Chinese Steamboat Dinner

Our second dinner invitation was from Peh Cheng, another Dean at the school. She took us out for a Chinese Steamboat experience. That means that we each had a bubbling hot pot of flavoured soup that we cooked our food in. It is very much like a fondue, but instead of cooking in oil you are cooking in the soup which you can scoop out and eat later on when it has all the yummy flavour of the things you cooked in it. She explained that in a Chinese family there would probably be just one large pot, but here we each had our own.

The meal was really fun, the best part being that she took care of ordering everything and then explained what it was. Believe me, I was literally taking notes. Here is a picture of some of the vegetables that she ordered for us. See if you can identify any of them before I tell you what they were. Clue: no peas or carrots in sight.


The meats she ordered were thin slices of beef and pork, and prawns. The vegetables and other things were:
lotus roots (crunchy like a water chestnut)
dumpling
fish ball
vegetable ball
salmon ball
bean thread (very thin transparent noodles)
small dragon puff
white radish (you cook it too- she said that the Chinese don't eat a lot of raw vegetables)
Chinese winter melon (it's a vegetable, not a fruit)
kelp (seaweed)
sweet potato noodles
There were a few different sauces to dip things into, and dessert was fried banana chips, some other kind of fried soft dough ball, and watermelon cubes. I tried everything and enjoyed it all!



After we dropped Jim off for his evening class, she took me shopping. We went to a famous store in Little India called Mustafa Centre. It is open 24 hours a day and sells everything. It is large and rambling over 4 levels, a bit like Honest Ed's. I thought for sure we would never find our way back out. I made a purchase--some red Oriental looking place mats with matching chopsticks. We saw a crazy amount of spices and some wonderful fabrics. People are very much in to getting clothes custom made here. Peh Cheng was wearing a lovely blouse and she told me that her long time tailor had made it for her for less than $20.00. She also told me that the retirement age here is 62. Peh Cheng studied and worked in the USA for several years but wanted to come back to her native Singapore. We got along well, maybe because she started out years ago as an elementary school teacher.