"Fu huo jie" is the Chinese name for Easter.

One of the things that I love about the USA and China collectively is that there are so many holidays and they celebrate every single one.  I suppose its due to the 'she'll be right mate' attitude of Australians but for the most part, we tend to celebrate the bare minimum of holidays and then mostly we focus on the food and not really on any frivolous decorations or activities (the exception being Christmas but we'll talk about that some other time).  

I've decided, I really like the frivolous decoration and activities.  I'm not very good at them yet but its a fun tradition that I'd like to continue -- even here in China. 

My friend runs a little playgroup here twice a month and the date just happened to fall on Easter Saturday.  So I thought it would be fun to colour eggs and do an Easter egg hunt at the park.  So we painted our eggs up and despite the rather dubious looking weather, headed off to the park to hide them for the kids.  Within minutes of arriving, we attracted quite the crowd.  The foreigners had arrived and everyone wanted to see what they would do!  Having anticipated this, we calmly sat and chatted for 15 minutes till the crowd finally dispersed and I could hide our eggs.  So all eggs hidden, all that was left was to wait for the kids to arrive -- and hope the rain would hold off. 

The first person to discover an egg was the kite selling lady.  After walking by it several times, she finally worked up the courage to take a better look...and promptly smashed it with her foot. She looked up to see our horrified faces and smiled (as one does after smashing someone else's Easter egg) and told us it would go bad if we left it here.  No kidding.  So there goes that egg.

Some girls came and sat right next to where I'd hidden another egg at the bottom of a tree.  One girl accidentally bumped the egg with her hand and screamed!  She told her friend it was an evil gee dan (egg) and began throwing rocks at it!  At this point it also started to rain.  Being sightly bemused up until the rock throwing point, my friend and I decided to gather our eggs and move the hunt back to her living room where hopefully our 'evil Easter eggs' would not frighten any more people.  Whodda thunk a simple, coloured, hard boiled egg could cause such a rucous!?!

Anyway, the kids had a blast finding and eating their eggs and doing all the other activities that we'd planned for them and their mothers!

Decorating their Easter baskets...

They took the hunting part very seriously...

Here's to the next holiday!!!

Hot Cross "Chinese" buns!

So let me preface this for the non-Australians.  I do believe it's originally an English tradition but on Good Friday in Australia, you'd be hard pressed to find someone NOT eating hot cross buns for breakfast.  There isn't a single grocery shop or bakery that isn't bursting at the seams with dozens of these delicious, fruity, spicy buns with their intoxicating aromas enticing you to buy them (and hence devour them -- warm with a little pat of butter). 

Ok so I like hot cross buns.  And when I got to America three years ago, I was a little shocked to find out that not only is Good Friday not a public holiday (don't start me on that one!) but its rather hard to find hot cross buns!  So I started my own tradition of making them myself.  

But that was when I had a bread machine.  And now I live in China.  And no longer have a bread machine.  And I wasn't sure if I could get the other ingredients needed either.  So armed with my recipe and my "substitute-ingredient-with-this list", I hit the dry market, determined to continue my tradition (and addiction perhaps?) of making hot cross buns. 

Surprisingly, I managed to find all the ingredients I needed except the nutmeg which was no big deal.  So I spent several hours on Good Friday making these buns from scratch.  Yes, I kneaded them all and baked them in the tiniest oven conceivable to man (6 at a time...).  In the end I managed to bake about 4 dozen buns. Five hours of baking was then promptly devoured by some of our other foreign friends here (being that most of them are from North America, it was the first time to eat hot cross buns for many -- how sad!).  Jason almost managed to polish off the rest today but I have saved two for breakfast on Easter Sunday morning.  Here's a sample of my finished product displayed in my sweet new Chinese steamer baskets...I'm not sure I know how to use them but I think they are cool anyway!

Stop the presses!

I found a vegetarian restaurant in our city of carnivores!!!  I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw (in English at that!) "Jingxi Zhai, Vegetarian Restaurant" on a little hand drawn map for foreigners that we just happened to come across.  So I went tonight, trying not to get my hopes up as I've been disappointed by the words 'no meat' before...I wish I'd had my camera on me to show you pictures because you would not believe what we ate was vegetarian!  Let me touch on the subject of soy for a minute though.

