Greetings, My dear Hive Fellows.
To spend this weekend in a different way, I have cleaned my bicycle to start cycling the next week as the temperature in my area has started rising from the frozen level, and often during the day time, it crosses 10 degrees Celsius. I have not taken any meal during the whole of Ramadan, which started on the first day of March. So, I have decided to have my dinner at a local Xinjiang Restaurant, which is known as a halal restaurant all over China, as they offer halal foods without any dishes with pork or pork-related cuisine. Also, the dishes in this type of restaurant offer most of the dishes originated from the Xinjiang Province, which is a Muslim-majority province of China. You can find such halal restaurants in every corner of China I have visited in my life in China since 2019.
As I was fasting from dawn to dusk, I had to go to the restaurant in the evening after I had broken my fast during the Iftar time of the day. Currently, Beijing has the iftar time around 6:30 when the temperature drops significantly here. I took my bicycle and started my journey in the evening, and I felt so cold on my naked palms that I had not taken any gloves or warm clothes to protect my palms as the temperature had increased a lot here. However, due to the snow and rain yesterday, the temperature dropped to around 5 degrees today, and I felt the pain while I was riding my bike in the evening.
The good thing was that the distance from my institute to the restaurant was not more than 2 km so I arrived there within 15 minutes as there were some slopes and signals on my way to the restaurant. I have chosen the closest restaurant as the Beifang town where I had gone has two Muslim restaurants; I have chosen the first one as the cold was quite irritating. It is not new for me to come to this restaurant as I have come here so many times in recent years after I joined this working place in late 2020.
I ordered two dishes though I wanted a dish with 'Da fan Ji', which means big plate of chicken with rice, but I could not find it there, so, I ordered another combo rice menu called the 'Curry Chicken Rice' which one is the only South Asian based recipe that you can find in most of the Chinese restaurant in China. But in reality, the rice bowl is not a native bowl for me except for some turmeric and other spicy colours and a little bit of flavour in the masala, which is very negligible. But we generally use more chilli powder with out curry dishes with all kinds of meat. Especially the problem is that the rice, which was not kept in marinated condition, could increase the taste significantly. But I liked it as it reminds me of the cooking style that is quite similar to our home region.
As a Xinjiang food, I have ordered a kind of Meat Samosa that contains beef or Lamb inside it, and most of the time, it contains lamb meat as it was with this one that I ordered. I love it as the taste is so genuine like the Xinjang flavour. Though it is also without many spices in the meat, the meat flavour was great with the bread, which contains some spices on top. I have eaten this there many times, but today, I feel slightly salty, which may be due to my fasting, I guess.
I hope you like my experience of my weekend dinner in a traditional Xinjiang Restaurant here in China with some delicious food. By the way, the price of the food was 15 RMB = $2 for curry chicken rice, and for each meat samosa, 1 piece = 8 RMB, which is slightly more than a bucks. If you have any queries, let me know in the comments, and I will try my best to answer them as much as I can afford.
Thanks a lot for your time and attention in reading my post. I will catch up with you at the next one very soon.
Wish you a good day!
All the photos are taken by me and these are my own properties.
