend I found myself at the Donghuamen Night Market with a CBS crew, trying centipedes, silkworms, and other odd critters for a CBS Early Edition segment. (More photos following the video.) 

You can also see the video on CBS's site.)

(Bibim naengmyun)

My week-long trip to Seoul turned me from a recreational dabbler of Korean food to a full-on addict. Now that I'm home and about 10 pounds heavier, I can't stop thinking about bibimbap, dakgalbi (pan-fried chicken), bibim naengmyun (cold noodles with Korean chilli paste), among others.

The first thing I ate after landing in Seoul was dolsot bibimbap, presented in a hot stone pot so the rice on the sides become crispy and the raw egg on top cooks as you mix everything. This was at a traditional Korean restaurant in Insadong where the seats are cushions on an ondol wooden floor. A nice experience, but certainly not the most comfortable.

I instantly fell in love with the spicy seafood bean paste stew, which I apparently forgot to photograph in my state of rapture.

(Dolsot bibimbap)

(Side rant: As my luck would have it, when I started uploading photos after returning home, my card reader started acting funky and ejected in the middle of the upload. Unfortunately, the mishap caused about 100 photos, including everything from my last day at Noryangjin Fish Market, to disappear. This is what I get for buying cheap card readers in China.)

The story of Jiumen Xiaochi (九门小吃）begins like many other stories of snack sellers in modern Beijing. Menkuang Hutong was a street where families sold traditional snacks using recipes and and skills that got passed down for generations. The hutong demolished some years back, to make room for new developments.

This story, though, has a happy ending. Eleven vendors got relocated to the new Jiumen Xiaochi, a collection of stalls now housed in a traditional courtyard. Some of these snacks, like bingtang hulu, can be found all over Beijing. Others, like flour tea, are a bit more unusual.

The restaurant is at the end of an meandering hutong off a larger road, not any place you would stumble upon. Jake and I made a lunch date and followed a map, walking 10 minutes or so from Jishuitan subway station. We bought a card from the reception desk (located in the dining area, not the entrance way), and ordered away.

Suanlamian, or sour and spicy noodles, was on display in its naked form. Instead of being doused with chilli sauce, the yellow and brown wheat noodles came with some peppers and cilantro on top, and a dish of chilli sauce on the side so you can adjust according to your spiciness threshold.

If you have been to Beijing*, you've most likely come across this street scene: a bunch of people crowded around a street vendor, picking out skewers from a bubbling hot red broth. Others are standing around munching on the their bounty with a look of ecstasy on their faces. Passersby, drawn by the sight or smells or possibly even the pheromones of the people in ecstasy, join the crowd. You wonder, what is all this?

Málàtāng seems to be more of a magnet than most other highly addictive street food. Most likely it's because of the number of choices you get. Shrimp, fish balls, tofu, bean curd, lotus root, mushrooms, chicken, beef tendon, noodles, and much more get cooked in a pot of steaming broth laced with Sichuan peppers and sesame oil. You get a plate or take-out container and make your selection either blindly or informed, by asking nicely and trying to remember if there's a chapter on animal parts in your phrasebook. No matter, because everything is cooked through and more often than not, delicious. At 1 rmb or 50 jiao per skewer, you can have a light snack for 3 rmb or stuff yourself for 10 rmb.

Even on the bleakest of Beijing's winter days, many corners of the city are lit up with bright colors. These are the corners where the bīngtáng húlù vendors stand, selling their skewers of candied fruit.

The traditional form of bīngtáng húlù 冰糖葫芦 is a skewer of about half a dozen hawthorns that are dipped in a sugar syrup, which hardens into a shiny candy coating. The snack is most popular during fall and winter months, when the hawthorn and its cousin the crab apple are in season. Hawthorns, called shānzhā (山楂) in Chinese, are also used in juices, jams, even alcoholic drinks. The Chinese believe that hawthorns aid digestion, so this is one sugar-ladened treat that you shouldn't feel guilty eating. At least, I don't.

Did I mention that adults love this as much as kids do? It's not uncommon to see adults going about mundane tasks like grocery shopping or commuting home, munching on a shiny fruit kebab with the nonchalantness of a Westerner sipping a cup of take-out coffee.