Craving MEAT

The second greatest inconvenience of the extended public holiday here for the Lunar New Year - after the incessant barrage of fireworks already complained of - is the sudden difficulty of finding anywhere to eat out.

Most of the smaller restaurants and snack food stalls close down for at least a few days, if not the whole week. This seems to be especially true of the Muslim places, which are usually my favoured destinations for cheap eats. There didn't seem to be a single one of them anywhere in my neighbourhood that was open all week. In most of them, the owners were quite obviously still around (they usually hang quilts over the doors and windows, but through the chinks you can see lights on inside and people moving around), but they just couldn't be bothered to open. You can't really blame them. This is probably the only time of the year when they get a chance to take any sort of a break at all, and it must feel pretty miserable not quite having the time or money to spare to go home and see your family, as most of the rest of the country is doing.

Yes, around my way, it has been completely impossible to get rou chuanr - the mini kebabs which are the leading street food here - this past week. It also becomes impossible at this time of year to get jiaozi, another of my favourite snacks (my buddy The Chairman and I used to lunch on these little dumplings almost daily during our first year here in Beijing).

This may seem somewhat paradoxical, because jiaozi are one of the main traditional foods of this festival and most Chinese families - or the womenfolk, anyway - spend the last day or two before the New Year manufacturing enormous quantities of them to feed all the family and friends who will visit during the holiday. However, because of this, the streetside jiaozi merchants assume, probably quite rightly, that people have had quite enough jiaozi at home and there's thus no point in them continuing to ply their trade during this period.

Even the foreign restaurants often close for at least a couple of days for this holiday. The only places that stay open throughout are usually the slightly more upmarket Chinese restaurants. These are not generally the kind of places I enjoy eating; and during this holiday they are usually packed out, and you often need a reservation.

Knowing that this is the way of the world, from the bitter experience of my last six years here, I made plans to cook for myself for four or five days and stocked up on food before the holiday. Unfortunately...... I omitted to buy any meat.

I like vegetarian cuisine well enough, but I'm not especially adept at cooking it. And I am too much of a meat-lover to ever give it up, I fear. After even a few days of deprivation I start to develop a serious hunger for it. The restaurant shutdown in my neighbourhood did seem to be especially severe this year as well. Friends and I were expecting some of the Muslim places to open their doors again by Wednesday or Thursday, but no.

I had thought the "five kuai pie place" might be my salvation. I noticed with relief that that had opened again on Friday evening..... so I planned to make that my 'meat stop' on Saturday. On Saturday, the swines weren't open. Well, perhaps they had been and they just closed early. Their opening times have always been a bit eccentric, but I've rarely seen them still in operation much after 9pm; and the foot traffic on their street is so low at the moment that I can see why they wouldn't want to make any extra effort effort to stay open just to satisfy the mid-evening munchies of eccentric foreigners like me.

And still today, Sunday, my favourite chuanr places remain stubbornly closed. I had to treat myself to a rather pricey 'English breakfast', hoping that two squitty sausages and a few stringy rashers of bacon could assuage my meat-craving. It did, but not much.

This is becoming a crisis. Tomorrow I may need to go to a very expensive foreign restaurant for a steak.