Lunch - Wuxi

After breakfast, we went to Yixing to look at the famous specialty teapots made from Yixing clay and then we were brought to the Freshwater Pearl factory (Wuxi Yuan Run Ju Pearl Co. Ltd.) and ate lunch nearby:

 

Fried Rice for lunch instead of white rice!  

Scrambled egg dish and some mysterious side dish

The scrambled eggs were good. 

Wuxi Spareribs

Now this dish is 10x better than the same dish from the night before. 

It was exactly how I expected a specialty spareribs dish to be: tender, juicy and tasty. The sweet sauce made it even better since the fatty meat absorbed the flavour.

I have no idea how they made the lettuce dish - but it was really good!

For an extra ¥20, you could get a Vegetarian Buddha Jumps Over Wall soup. 

According to Wikipedia, "the soup was created during the Qing dynasty and is known as a Chinese delicacy. The name is an allusion to the dish's ability to entice vegetarian monks from their temples to have some of this meat-based soup". 

The soup had a fragrant and herbal taste; I didn't see any evidence of shark fin or quail eggs, but there was definitely chicken and red dates and bamboo. It was really refreshing and delicious.

Vegetarian Chicken 

This was nicely prepared as well: it had more substance and was more tender than the vegetarian chicken at breakfast.

Dried tofu

It was an okay dish.

Taihu Whitefish and Spicy pork 

Taihu whitefish was still really bony - but it was delicious. 

The spicy pork was good too (even if it was too spicy for me)

Wintermelon Fungus soup

Surprisingly, this was spicy - it didn't really look like it would be, but it was . 

I actually really enjoyed it. 

Conclusion: This meal was much better! I love the Wuxi spareribs and the Vegetarian Buddha Jumps Over  Wall soup.

Snacks:

These were bought in Yixing in the market outside of the teapot factory:

 

OMG - Best Seasame Crackers I've ever had! 2 for ¥10

Layers of crispy deliciousness...mmm this might my new obsession (I still love baumkuchen too)

Salted Pine Nuts  ¥8

Really good! They also had an original flavour which was even better and for less than $2 CAD (or USD)? That's unheard of! A bag of pine nuts in Toronto goes for $15.99.