Cooking!

As you may already know, cooking has not been something I have done much of since I have been here. The temptation and ease of Sherpas and Element Fresh delivery after a long day at work are just too much! But I do enjoy cooking, so I have missed it.

Therefore, when Charlene suggested a Chinese cooking course for her birthday I jumped at the chance!

Chef Mike was our guide for the day, and our first dish was xiaolongbao - the traditional Shanghainese dim sum. They are different to normal dim sum because they have a soup inside them! The pastry (I'm not sure pastry is the right word, batter maybe?) was very easy to make - just wheat flour and water, but it was all very technical with how they are rolled out and shaped. Eventually you should end up with 8 perfectly circular shapes to fill with meat, but ours were a bit more "abstract" (to put it kindly!)

The filling in pork mince, onions, mushrooms and lots of sauces and herbs - vinegar, soy etc. there was also a load of chopped up pork jelly (yum!!). That proved to be the secret to the soup inside the dumpling - as the dumplings are steamed the pork jelly melts and turns into the soup! You have to twist the pastry around the meat filling in a fancy way of folding and pinching, which we managed with varying degrees of success...



My dim sum ready to steam (looking very pleased with myself!)

We also made pork wontons, which were made from ready made pastry (pah!) they were very easy to make, and the filling seemed pretty similar. They also looked quite impressive with only a small amount of effort.




These ones are boiled for a few minutes and then added to a soup.





Again, tasty! But really hard to eat with chopsticks!

Realistically I probably won't make them again myself - no idea on how to even start to find pork jelly and I don't want to think about what I might get by mistake!! But it was a really fun afternoon and it was great to get cooking again!

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People's Square

My aim whilst I am here is to visit a new place each week, and also to not return to the same restaurant twice!

I started this a few weeks ago, and my first destination was People's square and Renmin Park. It is a plaza with a mixture of traditional, colonial and modern buildings and skyscrapers, with a park just to the side of it.

Renmin Park was a lovely surprise, once you are inside you can't really tell that you are in the middle of such a busy city. The only clue is the sight of skyscrapers peeping over the top of the trees.




It is very calm and I enjoyed watching the old men playing cards, surrounded by onlookers.




I then turned the corner and came across the marriage market. As the name suggests, parents are there advertising their children in order to attract a suitable marriage. There were so many people there, I would guess over a thousand! And so many adverts for their children, I only wish I could read what they said.




There were lots of couples talking animatedly, I can only imagine they were discussing how suitable the matching of their daughter and son would be.




It was very interesting, but it did make me think of those sons and daughters who are having their future decided when they aren't even present.

Anyway, Charlotte is here at the moment! We are having a very touristy day with an open top bus tour so I am there will be plenty to talk about!

Zai jian x

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A long time coming!

Apologies for the long gap between my posts. I recently got a new camera and I am trying to work out a way of easily adding the photos to my blog. However, using an iPad is no use as there is no USB port and using my work laptop is no good either as blogger is blocked and VPNs aren't allowed. (VPNs direct your internet through a private network and therefore avoid the bans on Chinese Internet, otherwise known as "The Great Firewall"!)

The past two weeks have been great! I hope my weekends carry on being as fun as they are now!
Highlights of the past couple of weeks;

- Visiting People's Square and Park - eating street food whilst watching old men playing Chinese checkers. Wandering past hundreds of couples displaying information about their children to entice a potential husband or wife for them. Photos to follow!
- Chilled out BBQ in Yanlord
- Trying loads of different types of dim sum (I do have photos of this, as I had to take them on my phone)



Shrimp and sticky rice dim sum



Me and Charlene perfecting our chop stick skills!

- Irish music in a tiny bar called the Wooden Box, followed by dancing in a shockingly bad club!
- Residential trip with year 5 to Nanbei Hu. The kids had a great time on the leap of faith and we all had fun kayaking. The nickname "miss bum in the lake" is likely to stick for the time being! It was nice being outside and getting to know the kids a bit more, as well as the other teachers! Nothing like bonding over cockroaches in your bathroom and toilet incidents on the coach!!
- Ladies day at Aussie Rules - free champagne, great food and fit men in shorts. No complaints from me!

So there is a short and sweet round up of my last few weeks! I will try and add some more posts in more detail in the coming weeks!


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