Newfie food: Boil up

My first tailgate party ;)

What you see here with the big pot and a propane tank is a large scale boil up. Boil ups usually refer to a little winter picnic out in the woods. A fire is started, and water is put to boil to warm up the tired snowshoers, or snowmobilers. It is also common to roast wieners and eat a hearty serving of warm baked beans. 

Our boil up was a large scale one, so we deep fried fries and wieners as a treat. 

Newfie food: Seal flipper pie + Turr

I have finally done it. I've eaten seal. Even though I find seals quite adorable and entertaining to watch, my adventurous side could not resist an opportunity that was given to me to taste test it. Thanks Connie and Colleen!

It is like any other meat pie: minced meat and vegetables, covered with a pastry top

 And the verdict? I was forewarn that seal had a strong fishy smell and taste, and that many people can't stand it. I was able to eat it, because it was really in essence a meat pie, but I can't say I would seek it out. I'm usually not picky about fishy smelling foods since I quite adore sushi, including sashimi, the raw fish morcel, and I love Chinese lacquered duck. I was surprised I did not take to a liking of seal. Seal was just a bit too fishy smelling for me, more fishy smelling than raw fish, if that in any way is logically possible.

I also tried roasted "turr" which is the Newfoundland word for the common murre an ocean bird. This bird is hunted and cannot be bought in stores. It is just like eating a chicken, but dark meat, or just like a duck, but leaner, with the only difference being the meat is fishy smelling. The entire time I was eating it, I was really confused, because I was expecting something like a chicken, but kept smelling fish.

Newfie food: Newfoundland goulash

This is the famous Newfoundland goulash: tomato soup, elbow macaroni and ground beef and maybe chopped vegetables. When I first heard that it was common for families to have goulash at least once a week, I was surprised. I thought goulash was Hungarian, but I have not noticed any signs of Hungarian influences anywhere thus far in the province. This reminds me too of the time when I discovered that Donair, a popular middle eastern pita slow-cooked meat, was a popular food item here. Ahh, surprises.

Newfoundland heritage day

Going back in time to re-visit the Newfoundland history and culture at a wonderful heritage day organized by the Springdale Pentacostal Church.

The green place mat show cases the Newfoundland tartan, which is a plaid pattern with a specific selection of colours and arrangement to represent and identify Newfoundland.

The meaning of each colour on the tartan

Brunch from top left to bottom right: Raisin loaf, baked beans in molasses (Québecois use maple syrup), toutan with molasses, fish cake, baloney, macaroni casserole

Fetching water: The wooden square is called a hoop and is used to
prevent the buckets from swinging and bumping into the legs.
How do you think they walk through gates and doors?
They elevate one bucket to tilt the hoop until it reaches a narrower vertical alignment to allow user to pass through the entrance.

Sunday attire for church

Making salt fish (cod)

Laundry day

Rickett's blue square made the water blue but will ensure your shirts come out white 

Newfie food: Hot chicken

I know English, or at least I think I do. One day back in the fall when I was still in Springdale, I passed by Mary Brown's (the Newfoundland Kentucky Fried Chicken) while running errands in town and decided to drop by to pick up some lunch. I had already tried Mary Brown's fried chicken and decided to try a different item on their menu. The fried chicken is quite delicious, but KFC has more seasoning in their batter. Anyway, I looked at their menu and decided I felt like a sandwich that afternoon. Since Mary Brown's specializes in chicken, everything on the menu is pretty "safe" and predictable. I decided that day would be a "Hot Chicken Sandwich" day. I ordered take out and brought it back to work on my bike. Little did I know, when I opened my Styrofoam box, I was faced with one messy sandwich. In my box was a sandwich consisting of shredded chicken between two slice white bread - a chicken sandwich. Except the title "Hot Chicken Sandwich" failed to mention that my sandwich would be drenched in gravy! They should have named it "Hot Chicken Sandwich in Sauce"! Apparently, when Newfies read "Hot Chicken Sandwich" or "Hot Turkey Sandwich", they know to expect a sandwich covered in gravy, because that is a fact of the culture. Sometimes we don't realize the amount of inexplicit practices or knowledge that are associated with different cultures and environment.  

