Dad’s 60th birthday – the savoury
As promised, here are the food pics from my father’s 60th birthday celebration dinner, which was held at a chinese restaurant.
We began with soup – I’m not exactly sure what was in the soup – there was egg, tofu, prawny bits, mushroom and something that was a cross between squid and shark’s fin. It tasted great, anyway. I love this kind of soup.
The next dish was crispy fried chicken, served with a dish of seasoned salt and garnished with prawn crackers. The chicken itself was tender and the skin was delicious. I tried it both with the seasoned salt and without. I reckon it was tasty enough without the salt.
After the chicken came a dish of spicy prawns, fried in their shells with chilli and garlic. The shells were battered and crispy and perfectly edible, which suited me very well, as I hate peeling shellfish. This picture is specially for you, Bro in Law!
The next dish was pork, amazingly tender and sweet, cooked in some sort of a barbecue sauce.
Ahhhh, the token vegetable dish. This was very nice, fried tofu with baby corn, broccoli, carrot, snow peas and chinese mushrooms. Very simple, and most welcome after those meaty dishes.
Then, out came whole steamed fish. Mum tells me the fish was silver perch.
The fish came out whole, bones and all, but then a waitress came along and removed the bones very neatly as we watched in anticipation. See the bones on the plate? In this photo, the waitress has ‘folded’ the fish back together and is re-garnishing it.
What a neat job – can’t even tell it’s now spineless! I had been looking forward to this dish, as I love steamed fish, but alas – I was most disappointed. The fish was really gelatinous. There was a layer of slimy fat between skin and flesh, and as I ate I kept finding globs of fat. Apparently this is not a bad thing (Mum reckons the fish fat is good for you), but whether it’s my own uncultured taste or not, I found it quite unpalatable.
We were then served a great big dish of long life noodles. They don’t look particularly impressive here, but believe me, they were gooooood, with chinese mushroom and lots of chicken. By this stage the dinner guests were quite full, and so Mum doggy-bagged most of the noodles, and we ate them the next day.
Next post will be of the sweet stuff.