Some Like it Haute

for dinner tonight, kiku and i decided to prepare an asian meal for our fair friends of the west. it was initially mind-boggling to decide what to prepare since the boundaries of asia extended to china, japen, thailand, singapore etc etc.. and even if we were to narrow it down to food from taiwan (she being from there) and singapore, we would still be swapped with the variety..

i had originally thought of doing a noodle soup dish like ban mian or chinese chicken noodle soup but the lack of big bowls and chopsticks made it difficult to execute.. fried rice was scrapped for being too unoriginal and uncreative.. so finally, we decided on fried noodles since it was easy for non-chopstick-using folks to handle AND supposedly simple to prepare. we even visited the chinese supermarket yesterday and bought shao cha jiang (chinese barbeque sauce), bak choy, chicken fillets and noodles for our fried hor fun/ kway teow/ rice noodles. the end result was satisfying and everyone (yes, all nine of them!) relished at the idea of being introduced to a new dish for thhe first time..

yup, they have never tasted kway teow before and we were to describe to them what it was made of and what the dish was called and what type of vegetable we used.. german steffi even professed a liking for the bak choy..

we served tang yuan for dessert and they were so amused yet daunted by what lay beneath the white cushiony surface.. they poked and pricked, unfamilar with the oozing filling and later torn between which flavour they preferred- the 'black one' and peanut? some even later voiced interest in visiting the chinese supermarket.. i am just so very very heartened by how receptive everone was and the fact that two large saucepans of fried hor fun was effortlessly polished off.. how encouraging~

right now, i am trying to convince a friend to visit singapore and to travel with SIA... i am even trying to tempt him by introducing the concept of the SIA girl.. and he has just informed me that return tickets cost 1571euros, should he fly in 2008. haha..