Once again, the Newfie has something in common with the Quebecois. The Quebecois also eat sandwiches drenched in "la sauce brune" and covered in green peas. Guess what they call their sandwiches? A " 'ot chicken"!

Fauna: Fuzzy long-eared creatures

Going out for winter strolls in the forest is so much fun. Not only does the snow make everything look clean and bright, it adds a pretty trimming to the trees and makes it is easy to visibly detect the presence of the hidden forest dwellers. 

Bunny tracks.    

By the look of the track spacing, it looks like this guy was hopping about leisurely. Apparently when they are running, their hops can be spaced up to 3 m apart. No wonder they can run up to 45 km/h. When I run, my gait spacing is probably only between 50-100 cm.

Hey, bunny, bunny, look at me.  

Good boy! 

As you can see, this one has turned almost completely white for the winter to camouflage with the snow. I was surprised I was able to get so many good photos of this little guy, because being a city girl, I'm not exactly swift and quiet on the feet and was making quite a bit of noise, especially with my puffy snow pants which makes crinkling noises distinctive of the waterproof fabrics. It turns out, it had heard me after all. Freezing in place is one of their strategy when they senses danger. They take advantage of their camouflaging ability first, to access the situation, before running.

Fun facts about the snowshoe hare:
-Their toes can spread out to increase its surface area, so they won't sink in the snow.
-They live in the coniferous areas of the Boreal forest, and are found in all the provinces of Canada.
-They can have up to four litter per year, with a gestation period of only 36 days.

Hare, like moose and other game I will write about in later posts, is a much appreciated food source here. For a city girl,  seeking food always meant going to the grocery store, selecting what I wanted and handing over money. I wouldn't be any good at turning to my environment for food. The skills I have acquired at school are only valuable within four walls. Here in the rural, most families have a culture of passing on their food source seeking knowledge to their children, from skills on hunting, trapping, fishing, berry picking, to cultivating.

Game meat is an important food source for some people, especially those who are of lower income. These people may include those retired, but still healthy, active and capable, or people seasonally employed, or even just people who didn't have the opportunity to advance their education, and thus do not have the skills sought out by the modernized workforce. The irony is that, food source seeking skills are more valuable then my "employable skills" if a disaster were to ever happen. Another reason that catching your own game may be more viable for someone with lower income is that meat at the store is expensive. The price factors in all the labour added to process the meat before it reaches the store display. Processes like bloodletting, skinning, butchering, packaging, shipping, storage and refrigeration until sale all add to the cost of the meat. In addition to paying the cost of processing, food seems to be more expensive in places that are further away  from urban centres. The higher cost is most likely due to shipping, and also with a smaller population, there is a smaller profit margin and businesses need to adjust the prices in order to make it worthwhile to continue offering their service to the community.

Some of my colleagues hunt hares with a bow and arrow! I can't believe that there are still people that hunt with bow and arrow, since riffles are pretty easy to access now that it is mass manufactured. The bow and arrow is probably more for sport. The advantage of hunting by bow and arrow in Newfoundland is that the licence to hunt hare is two weeks longer than the license hunting with gun. The season for hare game is from September to early February. In addition to shooting, people also set up snares.

My colleagues were saying, they need to take me out on the snowmobile and introduce me to Newfie boil up, which involves matches, wood, water, a tin can and a snare. Now I could imagine the use for a tin can and all the other items, but a snare? I had read about snares in The Hunger Games, but I had never seen one or understood how it worked. It turns out a snare is simply a piece of wire, and it would be used as a handle to the tin can. The snare is twisted into a loop where one end is free to slide along the wire. As an animal runs through the snare, they will tug at the loop, making it smaller and smaller as they try to run away.

Here are two examples of rabbit snares.

 Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Snowshoe hares are apparently pretty easy to trap. They always travel through the same network of  trail ways, which become really obvious in the winter as they leave behind their tracks in the snow. You would think they would adapt to hide their trails network, but in fact they work hard at keeping the trail maintained.  They keep the trail clear of obstruction in case they needed to escape from predators.

