To avoid any false accusations: It is NOT my intention to do any kind of trophy collecting. I’m just writing this down to keep track of the facts. As I happen to be invited to eat with other people regularly, it’s seldom my proper decision what is ordered as food.

Anyway, here are the facts: The things I ate ever since coming to China:

• Chicken. Many forms of preparation. The things you (almost) can’t eat, often go into a soup, where they’re cooked for a long time, to get all nourishing ingredients into the soup. Thus one shouldn’t be astonished to find a complete head of a chicken or a foot in the soup.
• Duck. Just delicious! Beijing duck is probably the most known form of cooking it.
• Geese-Blood. I had it in a sort of spicy soup. Couldn’t get enough!
• Geese stomach. Now that’s bad. Rather bitter in taste and one can’t stop thinking of what passed through it when eating it, since the taste is very strong….boerk…
• Geese tongue. Served cold, but roasted and with the two tendons that connected them once to their respective throats. Rather bony. Nip and bite some parts of the surface. Be prepared when eating it: the delicious taste of roasted geese is suddenly interrupted by your own imagination of getting an intimate kiss of that same animal…
• Pork-tongue Weird surface (similar to cow-tongue), but very nice in consistency and taste.
• Beef. Very delicious in slices with peppers, ginger and onions. Slightly fried gives a particular taste.
• Cow stomach (”Kutteln” in German). Though the consistency might be a little bit strange, it’s taste definitely is delicious when well prepared!

• Rattle-Fish (correct name could be different). Deadly poisonous when badly cooked. According to my information the effect would start off like a drug: you feel excited and your facial nerves go. Tastes rather strong, but good!
• Frog. Tastes somewhere between fish and chicken.
• Jelly-Fish. Tastes of almost nothing. Feels a little bit bony, when biting into it. Good as appetizer with vinegar.
• Turtle-Fish. Nice taste. Slightly difficult to eat, since you can’t eat the shell.
• Shrimps Delicious, but needs a bit training of how to eat it. The Chinese sort eatable parts from the shell only inside their mouth. Feels a bit strange in the beginning to put he whole shrimp with all it’s fingers and antennas in the mouth, but you get used to it.
• Raw crabmeat A new dimension of seafood. Served directly after chopping the crab. Tasted with some sort of vinegar.
• Drunken shrimps. Preparation: catch some living shrimps out of the aquarium and put them in deep plate that can be fully covered. Add enough wine that they’re fully covered and serve it immediately. Catch them with the chopsticks and bite their tail off. Shocking.

• 1000 year old eggs. I was told the way these are prepared is by burying them along with dung to leave them for a long time as is. When they’re taken out, they are completely dark-brown. The taste is very strong. I might need some more trying to like it truly.
• Scorpions The excitement to know that what you’re eating was once a poisonous animal, is much more interesting than it’s taste. The one I had, came fried together with chips. It was hard to make out any difference between the taste of the chips and the scorpions. Disappointing.

I was asked why I only list meat, and wheither I am not eating any vegetables. The basic problem with them is that the names of animals are much easier to translate. My translator uses almost all the time “green vegetable” as translation, which though is not very spectacular and doesn’t really help much in recognizing it on a later plate.