Eating "Family Style"

 When the Chinese go out to dinner, they rarely order a single dish for a single person.  Everything is meant to be shared among those joining in.  If it's a small group, the dishes are just set in the middle of the table and when you want a piece of an item, you reach in with your chopsticks and grab it.  If you go with a bigger group, you are set at a larger table with a turn table in the middle and food constantly goes around.  

The pictures below are of the meal where we met Jacky and his wife Daisy and their daughter Cynthia (seated in between me and Tessa.)  

We've learned at the nicer dinners to pace ourselves so that we have an appetite all the way to the end.  After an enormous amount of food (probably 20 different full sized dishes) they bring out the fruit, and after the fruit, we know there is still another soup and a couple of vegetable dishes still coming.  There is never any dessert served. In watching the Chinese eat at these functions, they really just nibble the entire night, socializing, not focusing on getting full and then when the vegetables come out, they start to top off and get full.  

This type of eating gives me more evidence of the strong sense of community that is here.  It is socializing, but it is also sharing--not taking too much of your favorite so there is some for others etc. Tom asked at one of these meals when you knew to get up and do a toast.  It is when you meet someone's eyes across the table, then you get up, go over to them, and acknowledge and appreciate them as part of the group with a toast.  I just find this 'community building' so fascinating and endearing.

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This seems to be as good as place as any to dump some food pictures from dinners such as these. I haven't taken very many compared to the amount of food we've been served and the number of times we've been to functions such as these, but you can get the idea of the variety and size of dishes and masterful cooking they have at these nice dinners.  

A chef carving our Beijing duck.  I didn't really care for duck until we met this guy.  Now he can cook duck for me any time.

A bad picture of a salad type dish with WJ in the background. (Okay, well, all of these are not great photos, but they do show the food a bit better than this!)

This is a cold, bone-in chicken appetizer in a spicy sauce. 

This is one of my favorites--a Thai curry--better than I have ever tasted before.  After the meat and vegetables were mostly gone out of this, the servers came out and broke the rice bowl into pieces to dip in the sauce.  That was amazingly good too.  Recipe please???

This was an individual fish soup given to everyone (most soups are set in very large bowls on the turn table with a ladle).  This soup was very tasty, but large enough to get me full alone, so I didn't eat much of it because I wanted to sample everything else.  I'm not sure what I was doing that made it stay on my plate the entire night, while others had their whisked away at different points.  I need to learn the etiquette!

These were beef, but kind of like a chicken nugget texture dipped in something that texture-wise was like cocoa powder, but not.  The platter these are on is about 24".

A mushroom presentation on greens.  

Soup dumplings.

Squid on greens (not my favorite)

Fish with another fishy item.  Pretty tasty! To give you an idea on size, that fish was easily 12" long.

A delicious soup with red crunchy thingies.

This odd looking fish is probably my favorite thing I've eaten here.  It was an extremely tasty fish that was battered and deep fried and coated in a delicious sweet and sour sauce like I've never had before. After the deep frying, they piece it back together on the plate! I had to be careful to not take too much of this one and leave some for the others.  It was SO good!

I need a cooking class or two!  But either I need to find a cook who speaks English or I need to learn some serious Chinese before that can happen.  The latter is far in the distance, but hopefully one day....