Hunters tie bright coloured ribbons above the snare so that they will remember the location when they come back to check their trap. They need to check their snares everyday to make sure that other animals do not get to it first.

Now why hasn't this bunny changed colours?!

Just last week-end, I bumped into another bunny. Except, this one confused the city girl in me a lot, because from my first photo shoot with the snowshoe hare, I knew that their fur should have all changed to white by now. When I went back to work, I told my colleagues that I saw a brown bunny. They didn't believe me, since they should be white by now. So I showed them my photo as proof. They all looked at it and said it must have been a house pet that escaped, because there is no way that is the wild ones. Later when I was telling the same story to some of my curling friends, it turns out, that bunny is in fact a tamed rabbit, and had escaped two months prior as one of the family was moving away. Since then, my friend Lorna has found it wandering her house, and she has taken to leaving out food for it whenever she can, because the poor thing chose the harshest month to escape into the wild. Lorna hopes that eventually it'll learn how to find its own food. Other are less optimistic. They are sure some other animal will find it before spring.

Fun facts comparing tamed rabbits and the wild hare:

-Hares are born with all their fur and their eyes open, while rabbits are born fur-less and blinded. 

-Baby hares are capable of hopping about right at their birth.  

Poor bunny, he is doomed, since its specie was not meant to survive in the wild. :( At least it would have tasted liberty.

新年快乐！Sharing my Chinese culture

新年快乐！(Happy New Year!) Today is the Lunar New Year; the year of the snake (蛇) according to the Chinese horoscope.

Part of this year living out here in Newfoundland is learning about this province's people and culture, but at the same time, it is also about sharing my culture with them. Even though almost all the towns I've been to across Canada have at least one Chinese restaurant (towns of at least 3,000 inhabitants), the Canadians who do not live in the urban centres of Canada in fact know very little about the Chinese culture, or food for that matter! (Chicken balls are not Chinese, but Chinese-Canadian, and even so, the only thing Chinese about them is that it is made and served by Chinese at restaurants. )

Over the next week, I will invite my students to join me in my festivities. They will learn about the New Year legend, song, dances, tradition, greetings, and even try some New Year sweets! Here is a collection of video clips I have compiled for my students about Chinese New Year. For an English summary of the video, please refer to the description below.

Summary of Chinese New Year celebrations
Date:
This year the Lunar New Year falls on February 10th, 2013. This date changes every year, because the Chinese follow the lunar calendar. It wasn't until around 1929 that China finally started using the Gregorian calendar, and even then, the Gregorian calendar was more for business purposes, and the festivals continued to use the lunar calendar.

Horoscope year:
2013 is the year of the snake (蛇). Snakes have a calm characteristic, so this year will be a quite year of introspection, reflection and getting in touch with the inner you.

New Year legend:
Why do Chinese celebrate the new year with red, lion dance and firecrackers? The legend goes that there once was a monster called "Nian" (年) who terrorized the villagers, because that's what monsters do best. The people thought hard and long on how to ward off the horrible 年. Finally someone noticed that 年 was afraid of things that were more ferocious than him, namely, the colour red, fire and loud noises. Hence, at the beginning of each year, the Chinese decorate their homes with red, light paper lanterns, and hold a lion dance with the sounds of cymbals clashing, and drums beating. A final chain of red firecrackers is lite to banish the 年 away until the next year.

New Year song:
In English-speaking countries, people start the new year singing "Auld Lang Syne" which is a Scotish poem talking of the good times. The Chinese also have a new year song, titled Gong Xi Gong Xi (恭喜恭喜) which translates to congratulations.

