Dad’s birthday lunch – the savoury

EDIT, 26/09/2006:
Mum emailed me the names of the dishes we ate at my dad’s birthday lunch.

1. *Salt and pepper prawns
2. *Roast duck
3. Keong choong tai wong kai (ginger spring onion steamed chicken)
4. *Whole deep fried cod in sauce
5. Teik pan tow foo (teik pan = steel dish = sizzling)
6. Crispy beef (on the docket it said Peking beef)
7. Kai lan ho yeow (kailan with oyster sauce)
8. *Seafood noodles

* These special dishes have to be pre-ordered

Additional note from mum: They have another type of longlife noodles which is $10 cheaper, with shredded chicken and mushroom – also very delicious. Another good vege dish is their brinjal (eggplant) veg dish (dont know the name, but they do it a special way).

Today we celebrated my Dad’s 61st birthday with lunch at the Eureka Chinese Restaurant in Wilson. I think Mum and Dad have been to that restaurant before – but none of us *kids* had. I really enjoyed the meal and would definitely eat there again, oh yeah.

The first dish was king prawns, fried with onion and garlic and served on a bed of crispy noodles. The only bits I left behind on my plate were the head and tail; the prawn shells were lovely and crisp and deliciously edible.

King prawns

Next came a dish piled with roast duck (that’s like three meals now, in a short space of time featuring roast duck – I think I will abstain from roast duck for the next little while!). It came with a small dish of yummy duck sauce. I always enjoy roast duck. But I’ve never been able to work out what pieces will be meaty and which look meaty but are actually bony. I really don’t know my way around a duck as well as I do chicken.

Roast duck

I don’t know the name of this chicken dish, but the sauce was just gorgeous, gingery and savoury – completely drinkable on its own, just beautiful poured over my rice (I soaked my rice with so much of the sauce I ended up having to nick one of the serving spoons so I could eat the rice – it was too wet to be picked up with chopsticks – tasty, though). On the top is sliced fresh chilli, spring onions and slivers of ginger – YUM, I love slivered ginger cooked like that.

Chicken

This was a whole fried cod. The white flesh of the fish was moist and tender, while the outside was lovely and crisp. Jac is not a fan of whole fish (she usually only eats and cooks fileted fish), but even she said this was lovely.

Fried whole fish

I took this photo of the cod’s head before Dad seized it and picked all the meat out of it. There was a surprising amount of meat, at the “neck” end.

Say CHEEEEEEEESE!

I don’t know the name of this dish, but it was tofu with egg sauce and minced pork. The tofu was really soft on the inside, almost custardy in texture.

Tofu with egg sauce and minced pork

You can see the egginess of the sauce in this shot. It would’ve been a mighty tasty sauce on its own, but the minced pork made it even better!

Tofu with egg sauce and minced pork - a closer view of the egg sauce

This was called Peking Beef. The beef was crispy and the sauce was really syrupy and sweet, a similar flavour to Jac’s favourite pork chops in Nanking sauce that we have when we order Chinese home delivery. I wouldn’t recommend this dish if you had a craving for beef though – the beef didn’t taste particularly beefy or even meaty. But it was a very tasty dish.

Peking beef

And of course, there had to be a vegetable course. This was kailan (also known as Chinese broccoli) with oyster sauce. I just love Chinese green vegies in oyster sauce. The leaves were soft and really held a lot of that oyster sauce, and the stems were lovely – still with some hardness to them but definitely not raw. If there hadn’t been long life noodles and cake coming up, I’d have just chomped my way through the vegetables. Mum, Mark and I especially really loved this vegetable dish. Everyone had been starting to feel full at the beef course though, and there was some serious Chinese banquet tummy pacing going on. Mum ended up getting most of the vegies in a doggy bag to take home.

Kailan with oyster sauce

The long life noodles were FAN-TASTIC! I was a little worried initially that the sauce would have that strong pongy seafoody smell (which is why I don’t particularly like seafood soups like lobster bisque, for example), but it was thick and eggy and just delicious. The seafood consisted of squid, pieces of fish and perfectly bursty prawns.

Long life noodles with seafood

The noodles were so good I had two helpings. But as I explained to my mum, I have a separate chamber in my tummy reserved for sweet food :) and fitting in birthday cake would be no problem whatsoever. The savoury chamber (significantly bigger than the sweet chamber) was pretty much filled to capacity though! Mum also doggy bagged the remaining noodles.

Another view of long life noodles with seafood

We ate everything with lots of rice (if this was an Enid Blyton book I’d say lashings of rice – her most common usage of lashings is in reference to ginger beer, but she has also used it with boiled eggs) and washed it down with cups of chinese tea. Coming up next – the sweet.

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