Food during the Chinese New Year break

Chicken soup & (very oily) stir-fried niangao (年糕), made by a half-drunk chef in Lishui (丽水).

Pickled cabbage (雪菜) and pink white sugar cake (白糖糕).

Red braised pork belly with meigan cai (梅干菜红烧肉) in Jiangwan (江湾). Not sure if I ever had meigan cai before, it’s pickled, dried, and steamed vegetables from the Shaoxing (绍兴) region with a sour but unique taste.

Xiaolongbao (小笼包) & mifen (米粉) in Jiangwan.

Jiangxi-style, purse red carp (荷包红鲤鱼) — fried and then steamed — in Likeng (李坑).

The famous fishhead from Qiandao Lake (千岛湖鱼头).

And lamb kebab (羊肉串) in Qiandao Lake. All these authentic fish restaurants near the lake, and then these guys from Xinjiang just being the coolest guys in the coolest guys in town with loud disco-Uyghur-folk songs over a loudspeaker and butchering a lamb in front of everyone.

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