seriously food: Thousand-year old egg, anyone?

I have one mission in life: to convince everyone I know that Chinese food does NOT consist of sweet and sour pork, orange chicken, or a medley of meat and veggies immersed in a sea of corn-starch thickened goop. I guess I can sort of understand the appeal of Americanized Chinese food, sort of like how you sometimes crave MickeyD's egg mcmuffins even though you know its ~~not~~ so good. Of course bringing thousand year-old egg into the picture doesn't help.

We had a proper Chinese/Taiwanese meal, legitimized by three Taiwanese guests fresh off the plane plus too-legit-to-quit pork belly A-chen and my half-claim-to-Taiwanese self. That makes for 4.5 of us right? We started off with pickled radishes, thousand year old egg and tofu, and green onion pancakes. I don't think many people are aware of Chinese cold dishes but they are a norm in any Chinese household. A made her famed hong shau rou, a recipe she snatched from her pops. The pork tender, the sauce addictingly sweet and all in all "salty as fuck" (as Allison likes to put it)-- it is delicious on top of rice. The rice, should be noted, is incredibly important--short grain and a tad sticky-- as the sauce should cling to the rice (like white on rice). I say this because I messed up the rice and bad rice is not acceptable nor salvageable!

Also on the menu included a vegetarian dish of bean curd, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and green peas; sauteed Taiwanese spinach with garlic and ginger; shrimp sauteed in a shitload of olive oil and butter; a cold noodle dressed in sesame oil, black vinegar, soy sauce and hot chili garlic sauce topped with canned tuna/salmon/sardines (really, we had a choice of all three and it was surprisingly good); and lastly, E contributed a Korean-Chinese dish, Kimchi fried rice. I'm missing some pictures but I was too eager to eat...sorry!