Xinjiang (Chinese) Meal

As there are no country names with the letter X this meal comes from a province with that letter. Xinjiang is a western province of China adjoining the middle east. The food here is influenced largely by the middle east. The ethnic people of this region are the Uyghur or Hui.


For my the meal I was looking for noodles as the main dish. I found a very detailed laghman noodles recipe with embedded videos to help make them. Then I found a really nice pulao (pilaf) recipe. The Uyghur polo is not vegetarian but could be easily converted using paneer. I will make the noodles some day but for this meal my main dish is Uyghur (ee-gur) polo. I read here that samsa, a street food similar to the Indian samosa, is served with polo. So samsa served as the side dish. For dessert I made a sweet rice called mifirfan. 'Fan' is rice in the local language. In this dish the rice is sweetened with apricots and raisins along with a little sugar.


I did not use any new ingredients in this meal. This meal was not spicy at all. If you like spicy food you could add a whole range of spices to the polo as well as the filling for the samsa. We do not eat spicy food in our house so we enjoyed the original recipes.


Here are the recipes for the dishes on the menu
And for dessert


Comments

  1. Another wonderful delicious meal put together. .loved all recipes. .specially the sweet rice ..it has awesome flavors.

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  2. I never thought samsa (samosa) and pilaf would be part of a Chinese cuisine. Nice choice for X and a nice meal.

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  3. Samsa and pilaf in chinese cuisine, thats seriously very interesting to know.. You rocked again with your meal Varada, tremendous search and beautiful spread there.

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  4. Same pinch, Varada. I went with the same region!

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  5. That's quite a revelation for me too..imagine cooking all that samosa and rice..all the dishes look so inviting..

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  6. Very interesting Chinese dishes. Whole meal looks awesome.

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  7. Interesting meal Varada. Can't wait to check out the recipes....

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  8. If not for your post, I would have never known that Chinese cuisine do consist pilaf and samosa kind of dishes. :)

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  9. I actually saw documentary about the Uyghur people a few months ago on Global Voices. Don't know if you ever watch that show - it comes on PBS. I was so surprised to see people from China speaking Arabic. It does not surprise me their food is also Middle Eastern.

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  10. i was keen to make this cuisine too...no one would have believed i made chinese with the food on table...its good that with this bm we are able to break some stereotypes

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  11. Very interesting spread of dishes..

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  12. Same pinch for the polo and with paneer it must have tasted great . Samsa and mifirfan looks yummy too.

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  13. My you really are amazing! Here I find it difficult to cook one dish and you comeup with yum meals.

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  14. Its looking very innovative dish..
    I will try this at my chinese restaurants in bangalore

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