When Mennonites Cook Chinese Cuisine

First off, it's a trip to the Chinese food store.

I've been wanting to try bubble tea after having it at a local noodle house.

The recipes online make it look so simple (beware of those recipes).

The first attempt was sort of a fail because I had tiny little tapioca and that was just strange.

I even found the huge fat straws at an end of summer discount.

This time I thought I'll get fish eye size tapioca at the Chinese food store and then I should be good to go. Well, when the dry tapioca hit the water, they fell apart into powder and then proceeded to cook into glue! There were a few big pieces swimming in there but then they started to stick together tool

I added them to peaches and decided I'll just have to go on Amazon and buy the $10 bag of tapioca.

This is my garbage dish, but the white stuff is the tapioca after I added a bit of water to the rest of it and found out that the whole bag was like that!

The other thing on the "most requested" list was steamed buns

sorry for the poor picture, I thought of taking pictures after most of them were gone...

and ALL of them had huge bites missing. I filled them with a beef roast that had "roasted" 18 hours in the crock pot. Normally steamed buns have pork filling but, I didn't have pork.

Flavored the beef with sesame oil, char sui seasoning (from a packet- turned the meat a day-glo pink in places- tasted good tho) soy sauce, and a bit of oyster sauce. They disappeared like magic.

Then Zeke thought maybe we could make steamed buns instead of my traditional egg roll for his senior hot lunch at school.  Wonder if you can steam buns for 130 people?

Then because a certain someone was coming I made mashed potatoes and green beans to go with the bok-choy. He decided that sweet chili sauce tasted very good with steamed bun. 

For desert we had steamed bun with lemon curd nestled inside....now that is a keeper!

AND

we had "cream-cream cones"

That boy can eat.

This post reminded me of the cook in China who told me about the filling in the delicious buns we ate every morning. I knew enough Chinese words to figure out that they had, eggs, milk,and lemon.

Aren't they all so cute? 

"My" kitchen while we stayed in Beijing