discovery: jian bing guo zi!

Yesterday morning, Ben had to leave the house really early. When he came back several hours later, he was all excited because, as he was walking out to the main road just behind our place to get a taxi, he saw all these street vendors along the way. They had never been there when we walked out later in the day. He decided then and there that we were going to get up early this morning and go out and buy some breakfast from street vendors.

Well, we got up (although not really all that early) and headed out to check it out this morning. The vendors weren't in the same place where Ben saw them yesterday, so he started to get disappointed at first. But then we saw one little lone cart on the corner of this little side street, where a woman was making jian bing guo zi.

How to describe jian bing guo zi? They are a bit like crepes, but more eggy and totally Chinese-style. Basically, the vendor pours a little batter onto a hot griddle, and then uses a squeegee-type tool to spread the batter into a perfect circle. She then cracks an egg (or in our case, two) on top of the crepe, and breaks it up using the squeegee. She sprinkles green onion and cilantro across the top of the egg, and then flips the crepe while the egg is still soft, to finish cooking.

Once flipped, she paints chili paste, pickled vegetables, and some kind of sweet sauce (hoisin sauce?) across the crepe. Then, she puts a crispy fried flat rectangle of dough in the center, breaks it up into four equal pieces, and folds the crepe around it, till it's all tucked in nice and tight. Voila! Breakfast is served in a little plastic takeaway bag. The result is the perfect combination of sweet, salty, spicy and crispy. Yum!

I forgot to take my camera with me when we went, and I couldn't keep myself from gobbling the whole thing down before taking a picture once we got home, so I have no photos of the experience (the one at the top is, sadly, not my own). But I have no doubt that we'll be back, and there will be plenty of photo opportunities in the future.

(Incidentally, we also discovered that a complete market exists down the alley just beyond the jian bing guo zi woman's cart--how we missed it's existence before now, I'll never know. I'll take photos and post more on that soon. That pretty much means we don't need to go to Carrefour 17 times a week any more.)