Thursday, May 10, 2007

DPRK Food, Day 4

Day 4, May Day. The food we had on that day was so nice it's like Christmas and birthday all rolled into one.

After our exhausting morning or dancing and boat rowing we were all too happy to be trying the Sinsollo at a local restaurant. The dish is prepared with over 30 different ingredients and it's a little similar to a hot pot. I have to say the flame looked pretty impressive.

Ingredients should usually include chicken, beef, pork, pheasant, shrimp, egg, bamboo shoot, mushroom, chestnut, pine nut, abalone, sea cucumber, spring onion, liver, and etc. From what I could tell ours had egg and beef and pork, some veggies and liver (unfortunately I ate a piece before I realised what it was). I was too hungry to verify the content of my spoonful of food I was wolfing down. All I knew was everrything tasted nice (except that liver I spat out), and we got unlimted broth too.

A piece of fried chicken was served to cater to the tourists' needs I guess. Why not just give us Korean food? It tasted much beter!

The grass infused, sorry herb, bread was intereting enough to look at.

Kimchi was good as gold.

Pyongyang cold noodles was available at €1.50. Bring it on! This version was even better than the one we had on Day 3. The chili sauce had so much kick it was a good thrill!

Another "western dish" for the foreigners. In this case the salmon was actually not bad.

It would be hard to match up to the excellent lunch, but I've got two magic words for you:"barbecue" and "duck".
We got a little worried cos we swore we thought our guide H said we were going to a famous barbecue "dark meat" restaurant. I wasn't too worried as I wanted to try it anyway but some were very concerned. I think we were all happy to find out she meant duck (she even spelled it out for us in case we'd be stupid again).

When we saw the BBQ plates on the table we knew we were in the right place. The duck was marinated in special Korean ingredients, which had a nice sweet taste. 9 out of 10!

There were also a number of other duck dishes. I believe this one is a smoked version with chopped leek on top. Tasty!

This one is similar to a Chinese BBQ duck without the crispy skin. Maybe it's braised? The meat tasted good though.

I would normally ditch the veg but the fact that we hadn't had much veggies in the last few days we were grateful to have whatever other than kimchi. ( I love kimchi but it's good to have varieties if you know what I mean.)

I actually don't remember much about the soup other than the fact that it had dumplings in it. It's weird that they would serve it at the end of the meal? I ate the dumplings but the vodka and soju killed that particular part of my memory.

The day's favourite: Pyongyang cold noodles once again!

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