By the way, in Mandarin, vegetarian is said: Su shi (I know what it looks like but it's pronounced "soo shir").

The Chinese first cultivated the soybean 3,000 years ago. It took them nearly 1,000 years to develop its full nutritional potential. In the west it took only 30 years to turn soy into soy burger.

Roughly some two thousand years ago when two Buddhists missionaries named Kasyapa and Dharmaraksha arrived from India after a long journey on the Silk Road, they brought with them a belief in the virtuousness of the meatless diet. Their teachings eventually found an a receptive audience - meat was a luxury the Chinese peasant could rarely indulge in, and for some the gap between a diet of little meat, and of no meat was not a wide one.

The great Chinese art of meat substitution was born. Meat analogues can be amazingly meat-like. You would assume that it would be much cheaper than the stuff hacked from the carcasses of animals, unfortunately due to the art and novelty its become,the vego dish is generally a more expensive choice.  Whether made of tofu, soy protein, wheat gluten or mushrooms, mock meat remains a major feature at vegetarian restaurants and temple kitchens throughout China. 

In fact my heart sank when I first glanced at the other tables and saw chicken and prawns.  But the waitress assured us several times (you could tell by the 4th time of us asking, she was thinking 'stupid foreigners') that the dish was, in fact, meat free.  They can make their not-meat look and even have a similar texture to 'the real thing'.  If that's even what you're going for...all I can say is to the original Tofurkey company...eat your heart out!  

Sorry that's not very vegan of me, is it?

Next time we go, I'll post pictures!

For anyone that's possibly interested in the location of this delightful gem, it's off Minzu Lu on the 1st floor of the Xiangyun Hotel.  Well worth the look-see.  Now if only I could find an Indian restaurant!

Let me start this one out with letting you know that one of friends is pregnant, and being pregnant, she has had some varied cravings for tastes that are not all Chinese. And some of those tastes she has been craving are hard to reproduce in China, one of which is Mexican. But we agreed to a group dinner the other night with that theme. Now, you can't get refried beans here, but you can get dried beans. So my task was to take dry black beans and try to make refried beans out of them. Well, they actually came out pretty good. Take in mind that you have to first soak the beans overnight, drain them, and them boil them for about 3 hours AND THEN you can saute some onion & garlic & spices and slowly add a cup of the beans and a little bit of vegy stock and then you take a potato masher and start mashing the beans while they boil down to a consistency to make room for more beans and stock. All in all, a fun experience. Oh, and then Rachel made the dough for the tortillas, rolled them out and I cooked them up, a team effort. This meal made for a long day of cooking beans and tortillas, but it was well worth it, one of the best Mexican meals I think I'll have here in China. 

I know they're not the best pictures, but we don't get good Mexican food in China that often, so nobody was dropping their plate to pick up the camera. 

I suddenly felt like Po the panda from the Disney movie 'Kung fu Panda'.  You know, the only thing stopping him going to the see who would become the dragon warrior was that set of stairs...and the noodle cart his dad wanted him to take up.  

Well, it was too bad I hadn't met my new friend before I had eaten my own fair share of noodle for breakfast that day (well if you count 10:30am as breakfast).  It was also too bad that the weather forecast for the weekend was completely wrong and I was wearing jeans in the sweltering humidity.  But ya gotta do what ya gotta do.  I knew I was going to hurt in the morning.

I wished I'd thought to count how many stairs there were!

Getting ready...


Psyching ourselves up for the climb...no resting on the way! 

Jason doing his Jack Black/Kung Fu Panda impersonation (before Po was in Kung Fu shape).

Ah!  The Dragon Warrior's sword!  Well, it was someone's sword and the town is extremely proud of it...let's just say we made a few ladies quite rich with all the photos they sold with us in them in front of this monument!!!  Still waiting to see some of the profits from that!

The view was totally worth it.  The sleepy town of Hechi nestles between these two massive mountain ranges.  I know its not on the 'must see' list but if you're even in Guangxi, I'd totally recommend popping in for a day or two.  Its China from a different perspective.