carb mania and vanity at stake

Even before I'd stepped out of the house, I knew I won't be cooking lunch, just one of those days when you want to eliminate the possibility of entering the kitchen.

There's a small shop near my house that sells all manners of local baked and fried items of very Shanghai taste, and I'd made a mental note of picking something up on my way back.

So this is what I picked up. The white bun like thing on the left is called 'baotza or bao zi' and is really a steamed bread dumpling encasing some filling. Usually it's sweet red bean paste, but this particular shop where I picked these wonderful gems from excels in creating a hundred varieties of such, and this baotza was stuffed with minced pork and garlic.

The bronze rounds of fried beauties are known as 'Shao bing' and come in a myriad of flavours; either baked or fried, and these ones were nice and fried. They come in both sweet stuffings or meat stuffing and these ones were the latter. (one stuffed with beef and green onion, and the other with minced pork and some other flavour which I couldn't guess)

Think of them as inverse burgers if you please.

Here's a cross section of these little lovelies. 

I thought I was ravenous, but man, were they filling. I have just washed my carb filled lunch with a glass of hot white tea, and now I'm contemplating some masala chai. 

And now I'm feeling guilty. Talk about binging, and binged I have. 

Fried carbohydrates are such sweet words, and sometimes I wonder, why I subject myself to such grueling discipline of eating frugal low carb food and idiotic exercises, when I can just eat awesome things like these.

I think my insides thanked me for downing this food and now I crave sugar. Goddamit.