Gifts:
Instead of giving gifts, Chinese usually give gifts of money in red good luck envelops. Also, it is those who are established and married that give money, and those who are unmarried receive the envelops. ;)
 


 

Newfie drinks: Blue star

5 Newfoundland big brands
Photo from Newfoundland Beer Brand History

Alright, so I'm not going to pretend I know anything about beer. Someone else has already written an entire post on the history of the top five Newfoundland beers. I merely wanted to document in this post that I have given into the "tourist" tendency and tried the the beer with the Newfoundland flag on it - the Blue Star. The guys at the bar did make fun of me, deducting right away I was not from around here, but oh well, it sparked some good conversation. After all, this year is all about collecting and exchanging stories.

PS The Blue Star was really light in taste, and that is as far as I can go in describing its taste with my unrefined taste buds.

Chilling with Annie in Stephenville, NL
and putting some physics knowledge in action at the pool table. 

 

Happy discovery at the grocery store

Guess, what? I was so excited when I found a package of dried chow mein at the grocery store (Springdale, NL). I was really excited to try it, because the label of the package says the product is imported from Burnaby, BC, which means there is a high chance it will taste like authentic chow mein noodles. Although, the best chow mein noodles are the fresh kinds.

My homemade chow mein with stir fried veggies and bok choy on the side.

Unfortunately, the noodles puffed up, and was again no where near the original chow mein noodles.

I just came back from eating at a very authentic Chinese restaurant called "Noodles" here in Charlottetown, PE and am really excited to learn that there is a ethnic grocery store here where I can stock up before I leave.

Newfie food: Donair

Donair. Donair as a pizza topping; donair kits and tubes of donair sauce available in grocery stores...
Donair is not a Newfoundland specialty. It is a middle eastern meat that is cooked in a vertical spit. I was amusingly surprised to see this spiced meat so readily available, and common here in Newfoundland. I guess, once upon a time donair got introduced in Newfoundland and has since made itself home in the Newfoundland menus.

My quick fix lunch kit.

Newfoundland foods: Dough boy/ dumplings

Dough boy, or also known as dumplings, and yellow slip pea soup.

Dough boys are balls of steamed dough mixture of flour, baking soda, salt and water. These dough lumps are usually served with a meal of soup, because the dough mixture is cooked by the steam as it floats on top of the of soup. The taste and texture reminds be a lot of the Mandarin man tou buns (饅頭), which are plain in taste, but fluffy in texture.

Newfie food: Cod au gratin

I absolutely love the cod au gratin dish. Cod au gratin is a cod casserole topped with grated cheese. Gratin, or gratinée is French for any dish served with a béchamel sauce made of whisked milk and flour, grated cheese or bread crumbs and then baked in the oven until the top is crispy. The shallow-oval dish in the photo is a typical gratin dish where the design allows for a larger surface area of the meal to be browned in the oven to create a crispy texture.    

Newfie food: Pan fried cod

This is a breaded pan fried cod filet. Apparently according to Joy, they were not always able to eat cod, because some years there would be so few cod, their fisherman friends would not have any extra to spare, or it would be very expensive at the market. This year is the first year in a long while that she has been able to enjoy cod.

Candy variety and brands

So I was at the pharmacy the other day when a flashy sale sign in the candy section caught my eye. I don't usually indulge in junk food, so I have never took the time to study the kinds of candies found in the aisles of my new adopted province. This time however, my eyes stopped long enough to take in the products and read the labels to realize that quite a few of the sweets on the racks are in fact new to me. The lady-pink Ganong sweets were the first items to catch my eyes. I have seen Ganong truffles and chocolates in Ontario and Quebec, but I have never seen their chicken bones, a candy which I have never even heard of before. This led me to a candy shopping spree to discover all the candies yet unknown to me.

So according to the Ganong website, Ganong was founded in 1873, and is Canada's "oldest" candy company. Their chocolate makes up the largest volume of their sales, so this is probably why I am likely to be more familiar with their chocolate than their other products. Their head office is in St Stephen, New Brunswick.

Ganong chicken bones.

The chicken bones are apparently a favourite of Newfoundlanders. It has a glassy pink candy cinnamon exterior, and a hint of chocolate on the inside. For those who like cinnamon hearts, they will not need to wait until the Valentine's day period for their dose of cinnamon if they can get their hands on chicken bones.

