After four days in Vancouver for a family wedding (Chinese food throughout), my appetite is satiated from banquet gatherings. I love it here! Vancouver reminds me of my favorite place in the world, San Francisco. With ocean and nature nearby, the skies are typically blue when not foggy. From one district to another, pockets of culture are represented by restaurants and multi-cultural supermarkets. Leaving China, one has promising luck to reunite with obscure vegetables, after a visit to the large Chinese markets scattered throughout Richmond, just south of Vancouver.
Red Star Seafood for Dim Sum
Chinese celebrations are an epicurean sport only the hungry should contend with. A ladies brunch at Red Star Seafood, a rehearsal dinner at Shanghai River, and a wedding banquet at Kirin; all a range of flavors different from what I usually eat in Beijing because the flavors are mostly Cantonese.
Aunty M cooked up a feast of steaks with grilled onions, ribs with mushroom sauce, garlic bread, three types of salads, and Kimchi!
In between the restaurant meals were a few belly-stuffing home-cooked meals.
Gooseberries!
Sunday brunch, Pei and I met with some friends at Seasons in the Park (Queen Elizabeth Park). I had a delicious burger, so monumentally good I forgot to photograph it. Cajoled into dessert, we shared a brandied pecan pie. Sitting shyly next to my pie was a tomato-looking berry I’d never seen before. It was a Gooseberry! It felt like biting into a cherry tomato, but the flavor was sweeter and tart.
Steamed Lotus Leaf Wrapped Rice
Our last meal was hosted by the bride’s parents at another branch of Red Star Seafood in Richmond. I’ve had quite a few lotus-leaf wrapped rice packages in my life, but this one I ate tonight was not made with sticky rice 糯米 and was bound in leaves resembling Beijing’s Temple of Heaven 天坛. I love the fragrance lotus leaf adds to rice — 好香！
So now I’m in San Francisco, exhausted, stuffed, and hoping the hills will bring a little balance to my consumption. However, if you know San Francisco like I know San Francisco, we both know my appetite is about to be spoiled a lot more (in good a way). I just wriggled into my skinny jeans, shivering from this San Francisco summer. While the past few days have been good to my senses, my jeans constrict in revolt.
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Is it just me or does a person look more and more like their surrounding as time goes by. What I mean is that if you live in China you look more Chinese as you adapt to local culture and style. As you travel, live and experience each new place the same person seems to change ever so little to reflect their environment. Can this be perceptible even in short time-frames? Personally I think so even if you are in one place last week and somewhere else over the weekend. Even day-to-day though you may not set out to look more “something” as you pick out your clothes, choose you makeup and do all those other little things women do to get ready in the morning invariably your choices lead you down that path. Is it fate, is it nature, it just human tendency to adapt to be similar to those around them? who knows so Shanti I just have to say you really do look Chinese in your Gooseberries picture..
I can’t believe this is home cooked!
Everything seems so professional and neat.
I do not know if you look Chinese, but you certainly reflect the knowledge you’ve acquired!
I love your blog! I’m living vicariously through it. And as much as the food in Vancouver was good, meeting you and Peikwen was even better. I hope your eating adventures don’t end!
Hi Carolyn, great hearing from you. Thanks for reading. We had such a great time meeting you and Adrian, as well. I don’t think the eating adventures will end any time soon. Come out to Beijing, and we’ll eat! xo