Szechuan Cuisine

Some relatives of mine live in Chicago, and while we were there visiting my grandma, she took all of us out for a full Szechuan dinner at a friend's restaurant. My only remaining grandma is the source of my being 1/4 Szechuan, and probably the reason why I like MaPo Dofu so much. The special thing about "spicy" in Szechuan cuisine is that it's not only flaming hot, it also temporarily numbs your mouth. The peppercorns used are hua jiao, different from conventional peppercorns. The combination of runny nose, numb mouth, and burnt tongue only makes you exclaim, "hao shruang!"

The name of the restaurant is "Asian Bistro," which has nothing to do with it's Chinese name. The Chinese, found on the right hand side of the picture, is "ya shuan."
The first thing they brought out were these flaming fried shrimp, on the house, because they liked my uncle and his family. The ratio of hot Szechuan chili peppers is equal to shrimp. You can only imagine how spicy and extremely tasty these crispy bombs were.
In Chinese, this is su ji, or vegetarian chicken. It is not spicy, and consists of dofu pi (skin that forms on top of the liquid when you're making tofu) wrapped around chopped mushrooms. Very savory.
I'm not sure what this is, but it just looks like some generic stir-fry of some sort that you would find on the "american" version of the menu. The rest of the stuff we ordered were from the "chinese" version of the menu.
Fu Chi Fei Pian!!! This is my first encounter with "married couple (fu chi) slices (pian) of lung (fei). It was actually quite tasty, though I think it should have been spicier. In reality, sliced lung is sliced cow stomach and other tendon-y parts of the cow. I tasted the slices that looked like legitimate cow meat, but I'm sure tripe is good too.
Cheng du liang mien. Cheng du is the capital of Szechuan. Liang mien just means the noodles are served cold. It tastes a bit like peanuts but is not that spicy.
Steamed fish. I was surprised that this fish was fillet-ed, as Chinese people tend to eat the whole fish. The sauce is mostly soy sauce and sesame oil and garlic. The green things on top are a type of chive, I think, with ginger julienne.
Categorized as a dessert, ba bao fan (8 treasures: usually contains 8 different types of fruits and nuts) is not normally eaten after a meal. I only ever remember eating ba bao fan during special occasions like Chinese New Year, never with everyday meals. The rice is supposed to be more colored than what you see below. This specimen is not a very accomplished mound of ba bao fan.

Slices of Lung..mmm tasty

Chinese newspapers aggregate in the basket of commode reading in my bathroom. I rarely look at them, as I always bring my own reading material. I noticed yesterday that there was an advertisement for a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the Triangle that listed a bunch of names of dishes. This is an uncommon occurance in the US, as people tend to think "beef and broccoli over rice" or "general tsao's chicken" when they think of Chinese cuisine. Not so fast. Those aren't actual names of dishes.

I don't know too much about nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure that Chinese dish names are like proper nouns - there is only one way to make it, and everybody calls it the same thing. Most of the time you can't tell from the name of the dish what it's made out of, simply because the name of the dish comes from some historic story that nobody remembers.

Example: One of the dishes advertised bye the new restaurant was "married couple's lung slices" (Foo Chi Fey Pian). mmmm yummy.