I quite enjoyed the chicken bone bark - a dark chocolate with tiny crunchy pieces of cinnamon chicken bones.

  

Top left to right: Caramel log, Caramel, Tea Cake, Snowball.

Next, I discovered the Tunnock sweets. Tunnock is a Scottish company established in 1890. Their candy products are apparently really popular in the United Kingdom according to wiki, and has equally made a big hit in Newfoundland.

When I asked to buy a Snowball the other day at a bus rest stop, the shop owner regretted that they do not have any more snowballs with the tourist season just wrapping up, because Snowball has become one of the more popular "Newfoundland" souvenirs to buy and try.

The snowball consists of a marshmallow, and is covered in chocolate and coco nut flakes. However, the marshmallow does not have the dense and springy texture of the typical North American marshmallow. In fact it is a kind of Italian marshmallow which is moist all over, fluffy, and when you bite it lightly, your teeth slice through the fluff right away with no resistance.  

Tea cakes are similar to snowballs, except it is not covered in coconut flakes, and it has a thin bottom layer of shortbread.

As you can see from the photo, tea cakes require careful handling, or else the chocolate shell will crack into multiple pieces and leak out the soft marshmallow.

The Tunnock Caramel is a candy bar of wafer flakes   with a thin layer of caramel sandwiched in between the flakes, and then entirely covered in chocolate. I personally prefer Nestlé's Kit Kat with thin layers of chocolate in between the wafer flakes, because I find the caramel in the Tunnock bars eliminate the crispy texture of the wafer flakes, and I prefer the crispy crunch to the candy bar.

The caramel logs are almost a replicate of the caramel bars, except for its layer of coconut flakes on the exterior. Do you see a pattern here? A whole candy bar niche can be exploited by changing just one ingredient to create a  new candy bar.



The photo shoot for this post was very gratifying.

Newfie food: Bologna for breakfast

The Newfoundland breakfast is pretty similar to a continental breakfast. On the menu, you can expect to find toast, french toast, pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausages, ham, and bologna. Yes, bologna, a very specific kind of lunch meat. I wonder if I could start a trend making fancy cold cuts part of the breakfast staple, and not just have them for appetizers. 

Lovely bologna brunch made by Joy.
It was also my first time using an egg cup, since egg cups are not part of the Chinese kitchen dishware.

Newfie food: Cod tongue

Pieces of deep fried cod tongue at By the Sea Café.

Once again, cod finds it's way onto my plate. I know, I know, all of this cod eating is contributing to the cod problem here in Newfoundland, but since this is my year for learning all about the Newfoundland ways, I figured I am allowed to eat it once in a while, especially since cod is practically on all the Newfoundland menus.

I consider myself fairly adventurous when it comes to trying different foods, so the tongue part did not faze me at all. I quite enjoyed to smooth slippery texture. Smooth sounds appetizing, but the same cannot be said for the word slippery. I must admit, I would not do the tongues justice if I did not also describe it as slippery which sounds anything but appealing, especially when it is used to refer to an animal part. I guess the word slippery wouldn't influence your impression of the appeal of a food if I was using that adjective to describe let's say, something like noodles, but when used to describe tongue, I would fail for sure if I were in marketing and possibly even make stomachs churn. Since most of the animal tongues that I have encountered from petting and feeding sessions feel like sandpaper, I would say, the smooth and softness of a cod's tongue should be considered quite an accomplishment.

 

Newfie food: Fish cake

Homemade fish cake made from
the famous Newfoundland blue potatoes.

Fish cake is a pan fried patty made by combining left over potatoes and salted fish with egg, and is usually eaten for supper the day after fish and brewis is served. This particular fish cake is made with the famous Newfoundland blue potatoes. These potatoes have a skin with traces of purple-blue tint, and is famous for having a stronger flavour, than the usual bland flavour typical to potatoes.

Newfie food: Fish and brewis

Clockwise from top: salted cod, brewis, potato, and scrunchions.

