Mid Autumn Festival in Beijing

This would be our very first Mid Autumn festival away from home back in Malaysia. When we were back home, mid autumn festival were celebrated with my in laws and my youngest sister. After dinner, we would gather at our car porch, tabled laid with all sort of biscuits, cookies and the most important of all, moon cakes of every variety and fillings.

Lanterns will be hung across the car porch while the children will have a ‘FUNstatic’ time playing with their individual lanterns and candles of course. Lanterns back home comes in different shapes and sizes and Ryan’s favorite of course was his ‘Ultraman’.

However, we have much difficulty trying to lay our hands on some decent lanterns here in Beijing. We simply could not find them anywhere. We thought that we did not know where to search and hence we have been asking every local we came across, from the waitresses at Jamaica Blue, our daily morning coffee hang out to the illegal taxi drivers whom have became our friends over the last nine months.

One of these taxi drivers said he knew of a possible mall where we could get some and took us there last Saturday morning. We spent over an hour there before we came across this ONE store that has some in stock. They were nice and inexpensive, approximately RMB10 each. We bought six. Now that we have our lanterns, the next item to hunt for were the candles and that we have to buy from another store (and the only one who carries them) for RMB20 for 8 pieces per pack.

Finally, we have our lantern and our candles. Then we realised that we do not have any stick to tie the lantern to. We asked our driver friend if he knew where we could buy some. To our pleasant surprise, he drove us around on the way home and stopped by the road side, where he saw some broken branches, got down and stripped some sturdy ones for us.

With that solved, we were ready for the night. We got our Ayi to cook some noodles for the night and we have invited Coleen and her son, Slevin who is also Ryan’s best friend and neighbour to join us that night. It will be their first taste of celebrating mid autumn festival. Being Americans who have stayed in China for the last 6 years, they have heard about it but never really experienced it.

To complement the fried noodles, I made some simple appetizers for the night, mango salsa, oven baked crispy potato skin with mash potato and minced beef, and oven grilled crispy thinly sliced French loaf with minced beef dip.

 Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum and chopped mint leaves with lemon zest and lemon juice.

Oven Baked Crispy Potato Skin with mash potato and minced beef filling.

Oven grilled thinly sliced French Loaf with Minced Beef dip

Our newly employed Liew Ayi’s birthday falls on the following week. In keeping with our tradition and practice, where we have always celebrated our helper’s birthday back home, we bought a small birthday cake for her but kept it as a surprise. When we brought it out and sang her the birthday song, I can tell that she was pleasantly shocked.

 The children helping Liew Ayi to blow off the candle on her birthday cake.

To complete the night, we lit our lanterns and walked around the park within our apartment’s compound with Zoewe, our toy poodle happily tagging along. To our amazement, we made several heads turned when we walked past them with our colourful lanterns and some even stopped to take pictures of us with their mobile phones.

We are unsure of our future plans next year and whether we would still be in Beijing for the next mid autumn festival but for now, this year’s mid autumn festival was indeed something different from the previous years and an interesting chapter in our adventures in China.

Home Cooked Birthday Dinner

The month of September and October this year would be rather busy months of all of us here in Beijing. There will also be several rather significant changes in our daily routine.

For one, my mother in law who has so graciously came to help taking care of the children when we first came to Beijing will be going back to Malaysia after helping us for almost a year. We have also engaged a full time Chinese helper (ahyi) for 8 hours daily to help clean and cooked dinner. Ryan is already going back to school and Chenya is due to start  her first pre-school in November.

Wife has a rather full travelling schedule for the next 3 weeks of so, starting with travelling  back to Malaysia and then to Singapore for some training, after which she would be flying off to Seattle for another week or so. And I will be staying in Beijing to handle to the two super hyper active `monsters’ during this entire period. Lucky me.

Until Chenya goes to school in November, there would be no more early morning coffee or breakfast alone like I used to. Chenya would definitely be tagging along and with her around, there would be no more updating of Facebook or my blogs during my routine early morning breakfast.

With wife being away during her birthday, we had a simple pre-birthday celebration for her at home and as promised, I arranged to cook some simple dishes for her on Sunday.

On Saturday, we made arrangements to visit our favourite market at Sin Yuen Lee, where we could look for the ingredients and items I need. And the following are what was laid on the dinner table last night with some help from my local ahyi who I must said, was a little taken aback with me, teaching her to cook.

I prepared two appetizers for the night.

To start with, we have oven grilled Tiger Prawns marinated simply with some salt, black pepper, sugar and olive oil, served with Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum  and finely chopped mint leaves with lemon zest, lemon juice and salt and black pepper to taste. I must said that the Tiger Prawns are definitely much cheaper here in Beijing as compared to getting them back home in PJ. We had 7 tiger prawns measuring over 6 inches end to end that only cost us less than RMB50 (RM25).

The next appetizer was something that I did not expect to do but when she saw these life scallops at the market, she said that that would be nice to have. I have always worked with frozen scallops back home in Malaysia and have never work with life ones before. 1kg of these (numbering 8 scallops with shell) was RMB45 (RM22.50) which sounded rather reasonable to us. Instead of my normal oven baked scallops with Japanese mayonnaise, and since I don’t know where exactly to get them, I was thinking about a different cooking method.

