#14 Chinese Cooking For Everyone

#14 Chinese Cooking For Everyone

Kung Hei Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year 4706! The year of the Ox is sure to be better than the year of the Rat.

We're very lucky to have a large China Town here in our city and it's branching out to other neighborhoods, soon we'll have a huge Chinese grocery store just minutes from our house. I can't wait, I love to pick up a half duck, cooked Peking or BBQ style, then I buy the little pancakes and add a few vegetables and roll it up, delicious! The seafood section and bakery in the new store will be amazing too!

Another nice thing about having a China town, we have lots of Dim Sum restaurants. One that we go to on Sundays after church sits 500 people and it's always full. If you haven't tried Dim Sum it's amazing, it's great for families since the more the merrier. You sit down at your table, you're given hot tea and a little piece of paper is placed on the table. Then the fun begins, women push heated steaming carts around the crowded tables. They are stacked high with bamboo baskets or little dishes of food. All you do is point and nod at what looks good. Don't bother asking what it is, they seldom answer in English. They place your selection on the table sometimes adding a sauce or cutting it into bite size pieces and move on to the next table after adding a little ink stamp to your paper. It's very fast paced since you can have carts coming at you from all directions and everyone can point. We've ended up with chicken feet and tripe when we're in the middle of the feeding frenzy. The feet we handed back but we chewed on the tripe for awhile.

Most tables seem to take one dish, share it and then move on to the next. We usually end up with the table covered with the little baskets and plates since we're always afraid the same cart might not return. I keep a look out for the Sticky Rice, it's a glutinous rice shaped around a tiny bit of chicken, egg, sausage and a few other things. Then it is wrapped up in a lotus leaf and steamed, see photo, it's on the top. The texture and the taste are wonderful! After all the eating, you just present the little stamped paper as you leave and they total up your bill. We're always amazed at how cheap it is even after we've tried lots and lots of stuff and we do try lots!

The bigger the restaurant the more variety there will be and since the one we go to is huge, hundreds of beautiful dim sum are paraded around. I can't imagine going to the small place with just one cart or where you order off a menu, there's little thrill in that. Also at our favorite restaurnant, we feel like we're living on the edge a bit. Everyone goes up and down a tiny staircase to reach the second floor, this is the same staircase where rival gangs had a shoot out and killed several people a few years ago. And talk about dangerous, I also wonder what would happen if someone yelled "FIRE" and everyone had to flee down this bottle neck. Of course they wouldn't yell fire, they'd yell something in Chinese and we'd be left all alone sitting at our table happily chewing cow stomach as the smoke surrounded us. I think I'll learn the Chinese for fire, just to be on the safe side. So Happy New Year, the cookbook today is #14 Chinese Cooking for Everyone by Jackie Bennett.