Chinese Food, I'm Over You

I love food but I have never been a big fan of Chinese food. There are particular things that I like a lot, like rice, but that is because I've never met a carb I didn't want to devour. Me and carbs are best buds.

My parents are very traditional in terms of their food tastes. VERY traditional. Like I've been in Zurich with them for a weekend and they insisted on having Panda Express. Whoa vomit. They love cruising and I think they've never been on one for more than 7 days purely because they cannot last that long without some choi sum (I can't believe there is a wikipedia page for choi sum). I think my dad is getting better since he travels so much for work now and I don't think they serve him choi sum in Africa on safari. But my mom and my aunt, uh uh. No way.

So for all of my childhood and most of my young adult life my exposure to Western food (which I like to unpolitically correctly call White People Food) consisted mainly of McDonalds. I'm not complaining, I love McDonalds. Sometimes I get the flyers through the door and I hide them in my handbag safe out of Keith's reach (he will bin them if he sees them) hoping for an opportunity when he's going out that I can sneak a good ol' filet o'fish and french fries. But it meant that I did not regularly eat a lot of foods until I was in my late teens. Dairy products are not popular in Chinese cuisine - the cow is for plowing rice fields, not for the pampering and milking! For example, cheese was something which I never had as a kid - really only had kraft slices (at home and on top of afore-mentioned Maccy D's) and maybe a few cubes of mozza and cheddar on snack plates at parties. Can't remember when I first tried brie but mmm I sure was missing out. To this day, I'm still scared of the really stinky blue cheeses. And I don't think I actually ever tried yogurt until I moved to the UK (at the age of 24) and on a whim decided that yogurt might be a nice snack to have in my fridge.

But I did realize my love for mashed potatoes early on (see? carb!), and bless her, my grandma did try to make me some for dinner quite regularly, but butter and milk are not commonly used in chinese cooking, so she would just boil the potatoes and mash them with water as the sole liquid in the recipe. I always wondered why we could never make it without the lumps at home - little did I understand the power of cream and butter.

Pretty soon I realized that I much prefer White People Food, and when I moved to the UK I knew food would not be a concern at all. If you ask me what I want for dinner I will always say pasta (carb). I truly believe that if you told me I could only have one meal for the rest of my life, I would be happy eating spaghetti and meatballs. But seven years does take its toll, and I started to crave some particular dishes from home that I never have in the UK. Since I've been back I've therefore been indulging in Chinese food but now, after two big celebratory meals (Viv's wedding and my sister's birthday tonight), I've realized that two months and I've already had enough again and can take it or leave it. Which is actually quite handy since I'm still on that diet.

But one thing that I'm still looooving is Chinese baked goods. I take the skytrain and then the bus home (if someone isn't kind enough to swing by and pick me up from the skytrain station) and right at the bus stop is a Chinese bakery. It's literally right outside the bus stop as you can see here (blue bus stop sign and people queueing on the right):

So I'll often go in and drool at these. And then buy 6 because if you buy 6 or more there's no sales tax:

My favourite is the pineapple bun (top row), which has no pineapple on it, and is thus named because the crust they make on the top has bumps and ridges like a pineapple. This crust is made purely of sugar and lard. i.e. YUM. Too bad they are 340 calories a pop. worse than a donut, worse than a bagel, so I often buy them, dream of one day having enough calories leftover in my day to have HALF, never make it, and let other people in my household gobble em up (so I'm just fattening up my parents and grandma, really).

And tonight for my sister's bday there were traditional birthday buns, made with rice flour with a lotus seed paste filling (fav!). I think they are meant to look like peaches which have some significance in Chinese culture in terms of celebration and luck (too lazy to look it up) but I always giggle at them because to me they look like a pimply butt, complete with ass crack:

Pimples and asscrack or not, they are ohhhhhh so delicious.