And this is what we have. Oven baked life scallops, marinated with some salt and black pepper and Chinese cooking wine, baked with olive oil and finely chopped garlic. My ahyi gave an excellent proposal which I will definitely try and that is top the baked scallops with some glass noodles.

The soup is simply one of our all time favourite, especially my mother in law and Ryan, a creamy broccoli soup.

I had originally wanted to grill some beef steak as the main course but I have done that quite a couple of times and I am getting bored with that. Instead, I thought of doing a beef kebab with BBQ sauce. Hence, I bought some Australian sirloin beef from April Gourmet (a chain of small supermarkets catering for the expat market in Beijing, the other two being Jenny Wang and Jenny Lou). I also bought some green and yellow capsicum and large onions from the local wet market not far from our apartment.

The sirloin beef was cut into smaller cubes, marinated with salt, black pepper and BBQ sauce and left in the refrigerator for about 4 hours. Before grilling them, the beef cubes were pan seared with some olive oil till the sides were slightly browned before they were put into some wooden skewers alternated with pieces of yellow, green capsicums and large onions. The wooden skewers have been soaked in water for a good one hour prior to this to ensure that they don’t get burnt in the process of grilling. They were then put into the oven and grilled at 250 degrees for approximately 5 minutes before they were served.

We had a good dinner at home and I washed the food down with a glass of Shiraz Cabernet from Jacobs Creek Winemakers Selection.

Now that the pre-birthday dinner is over, my wife is now hinting that she would love to have lobster next because the life lobsters at the Sin Yuen Lee wet market was simply too tempting to resist. And that is something that I have never attempted before and it is going to be interesting.

Chenya is Now Two

Time flies and almost at the blinking of an eye, Chenya has just celebrated her second birthday. We have seen much changes in our lives in the last one year. For one, the entire family has been relocated to Beijing in November 2012 to start a new life in a new environment and new adventures.

From the moment she arrived, I knew that she is going to be a handful and a fierce one too and that is exactly how she has turned to be.She is as active as her brother Ryan, attempting every single move that her brother is doing. Her favorite toys so far are guns and cars (Pengsan!)

She is not afraid of anyone at home right now and had almost everybody twirling round her fingers. I am trying very hard to be the one to discipline her and instill some fear and respect in her at this age, else she would be absolutely uncontrollable.

She is demanding and when she wants something, she want it instantly and can be rather persistent in her demands. She is almost everything that Ryan is not. She can cry for long period of time with real tears when she does not get what she wants and smile just as fast, the moment she gets it. She is possessive and would rather put her stuff aside, even though she does not play with them instead of sharing them with another, including his brother.

She can also be rather manipulative to get grab attention. There were instances when she would just walked past her brother who was sitting innocently on the sofa watching TV, purposely let her hand  touched his legs and the before you knew it, she would be crying and running towards us, crying ...."Kor Kor knock knock Chenya!"

Her brother would look baffled, confused and would vehemently denied having anything to do with it. "No! No! I didn't touch her! She came and use her hand to touch my leg ... like this ..like this..." he would defend himself.

I must said poor Ryan received several rounds of warnings from us before we wised up to this manipulative girl's tactics.

She loves singing and grandma has taught her Theresa Teng's songs that she would sing whenever she feels like it. She will automatically moves and shakes her bump whenever she sees dances on TV.

She loves clothes and would choose her own clothes even at this age and she loves shoes and constantly changes and alternates between the several pairs she has adopted from Ryan.

At the age of 2, she is a fast learner. We are constantly amazed with the new words that she picks up either from us, her brother or TV. She is able to form sentences and recently even knows how to talk back to us! (Really Pengsan!) With us being in Beijing right now, she is getting on very well with at least three languages, namely English, Cantonese and Mandarin.

All in all, to sum it up, Chenya is after all, a GIRL in every sense of the word.

Chenya with her picture taken with mommy, brother Ryan and her grandmother with her tiny Angry Bird cake when mommy came back from her business trip in Atlanta to have another round of celebration with her.

Happy Birthday Zoewe

The first addition to our family was actually not Ryan but Zoewe, our toy poodle a.k.a. our eldest daughter. Today, 6th July 2013, is her 6th birthday and her first in Beijing. We got her when in August, when she was barely two months and since that day, she has brought us nothing but pure joy, happiness and loyal companionship.

We were advised by many well meaning friends and relatives to give her up when we knew that Ryan was on his way but we simply could not because she is part of our family. She has proven all these years to be that perfect protective, well mannered eldest `sister' to both Ryan and Chenya, despite being bullied countless times by them.

Nothing makes her happier than these:-

a. Eat and eat

b. Going for walks

c. Being cuddled

d. Play 'fetch' with her favourite ball.

What frightens her the most:-

a. Thunderstorm

b. Firecrackers during Chinese New Year

She would literally trembles and would want us to cuddle and hold her and to comfort her.

We can not imagine our lives without her and whenever she goes for grooming, our lives are somewhat less exciting for that several hours. Somehow, there is this sense of something missing at home.

So, Zoewe, although I know that you would never be able to read this post but I know that deep in your heart, you can feel how much you are part of our lives and how much we love you and we are looking to share many many many birthdays with you in the years to come.