Breakfast

This week my wife and I went to visit her mother and grandparents. We just relaxed and talked most of the time. And ate. Whenever we go to grandparents house we eat a ton of good food.

For breakfast today there were 12 different dishes on the table.

• 1st there was some roast rabbit. Delicious.
• 2nd there was a big bowl of little bitty shrimp. Each little crustacean was about one centimeter long. You eat them tail, shell, legs, tentacles and all.
  
• 3rd some soybean sauce. Very strong tasting and salty. Tasty, but it smells distinctly like socks.
• 4th hot pepper condiment-like dish.
• 5th Pickled duck eggs. Very salty. These are a condiment too.
• 6th cooked bean sprouts
• 7th an enormous fish.
• 8th a basket full of different kinds of small cakes.
• 9th a mushroom dish with wuhuarou. Wuhuarou is a thick cut of meat that includes a little meat at one end, a bunch of fat in the middle and skin at the other end.
• 10th garlic eggplant. Eaten as a condiment.
• 11th fermented bean curd. Eaten as a condiment.
• 12th something. I couldn't tell what it was.

Each person at the table had a bowl of rice porridge or a bowl of tangyuanr. Tangyuanr are a favorite breakfast food of mine. They are balls of sticky rice with a sweet filling of nuts or sesame inside.

This was not an unusual breakfast. This was a typical kind of breakfast for us to eat at Grandparents' house. I'm used to this kind of breakfast now, but I still remember in the early days when I first came here how I was shocked at the breakfast fare.

It was a lot of work for Grandma to put out this big spread, but it wasn't as much as you might think. These were all leftovers from supper the night before. Almost always when I have eaten breakfast with any Chinese family, they simply warm up the leftovers from supper and eat those in the morning. Americans usually have the idea that breakfast must be something sweet, or if it's not sweet, it needs to be an omelet and sausage. Chinese people however don't have this idea. They don't tend to put their nose up at even a spicy dish in the morning.