So back in the days, Newfoundland started off as a fishing place where the British use to send men over to fish cod for six months, and have them come back. I was never really good with numbers and date, so I apologize four not being able to be more precis. One would think that England having colonized so many places would consider diverting some of its resources to building some settlement on Newfoundland so that the poor men wouldn't have to go back and forth between the two continents. Eventually people settled in Newfoundland. (I later found out the reason for not initially having settlement was mainly political, because at the time, the territorial claim for Newfoundland was still unsettled between England and France.) Anyway, apparently they fished so much that the cod population had declined drastically (yea, or boo the advancement of technology...?), and in 1992, the government passed a law to suspend cod fishing (a.k.a. the Cod Moratorium). This moratorium from an environmentalist's point of view was a big save, preserving the few remaining cod, but from a political economical prospective, it was a disaster for the province's economy which relied principally on it's fishing industry, and specifically fishing for cod. Some more history, in 1497 when Giovanni Caboto, an explorer sailing for England landed in Newfoundland, he reported that the deep waters of Newfoundland had "so many cod you could scoop them in baskets". So cod was the image of Newfoundland. Now, two decades after the moratorium, the government has now announced certain periods when the public is allow to fish cod for leisure.

Revenons à nos moutons ( French for come back to our sheep, which I suppose would be equivalent to getting back on topic in English), what you see on my dinner plate in indeed a piece of cod, the fish I was just saying which is no longer permitted to be harvested here. No, we did not catch this fish ourselves, so indeed,  it was store bought. (Correction, the cod for this particular meal came from a family friend who is a fisherman.) The irony is that what use to be a staple traditional meal -salted fish and brewis- is no longer a sustainable local food.

What are brewis (pronounced brews) and scrunchions you ask? Well, brewis is a dried dense bread in the shape of a dinner roll and is prepared by being soaked in water and then boiled. Scrunchions are tiny salted chunks of pork fat that is fried until crisp, and sprinkled onto the meal to add flavour.

A lot of the Newfoundland foods remind me of Québec foods. The scrunchions remind me of les oreilles de crisse (Christ's ears), which are fried fatty pieces of pork cheeks eaten at les cabanes à sucre, farms where they make maple syrup. I am not sure if other parts of Canada have a tradition of eating pickled beets and other vegetables, since as I have already mentioned, I have never really had the opportunity to try other Canadian food while traveling across Canada. However, I have had the pickled beets and vegetables before with quebecois cuisine.

Left to right: From a recent potluck- chili, Fisherman's brewis, soy rice, and green Thai curry.

Note, the fish and brewis meal is not to be confused with Fisherman's brewis, which entails the same two menu items, but in this case, the bones are removed, and cod is crumbled into pieces. Then the fish is mashed together with the cooked brewis and pieces of scrunchions. There might be other ways of eating this combination of cod and brewis which I have yet to encounter.

Newfie food: Jigg's dinner

Jigg's dinner is  a hearty meal of pink salted beef still on the bone, boiled together with chunks of root vegetables including carrot, turnip and potato. This meal is said to be typically served on Thursday nights in Newfoundland homes and family style restaurants. My dinner was accompanied with mashed yellow peas, and a lightly sweetened bread pudding on the side. It is common to have gravy poured over the entire dish. Since most Newfoundland dishes are only flavoured with salt, you can usually expect to find various picked condiments at the table to go with the meal. My table had a small bowl of intense deep magenta pickled beets and bright yellow, mustard pickled cabbages, both of which I found as an absolutely wonderful addition to the meal. I had originally thought that my blueberry bread pudding was part of my dessert, and had found it weird that the server had drenched it in gravy, but later when a server had come to ask what I had wanted for dessert, I had then realized that in fact I was mistaken about the bread pudding. I ended up trying the partridge berry bread pudding which was drenched this time not in gravy, but in a transparent golden custard.   

Clockwise from top centre: Mashed peas, salted beef, turnip, potato, carrot, cabbage, pickled cabbage, pickled beet, blueberry bread pudding covered in gravy.

Missing my ethnic foods!

Ah, yes, this is the third post of the day on the topic of food, but I can't help myself. I like food!

