Everyone knows that I love eating Chinese food, but recently it has become a bit of an infatuation to master cooking Chinese food.
So I decided that I would host a Chinese feast with some of my favourite dishes for a group of my closest friends. One might think it would be a good idea to learn how to cook various dishes and then host a dinner party, but that’s just not how I roll.
I made up my mind to jump in at the deep end and just figure it all out as I went along.
Very quickly I realised that cooking for so many people wasn’t going to be easy, especially when the basic concept of a Chinese meal is many small dishes for everyone to pick over. To be honest, I hadn’t expected that everyone I invited would be free, but it just so happened that almost everyone was free so I was faced with cooking a full on Chinese meal for 10 people.
Now, you may say that I could have just scaled everything back and not done a full Chinese feast, but where’s the fun in that?
Never one to shy away from a challenge I made a menu, spent my lunch times in China Town buying everything I would need and devising my plan of attack.
For 10 people I was going to need about 10 dishes. That is quite a lot of dishes. Especially since most Chinese dishes are stir fried, which means that everything is cooked last minute and then immediately served.
To ease the kitchen burden I decided on a few of my favourite cold dished that could be made ahead and then that just left me with 5 hot dishes to cook at the same time. Easy right?!
I also theorised that it would be fun to make dumplings together and then those could just be left to steam. Easy peasy.
It turned out that it was not quite as easy peasy as I had envisioned. I realised I may have overstretched myself when I was up at 07:30AM poaching chicken. Don't ever say that I don't lead a glamorous life!
After a day of hand making noodles, preparing a million different ingredients and putting together cold dishes the people started to arrive and I very quickly realised that I was not prepared at all. I was a terrible host and hardly spoke to anyone but the dishes all turned out well, even if my kitchen did look like a bomb had hit it and I forgot to cook rice (oops).
To be fair to me, rice is typically had at the end of a Chinese meal and is used to fill up if people haven't eaten enough so in my mind it's not really essential to the meal. (Feel free to be horrified and completely disagree)
Although it was one of the most stressful days of my life and just a complete nightmare to prepare, it was also a lot of fun and I'm glad that I could introduce people to some of my favourite dishes in what ended up being a little culinary tour of my time in China. I wish I had taken more photos (read, any photos), but that's the hazard of hosting! It's all just another excuse to cook everything again! Maybe slightly fewer dishes at a time!
So, what was the menu? I’ve used Chinese names, I promise that they taste better than the names sound!
Menu
Cold Potato Salad (土豆丝)
Mouth watering Chicken (水口鸡)
Smacked Cucumber (拍黄瓜)
Liang Pi Cold Noodles (凉皮)
Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐)
Dry Fried Green Beans (干煸四季豆)
Fish Flavoured Meat Slivers (鱼香肉丝)
Dandan Noodles (担担面)
Beef with Cumin (自燃牛肉)
Pork Dumplings (饺子)
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