First of all I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!!!

We have been busy, but it was very good indeed.

I have discovered something and wanted to share it with you all. I was at my brother and sister-in-laws house for Chinese food for Christmas Eve dinner. We decided for fun that we would all eat with chop sticks. I have never ate with chop sticks before so it took me a bit to get onto it. Well, everyone else was complaining, but I LOVED IT!!! It is perfect for a bandster!!! Small bites, by the time you get more food together you have long since eaten the last bite. No golf balling, no waiting for food to go down, lots of time to figure out if your full. No wonder Asian people are thin. So I brought home 8 sets of sticks. I think I'm going to eat with them always, they are perfect!!!

interesting idea!

People will just think you're super pretentious, eating your Kraft dinner with chopsticks! LOL

I'll just blend the chopsticks in with the Optifast. mmm..Fiber. Chopsticks, the other white meat.

*Yoda stabs a kraft dinner noodle with a chopstick*...

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm KD!!! :hungry:

Yeah, I was thinking of just stabbing an entire huge dim sim with the chopstick, lol. Do you have dim sims over there when you eat Chinese?

Thats such a brilliant idea! I'm going to suggest Chinese each time I have to go out to eat!

That is a great idea for some. My problem is I have been eating so much Vietnamese food I am a pro with the chop sticks. Maybe I will have to try eating with one.

Andrew

Andrew that might be fun to watch...lol....I am a pro at chop sticks also. We eat lots of Asian food here on the island

Andrew that might be fun to watch...lol....I am a pro at chop sticks also. We eat lots of Asian food here on the island

[Mr. Miagi Voice] Andrew, when you finish Pho with one chopstick you will be ready. [ end Mr. Miagi voice]

Maybe I will get a blindfold and see if that slows me down.

Andrew

you are cracking me up. Hey maybe you can have your wife video tape it and we can all take lessons...lol

Yeah, I was thinking of just stabbing an entire huge dim sim with the chopstick, lol. Do you have dim sims over there when you eat Chinese?

Yep, we have dim sum over here. :hungry: There is a huge Asian population - mostly from the subcontinent of India and from China but also from Thailand and Vietnam - in Canada. Our climate isn't the best but the eating is good.

Cloe, I think your chopsticks idea is brilliant. :clap2: Eating with chopsticks slows me down. When I eat with chopsticks I like to wear dark clothes. The food splatters don't show up as much.

Okay, I need Enlightened.

What is dim sum????

Oh, I want to be more worldly. I only ever get a chicken ball, broccoli, and a bit of rice.

I swear green, I'm gonna show up at your doorstep one day, and were going to all those neat antique shops and then out for 'dim sum'.:biggrin1:

Dim sum is served at only some Chinese restaurants in Toronto and only at lunch time on the weekends. Some dim sum are little meat, seafood, and or vegetable filled dumplings. Some of these are deep fried and some are boiled/steamed. They are kind of like the Chinese version of pirogi or ravioli. Some of them have minced pork or beef with maybe a little garlic and ginger and these might be either steamed or fried. The seafood ones are very delicate. The dough is made of rice flour and is very thin. The seafood - usually shrimp - is chopped and these dumplings are steamed. The dough is very white and you can see the contents of the dumpling through it. Another thing they call dim sum is quite different from the dumplings: they wrap sticky rice around bean paste and tie this up in banana leaves and steam it. They also serve custard tarts and a white sweet pudding. They serve other things too but because these involve fish and your more exotic kinds of seafood (Like octopus) I stay away. Growing up in Toronto I never did learn to love fish!

Going out for dim sum is a very strange experience for the first timer. You will not receive a menu. Instead there will be women slowly pushing carts with little dishes by your table. On each dish there will be two or three dumplings. You must stop them by pointing to what you want as they walk by. Often they don't seem to even make a note of what you have just bought. At the end of the experience you will be presented with a bill. This will likely be a list of all the dim sum available and they will be listed in Chinese only; ones that you have consumed will be ticked off. If I remember correctly, a bill for 3 might run you to $35-40 max.

And you are always welcome to visit me, Cloe.

interesting... I don't think I've ever had dim sum either. Anything like 'potstickers"? Mmmm...

Cloe, as much as I love Chinese food too, my experience doesn't go much further than beef/brocoli, chow mein, fried rice, s/s chicken balls, almond guy ding (?) hehe

Tell me people... what does "chow mein" mean to you? (sounds philosophical, doesn't it?) Does this include some kind of meat and vegetable in a sauce, on top of some fat (sometimes skinny) noodles? Or meat/veg/sauce on top of some bean sprout concoction? I wonder, because up until I moved to NB, I only had it 1 of those 2 ways, and had no idea the other existed (and I hate it!!) And in NB, the new way seems to be the ONLY way! Just wondering what you guys get if you order chow mein.

I looooove dim sum, it can also be quite healthy if you order carefully (steamed) and lots of veggies. Definately easy to control your portions as you pay for only what you want, and it is fairly cheap.

Argon chow mein to me is definately with noodle, not bean sprout. That one if I'm not mistaken is lo mein.

Becca

We call that sort of Chinese meal Yum Cha and it has lots of other things besides dim sims.

Dim sims are kind of the layman's chinese over here, you get them in any takeaway store, steamed or deep fried, at the footy, at the school canteen, in the fish and chip shop, frozen in the freezer section at the supermarket. In fact we had steamed dim sims and home made fried rice for dinner last night. But real Chinese ones are great.

We also have a thing very similar to a dim sim called a Chiko Roll, its an Aussie Icon. Nobody has ever worked out what is actually in the things, they're like a big long deep fried spring roll, but you may as well shove them down your aorta as eat them, they're going to end up there anyhow, lol.