In the four days I have been here so far, I haven't had the time to cook, and have resorted to checking out all the food places that Springdale has to offer.

On my second day here, we went out to Marie's for a lunch social after our staff meeting. Marie's is a Chinese and Canadian restaurant and motel. Having forgotten all about Chinese-Canadian foods in rural Canada, I made the great faux pas of ordering a Chinese item from the menu. Out of the twenty people in our group, I was the only Chinese on staff, and the only one who ordered a Chinese dish. Everyone else ordered something Canadian like grilled cheese, soup, or salad. I thought to myself, why order Canadian when there are only two Chinese restaurants in town? It turns out, despite ordering a Chinese dish, my beef chow mein did not come with any mein (yellow Chinese fried egg noodles), and instead was more of a chop shue of beef, cabbage and some carrot shreds probably included to add colour to the plate. The only thing remotely Chinese about my chow mein dish was the trademark starchy sweet and salty sauce, which itself was a meager imitation.

After the failed attempt at satisfying my homesick craving for Chinese food, I decided to seek out the remaining Chinese restaurant in town to try my luck.  Bo Jo's is just around the corner from my place, and known for the best Chinese food. This time, I had learned my lesson and carefully studied the ingredient list under the menu options. Again, all the dishes listed under chow mein were not accompanied by any egg noodles. Seeing my puzzlement, the hostess, a Newfie, offered me the opportunity to speak with one of the members of the Chinese family that owns and runs the restaurant. I met the lady of the family and restaurant and delicately asked her first if she spoke any Chinese, whether it was Mandarin or Cantonese, and once establishing that she did indeed speak Chinese, proceeded to discuss with her what I was hoping to find in Chinese. It turns out, this family speaks Cantonese (my mother tongue), and they also come from Taisan, the same region as my dad's village. We bonded instantly over our common dialect, heritage, and regional roots. I asked her what is the one item I can order which most closely resembles authentic Cantonese cuisine. Serena, the owner, suggested the Cantonese chow mein containing a mix or vegetables, and three types of meat: chicken, cha sui, the red roasted porc, and shrimp. This dish also included noodles! I was excited and eagerly ordered it for take out immediately. When I had finally brought it home and opened up the trademark Styrofoam box, I was disappointed to find that the noodle was not the bright yellow mein I was use to, but a noodle of faded yellow... a Mr. Noodle kind of noodle. The dish was still relatively good, but just not the same.

I already knew that I could not expect much of Chinese restaurants in places outside of Richmond (Vancouver), Markham (Toronto), and Montreal, since when ever we go on family vacations, my brothers and I always joke that we are doing a tour of Chinese eats in Canada, and not actually giving the local eats a chance. Chinese dads' need steamed white rice, and Chinese moms' like Chinese leafy greens. The most impressive Chinese restaurant which we came across on our trips was one in Summerside, PEI. Since rent is probably considerably cheaper, the restaurant had a fresh renovated look of authentic decor. We picked the restaurants because we saw chopsticks place on  the tables, and noted that it was family run. There, my mom talked directly with the family and got them to make us things that were not on the menu.  But again, they were pretty limited, since there are many ethnic ingredients and produce they do not have access to in rural Canada. After quizzing them on all the ingredients they had, mom in collaboration with them came up with a customized menu. The dishes they served us did not look menu pretty, but were more or less similar to the dishes we were use to eating back home.

Even though I had some exposure to the simpleness of rural towns, I continue to forget and take the diversity  of the larger cities for granted. Lucky for me, I have brought along a small tub of green Thai curry paste, and selected Indian spices which hopefully will sustain me until I convince the people who love me to send me more. (I sound like I cook a lot, but I don't, so I'm not all that worried about running out of these ingredients.) I regret not having packed the sesame oil which I contemplated about until I convinced myself it would be too messy, the  Sriracha chili sauce which you see at every table of Vietnamese restaurants, and Chinese sausages which my mom would always pack me back when I was on res. My mom was very nice and thoughtful, and at least remembered to send me off with two precious packs of Chinese beef jerky, the sweet and hot kind, my favourite.