Ya, because we didn’t eat enough already… along the way we tried or saw great snack foods that were too interesting to pass up.
On our trip from Beijing to Xi’an, we had a relatively short flight and just got snack boxes. Included in the box was a bag of crispy apple chips, a slice of cake that was somewhere between pound cake and sponge cake and a soft roll ( no butter, no jelly). An interesting combination.
I had read about a local Orange Soda in Xi’an so when we finished with the regional history museum we found a street vendor and bought a couple cans. I can’t tell you the last time I had an Orange Crush, but I’m pretty sure it was the same.
We found Lay’s Potato Chips, they all came in tubes and were more like a composite chip, like a Pringles and they came in really interesting flavors.
I’m not much of a dessert person and typically we find that desserts, aside from maybe some fresh fruit, are not part of an Asian meal. And the desserts we have found are not very sweet.
So when we saw Ice cream, it was a real treat. Most things we found were frozen yogurt. This looked like a vanilla ice cream bar with a strawberry/cherry type filling dipped in chocolate so I went with it… when we asked out tour guide to translate the wrapper basically says – with fruit filling. So it remains a mystery.
Along the trip, our driver would share some snacks with us. This was a crisp rice cracker, it looks like it would be sweet but it was just kind of one note like puffed rice.
This snack looked like it would be crispy but was surprisingly spongy, again like puffed rice.
The yogurt bars were exactly that, yogurt, not really flavored but still refreshing. Dairy is not very big in China, we had almost no cheese and yogurt replaced ice cream in most cases.
There were fried rice balls with sesame, when we saw them online they said they had a light sugar glaze but they were not sweet at all and were very dense and tough. Not my favorite
And because we could… we tried another of the random, creepy, insect snacks.. these were grasshoppers! Deep-fried and dusted with a light spice mix.
