A carnival for foodies

Fresh vegetables and mushrooms are the basis of many dishes in Yunnan. （Photo： Mike Peters/For China Daily）

On many holidays, I've found myself sitting with women who were chatting eagerly about shopping. In Yunnan province, however, the shopping can take on a nursery-rhyme quality. My friends are going to market to buy a fat pig.

The region is famous for its pork, and visitors who are in the food industry often plan a side trip to Xuanwei town in Qujing prefecture, a day trip from Kunming or Dali. There, Yunnan's most famous butchers await.

I'm not ambitious enough to ship a whole leg or even one of those tempting hams back to Beijing. Instead, I head to the local market in Xizhou, a village in Dali, where more manageable pleasures await.

This market is a carnival for foodies. To get there, we walk through a sea of garlic fields, ruffled by a lake breeze from nearby Erhai that makes the very air taste like lunch.

In the heart of a province where agriculture is king, all kinds of treats await in this huge network of stalls. The local mushrooms are famous, and we're always sure to find some new, wonderfully weird fungi. They can be pungent or delicately fragrant, earthy or oddly sweet. Best of all, like other produce, somebody is likely to be cooking them here, so we can immediately see how to use it.

Because this old Silk Road stop is close to Southeast Asia－in the days of the Dali Kingdom it was the regional power－all kinds of tropical fruits and vegetables competed for our roving eyes. There are beautiful little striped melons, fat mandarins, bright green limes and creepy snake fruits－spiny, dark red devils about the size of kiwifruit but pointed on both ends. They're tart and troublesome to eat, and much of the core is a big seed. But they look too tempting for any modern Eve to pass by without taking a bite.

Rice crisps in bright colors, fussy live chickens, plastic pools full of lake carp and open sacks of dried spices in every hue are also part of the siren song of the morning market.

Vendors press the oil from grapeseed with ear-piercing grinders. Cheesemakers hang strips of the flat local goat cheese in the sun to cure and dry. Little old ladies in pink and yellow headdresses grill fish with tamarind paste. Other women patiently brush Asian pears in large tubs with a warm vinegar solution. The slightly briny fruit is surprisingly refreshing.

We also get a lesson in making erkuai. This simple rice dough finds its way into local noodles, buns, cakes and pastries, and it's fun to watch noodle makers stretch the stuff into long, elastic sheets. The name literally means "ear piece", because of the shape of one of its common forms. Kao erkuai is a popular street food version, grilled and wrapped around a strip of fried dough with sweet or savory condiments, a bit like a burrito.

Weston Anderson, our guide from the nearby Linden Center－a boutique hotel and culture center with cooking classes－shares another Mexican parallel: He fries flat rounds of the dough to make ersatz taco shells.

On our last day in Dali, we visit one of the area's many tea plantations. This small hillside farm produces tea only for local use, and gets about 40 visitors a day. That will pick up in April and May, our host tells us, as harvest season brings tea lovers out to pick and brew their own tea. We sit in the tasting room to learn some of the fine points of enjoying the green tea and the fermented pu'er types. The plantation has been in operation for 55 years, and boasts the name Mo Cui Cha Shai. That translates to "don't worry, take your time", and as we sit on the hillside deck enjoying a few last sips of our fragrant brews, we savored the laid-back sense of leisure that Dali offers in a escape from the big-city buzz of Beijing.